Elevating Student Voices at the Intergenerational Change Initiative (July 2024)

We are the School in the Square (S2) Youth Research Collective; A group of rising 9th graders, who have worked with educators in Washington Heights, NYC since Fall of our 6th grade year to design a school-wide oral history project of our peers as a strategy to enrich the cultural and socio-emotional well-being of our school. Beginning with New York State’s required SEL intervention, we developed a Longitudinal Oral History Project, led by middle school students at S2, where we gathered peer-to-peer narratives about socio-emotional dynamics, from middle schoolers growing up in working-class and immigrant households in times of pandemic and racial uprisings. As we, the youth researchers, have taken more of a decision-making role in the project starting in 7th grade, we have evolved the study to look into our lives as mostly Latinx youth in Washington Heights.
As we begin life in high school, this presentation will narrate rich and complex stories of joy, fear, courage, and care. We will detail how this project centers the expertise of students of color from immigrant families, coming out of COVID-19, in the throes of early adolescence, who found great relief in discovering that our fears and anxieties were widespread. Through this work, we note the sense of empowerment we felt as our research project influenced school policy. Further, we will discuss the transformative impact of the oral history experience, illuminating new ideas for both the interviewee and interviewer. The act of oral history in the context of this project nurtured a school culture of care with young people feeling less alone and emboldened to demand change.