Power, Privilege, and Precarity: Attempts to Conduct Ethical Youth Participatory Action Research as Early Career Researchers.

Though community-based participatory research (CBPR) boasts a robust history, challenges to conducting such work ethically and equitably remain. Common difficulties, such as addressing power dynamics and navigating mutuality, are heightened when doing participatory research with young people, specifically youth participatory action research (YPAR). Additional obstacles also emerge when engaging in such research as junior scholars, who lack tenure and occupy more precarious positions within academia. To elucidate these hurdles and illuminate the labor required to traverse them, we draw upon our experiences as early career academics facilitating YPAR projects with young people who have been historically marginalized. Employing an autoethnographic approach, we utilize qualitative data sources including field notes and reflective memos, from which three themes emerged after iterative rounds of reflection and review. Through descriptive vignettes, we unpack how we attended to positionality and power, interrogated shared benefit and mutuality, and engaged with the unique complexities of working with young people-as informed by our specific identities. In examining our experiences and their alignment with prior research, we aim to expand upon existing literature that has explored best practices within CBPR, but with a specific focus on youth-adult partnerships and consideration of the realities of junior scholars. It is our hope that this discussion will support early career researchers who wish to conduct YPAR but are unsure how to do so given their particular positionalities, by making visible the often-invisible work involved.

Statement on the effects of law enforcement in school settings.

School-based law enforcement (SBLE) have become increasingly common in U.S. schools over recent decades despite the controversy surrounding their presence and lack of consensus around their associated benefits and harms. Drawing on the history and evidence base regarding SBLE, we advocate for an end to SBLE programs. Grounding our argument in principles of Community Psychology and positive youth development, we outline how the presence and actions of SBLE negatively affect individual students as well as school systems, with particularly harmful outcomes for students with minoritized and marginalized identities. Research on SBLE and school crime does not provide consistent evidence of positive impacts, and many studies find null effects for the relationship between SBLE and school crime or increases in crime and violence in schools. Though funding for SBLE is often prompted by high-profile acts of gun violence in schools, evidence suggests that SBLE neither prevents these incidents, nor lessens the severity when they do occur. Thus, we advocate for removing law enforcement from school settings and redirecting resources into inclusive, evidence-informed responses that are generally safer and more effective than SBLE. We close by outlining the policy landscape governing SBLE programs and ways communities can lobby for change.

Best friends, bad food, and bullying: How students' school perceptions relate to sense of school belonging.

A positive school climate and sense of school belonging can influence students' academic outcomes and wellbeing in desirable ways. However, not enough is known about the aspects of school climate that influence students' feelings of belonging and how gender, ethnicity, and grade may relate to those feelings. Via a self-administered survey, a diverse sample of middle school students (n = 1,226) reported what they perceived as the best parts of their school and the parts most in need of improvement, as well as their sense of belonging. Students' perceptions of their school were aligned with the major areas of school climate: safety, relationships, teaching and learning, and institutional environment. These four areas were found to be predictive of sense of belonging to different degrees, such as listing relationships as needing improvement at the school being associated with lower scores in sense of belonging. Gender and grade were also found to be salient predictors of feelings of belonging, with seventh and eighth graders feeling less belonging than their sixth grade peers and girls having lower sense of belonging than boys. These findings affirm the importance of the school environment in influencing students' feelings of being a part of their school.