Futurities in Action "Seeing Eye to Eye": Identity, Leadership, Social Change Making and Consequential Learning Trajectories for Young People into Adulthood through Community-Based Education

Corey Winchester

Grace Lee Boggs, whose dialectical approach to social change making and worldbuilding inspires my own learning, pedagogy, and research, advocated for community-based education. These transformational environments encourage young people and educators to engage intellectually and practically, nurturing a love of place to live well and sustainably, actions necessary for thriving futures. These learning environments exist, often told through anecdotal stories, but what knowledge can we gain when empirically studying how to cultivate and steward these environments, especially as routine and embodied pedagogical practices that are consequential for who young people become and how they choose to engage into adulthood? My dissertation explores the designed conditions for how a diverse, youth-led, community-based, intergenerational student organization at a comprehensive high school yields long-term learning about identity, leadership, and social change making across multiple activity systems as young people become adults. I employ archival, ethnographic, interactional, and participatory research methods to understand the pedagogical practices that fostered learning for nearly 40 of the 204 young people deeply involved across iterative cohorts in the learning environment's 14-year history. I accomplish this through in-depth interviews with past and present students, audio & video analysis of the current learning environment, interviews with educators proximate to the space, and collective sensemaking sessions with research participants. At such a critical moment where young people are inheriting a challenging world marred by compounding sociopolitical realities, I aim to address multiple calls for "research on learning and human development…to prepare young people as civic actors" (Lee, White & Dong, 2021).

About Corey Winchester

Corey Winchester (he/him) is a Philly-born, Chicago-based educator with experience serving in various roles as a classroom teacher, teacher educator, and consultant. As a PhD Candidate in Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, his research and scholarship focus on the intersections of youth identity, leadership, and human development towards social change making; justice-oriented pedagogical preparation and continued learning for K-12 educators and youth development providers; and co-designed learning environments. Corey has worked for several local, state, and national organizations such as Evanston Township High School, the Golden Apple Foundation, the Aspen Young Leaders Fellowship, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Corey is the founder and lead consultant of House of Winchester Learning Designs, an organization committed to supporting the design, implementation, and cultivation of humanizing learning environments. In addition to being recognized as a Distinguished Alumnus from Loyola University Chicago's School of Education in 2016, he received the Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2019, was selected as Illinois History Teacher of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in 2020, and received a resolution honoring his work as a community leader from the Cook County Board of Commissioners in 2024. Corey earned a BS in Education and Social Policy and a MA in Learning Sciences, both from Northwestern University. He also earned a MEd in Cultural and Educational Policy Studies from Loyola University Chicago. Corey enjoys spending time with his partner, family, friends, and chosen family while tending to his plant babies.