Kabeera Weissman

Of the many initiatives designed to help high school students plan their lives after graduation, few aim to learn about students’ own experiences as they explore possible life pathways. For students in public Philadelphia high schools, the process of preparing for the transition from high school can be especially challenging: they often have limited access to resources and limited attention from guidance counselors, who frequently carry large caseloads.

Kabeera Weissman’s research has evolved through three years of volunteer work and pilot studies at a public Philadelphia high school. Through close listening, and learning with and from students, Kabeera has worked with them to create the kinds of support they are looking for in pursuing life pathways. Her dissertation focuses on exploring and creating life pathways with a group of twelfth graders and contributes to the literature on transitions after high school. While there have been scholarly studies about high school students’ transitions, there is a paucity of research into students’ perspectives in this literature.

Designing her work as a practitioner-participatory action research study, Kabeera invites students to collectively shape the research agenda and take up topics of interest to them in navigating transitions after high school and co-creating future lives and selves. The group collaboratively explores how students’ social and support networks inform their decisions, how students engage and resist bureaucratic texts (such as college applications and job forms), how students make sense of family narratives about life pathways, and how they can work together to support each others’ needs and goals. Kabeera hopes to learn about students’ perspectives and experiences of navigating life pathways, examine her own practice in facilitating this work, and contribute to the literature on college access, adolescent and bureaucratic literacy practices, and practitioner and participatory action research.