Paper short abstract:

Both authors are university-based teacher educators and former elementary teachers, here we reflect on our new work with high school students. Unlike our 'regular' work, this connects us to students more like our college students and allows to consider how high schools now socialize our students.

Paper long abstract:

Both authors are teacher educators in an elementary education pathway, and both are former elementary school teachers. While the content expertise needed to perform our elementary teacher preparation tasks comes from our biographical experience and current lines of inquiry, that expertise does not per se help us imagine the current and recent high school student, i.e., the recent academic identity of most of our preservice teachers (i.e., of our college students). College students are not high school students, but they are often not far removed from being high school students in terms of chronology, but also in terms of their socialization to how learning environments should be structured. With more emphasis on student mental health and technology in high school (both catalyzed by schools' negotiation of the COVID pandemic) than when we were high school students, it follows that we both can update and expand our expertise vis-a-vis high schooling and vis-a-vis our arriving new college students by working with high school students at their high schools on youth participatory action research project. This paper is composed of two auto-ethnographic reflections (one by each coauthor) about how working with high school students on YPAR matters for our (re)design of preservice elementary teacher education praxis. Because the YPAR projects are primarily with students from non-dominant backgrounds, the reflections also consider how we use that experience to inform considerations of welcoming college students from non-dominant backgrounds. Ultimately, we consider how the YPAR experience makes us less isolated from contemporary PK-12 practice.