Lessons from Year 1: Grounding Commitments to CBPR

The highlight of our work through TASIK in our newsletters and on our website are the programs themselves—the incredible efforts to provide youth opportunities to recall, explore, and begin to embody the wide-ranging potentials of indigenous knowledge alongside and in concert with STEAM knowledge and skills. TASIK also involves research efforts, which witness and track the impacts of programming, making them legible for a wider audience. Our questions help us understand if and to what extent youths’ exploration of informal STEAM learning and traditional indigenous knowledge and skills supports increased valuation, engagement in, and application of both STEAM and indigenous knowledge, independently and together. The long goal is to support the ability of youth, grounded in knowledge of themselves, their people, their history, lands, and waters, to innovate from a broad tool base, including STEAM, to solve present and pressing issues in their communities.  

The research goals of TASIK are tightly tethered to programming. These research goals are, on one level, to respond to questions created at the outset of TASIK. Beyond and throughout, however, the work is to plant seeds for a broader and more consistent effort at Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR), that will permeate and outlast the TASIK project. This includes co-designing research processes and protocols that serve the community; building skills for community to initiate and continue research work independently; and finding mechanisms for analysis and dissemination that are both increasingly representative of the epistemological and ontological multiplicity of our world, and accessible by and useful to the communities with whom that knowledge has been produced. 

More about the genealogy and aims of CBPR can be found here. The TASIK commitment to CBPR methods means, fundamentally, that the commitment to serve community is the foundation and the north star of the project, superseding a fixity to project outcomes. Our resolve, in other words, is toward each other, with present and future outcomes emerging from our capacity for mutuality and the ability for the group to work with what is.  

Through the first year of TASIK, we heard feedback on research protocols we employed during summer programming, and the extended labor of programming staff to implement these protocols on short notice. We also revisited our Theory of Action (TOA), to assess the course of our efforts. Broadly, we recognized the need for our movements to be increasingly attentive to the unspoken values being promoted through messaging via paper-heavy data collection protocols, as well as questions that centered and elevated STEAM above indigenous knowledge, in part by situating traditional knowledge as anachronistic STEAM practice. 

As we move into our second year of programming and research, we have clarified our language around traditional knowledge and STEAM in our TOA, establishing that both are valued programmatically and as discrete epistemological inclinations. We have also significantly revised research protocols in that vein—ensuring that questions identify youth’s recognition, valuation, engagement in, and understanding and application of both indigenous knowledge and STEAM, separately and in concert with one another. Revision of the protocols have also generated an opportunity to think about how we can collect sound, consistent data from collaborative and distributed research, in myriad languages, across six locations, while attending to the distinct needs and energy of local programmatic staff and youth participants in each location—and correspondingly, how research methods can sustain indigenous and place-based approaches to inquiry, observation, pattern recognition, and empiricism. 

While we don’t yet have all the answers, we continue to work with local staff and youth to understand how and what we need to rethink, and do differently, to honor our commitment to each other. In tacking between CBPR theory and practice, we actively seek opportunities to discuss the research practice, generally and in specifics, and how TASIK research and PREL’s work in the region can contribute to enhancing Micronesian youth’s recognition of their exceptionality.