“Beautiful You”: Creating Contexts for Students to Become Agents of Social Change

Abstract

The authors argue for creating a context within education where teachers can utilize critical pedagogical practices to explicate the hidden curriculum, explore students' sense of self and embodied identities, and engage students to empower themselves to speak up and take action about issues of embodiment and their understanding of social inequalities within schools. They specifically explore how high school girls' mediated and embodied identities were translated, particularly as they engaged in participatory activist research by becoming co-meaning makers and co-interpreters during the research process. During the first phase of the study, data were collected from focus group interviews and descriptive field notes from observations. In the second phase, participants created their own activist-based project. Participants shed light on the social issues they encountered in high school and how these experiences influenced their embodied identities, which led them to develop Beautiful You and thus become agents of social change.