"What tenth graders taught me about research": Teaching research skills at New Roots Charter School
Hopper Kendregan ‘26, PRYDE Scholar
When I stepped into the lower entrance of New Roots Charter School, converted from an antiquated hotel lobby and covered in students’ artwork, I knew it wasn’t an ordinary high school. I was here to be introduced to the faces and classrooms that I would spend a semester’s worth of Monday afternoons with as a part of PRYDE’s Youth Investigators Program. Youth Investigators introduces teens to the world of participatory action research, equipping them with the tools to explore meaningful research questions about their communities. The program is structured around a student workbook, created by former PRYDE scholars, that guides students through the entire process of a social science research project. Together with some fellow PRYDE Scholars, I was about to embark on an exciting journey facilitating Youth Investigators with the tenth graders at New Roots.
PRYDE Scholars Hopper Kendregan ‘26, Fiona Tracy ‘25, and Reagan Allvin ‘26
As a friendly young teacher led us around the school, I couldn’t help but notice the energy exuding from the student body, with their vibrant clothing and lively chatter. The lobby itself featured a large shelf of seedlings, sheltering from the cold before they will be planted in the student-run garden, and an inoperative elevator shaft that had been repurposed into a makeshift painting exhibit. Our newfound tour guide brought us to the music room, which retained much of its original structure as the hotel bar, and joked that Ezra Cornell was rumored to have spent his honeymoon there!
We learned that the tenth graders would be split into two groups for the duration of Youth Investigators. Fiona Tracy, a fellow PRYDE Scholar, and I would be set up in a sunny English classroom on the second floor, while the other half of the group would be in the science lab with Reagan Allvin and Casey Adrian. After our first session with the students, I couldn’t be sure how they felt about us. I thought that to them, we must just be a couple of (not very much) older people from the big university up the hill who were giving them extra work to do! But luckily, the Youth Investigators was designed to make learning about social science research active and engaging for young people, and I was hopeful that by the end of the semester, we would have some fun together.
The colorful workbook we had placed on each student’s desk at our first session consists of a series of modules, each of which follows a central storyline featuring fictional high schooler Bobby and his friends, along with active learning activities. Every module focuses on a different topic and by the end of the workbook, students should be able to walk through the basic process of developing, investigating, and sharing a social science research project. From helping Bobby think up hypotheses about tired teens to a ‘choose your own adventure’ game designing an ethical research study at Sofia’s family grocery store, our budding Youth Investigators learned something new and kept up with the story every week.
We certainly encountered challenges along the way: keeping the students engaged during lessons, navigating students’ interpersonal relationships, frequent absences, and even a four week stretch of consecutive spring breaks. But, by the final day of Youth Investigators, I could tell that our efforts had paid off. As a summation of the program, we guided the students through the full process of investigating a research question of their choosing, from start to finish. They decided to investigate why one classmate’s cat kept bringing live animals into the house and the group was full of creative (and funny) hypotheses. We had a lot of laughs that day, and it was incredible to see the students put a whole semester of learning into practice!
For me, this experience was such an important foray into the heart of translational research. It’s one thing to talk about community-engaged research in the classroom, but it’s another entirely to go out and practice it yourself. I love that PRYDE gives us the freedom and the support to position ourselves as translational researchers during our undergraduate career, and it has really changed my perspective on research as a part of my future – researchers don’t always look like older people in lab coats with a long list of acronyms after their names. Research can, and should, include many kinds of community members who all have something different and valuable to bring to the table. I hope that my experiences as a PRYDE Scholar can help me continue to participate in community-engaged and translational research projects like Youth Investigators long after my time in academia has come to an end.