#528: Examining Youth Authority in Community Member Interviews during the Co-Design of an Environmental Engineering Curriculum

This study examines youth authority in interviews with community members during a series of environmental engineering curriculum co-design sessions. Seven high school students, together with teachers, university researchers and informal environmental educators, participated in this multi-session task. The study aimed to understand how youth articulate, realize, and negotiate authority throughout the process. The qualitative analysis of audio recordings from co-design group discussions, formal interviews, reflections, and end-of-year interviews yielded three themes. First, youth authority drew from different sources across different activities. Second, facilitated activities scaffolded youth to realize epistemic and deontic authority. Third, youth authority emerged through adapting and challenging tasks. These findings extend the previous macro-level analyses of power dynamics and suggest that a balance between scaffolding and autonomy is critical to allow youth to exercise authority. This work also contributes to broader literature on power, authority, and equitable youth engagement in curriculum design.