“Can You Hear Us Now?": A Case Study Exploration of Drumming Circles as a Programmatic and Evaluative Context for the Engagement, Equitable Partnership, and Empowerment of Urban* Youth of Color

Abstract Information: While the fields of positive youth development (PYD), youth programming, and youth-focused evaluation have made important strides in reprioritizing youth strengths over once-perceived deficits and pathologies, it remains a tragic reality that the voices of young people of color living in urban communities are overshadowed by the context of their circumstances. Many of the innovative methodologies that have been created to increase youth involvement and empowerment throughout the evaluative process prove infeasible, unsustainable, and/or unresponsive in the contexts these young people call home—when circumstances prevent the access of tools to the very people who they were supposedly designed for (i.e., the young people who experience the realities and implications of our work), these are not mere paradoxical problems…they are a call to action that evaluators are uniquely positioned to hear and respond in kind.
In this roundtable, we will share our experiences in a case study format that focuses on the ways in which meaningful partnerships can mitigate these challenges and can in fact illuminate unique pathways to hear, help, and uphold the wisdom carried by young people today. More specifically, we will highlight how leveraging multi-disciplinary partnerships allowed for the integration of expressive methodologies (e.g., drumming circles) and momentary data collection techniques that were more developmentally and contextually suited for this population. Finally, this session will offer attendees the chance to experience a glimpse of this context firsthand in community with one another, while reflecting and collaboratively strategizing ways in which creativity can serve as both a programmatic and evaluative context that meaningfully empowers young people, creates sustainable networks of support across levels of practice, and produces more-representative data that heals in its collection, rather than exploits.