Katie Richards-Schuster, PhD, is featured on this episode of Michigan Minds as part of a special series focused on the quickly approaching return to school in the fall. Richards-Schuster is a professor at the School of Social Work and joins the podcast to discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected youth and shaped their participatory experiences.
Her research focuses on understanding the strategies and approaches for engaging young people in communities, the contexts and environments that facilitate youth engagement across settings, and the impact of youth participation in creating community change. Richards-Schuster is a leading scholar in using participatory research and evaluation approaches with young people and communities. She has written multiple peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and has led community-engaged and national projects focused on youth participation.
Throughout the podcast, Richards-Schuster explains how the pandemic has changed the way youth are participating in their communities, noting that while there are still opportunities for youth to be involved within their communities, they may look a bit different than before.
“We’ve also seen that part of the impact of the pandemic has been a space where young people have begun to emerge and take action in their community. They’ve seen issues in their neighborhoods, on their streets, in their school districts, and they’ve worked to kind of create programs to help volunteer and to develop local drives. We’ve seen this kind of localized example of young people who are taking action and using the challenge as an opportunity for change.”
She discusses her research, which includes an evaluation of a systemwide youth participatory evaluation within a large urban school district, a youth-led community assessment and data dialogues project, and a project to distill best practices in youth participation within social work.
She offers strategies and approaches that teachers and community leaders can use to continue to keep youth engaged, both online and in person.
“I think one of the things that I would say is to recognize that it’s going to take time; there needs to be a slow process. In social work, we always talk about how we need to start with where people are—I think that that’s going to be true for the young people we’re bringing back together.”
Richards-Schuster closes with an inspiring message of how to authentically listen to youth to learn how they are feeling. She expands on the importance of taking what youth share seriously, because they are experiencing a lot of changes and will need to be heard in order to receive assistance.
“It’s really important to listen to young people and listen authentically—it’s really easy to listen to young people and say ‘yeah good idea’ or ‘oh that’s so nice well what a cute idea.’ That’s dismissive and demeaning to young people to kind of treat them as if it’s an interesting idea, but then we kind of turn and we do something else. So, listen authentically and really take the time to engage with the young person in your life.”
