Using Action Research and Logic Modeling to Promote Young People's Engagement,Resilience and Wellbeing in Middle Schooling

Abstract

An approach to action research of innovative and disruptive socioecological understandings of young people's wellbeing, resilience, and engagement in middle school was piloted with a coalition of school principals, lead teachers, police, and community development professionals by an RMIT research team. This coalition was built around the Hume-Whittlesea Local Learning and Employment Network and the Whittlesea Youth Commitment Committee in outer northern Melbourne, Australia. Action research facilitated the collaborative design of interventions for reducing middle school disengagement. These were then expressed in logic model terms to guide implementation and subsequent evaluation. Logic models clarified how local innovations, situated in an authorizing environment, can develop promising practices that contribute to system reform. Our project involved characterizing ecologies of young people's engagement, resilience, and wellbeing as part of a place-based strategy.

Introduction

This research project addressed how young people engage and disengage with middle years schooling in outer northern Melbourne's Whittlesea region. It aimed to investigate and co-design innovative responses to these challenges by using action research methodology and logic modeling. Our action research approach facilitates an explicit link between action and theory so that the process of collaborative inquiry contributes directly to benefiting the participants and their communities (Coghlan & Brannick, 2019). The most productive form of action research is one in which those involved have a responsibility for implementing the results of their learning (Kemmis, 2009). Action research involves using a recurring spiral of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting, especially in situations where there is a desire to improve local practices and address complex problems (Lewin, 1946). Our combination of action research and logic modeling was aimed at helping participants to co-design interventions and services for reducing school disengagement by middle years students in their particular locality.

Education researchers and local service providers and planners use logic models to assist action research and policy development. For example, Luck et al. (2020) show how a service navigation center used logic modeling to facilitate the foundational work needed to co-create more convenient and integrated support services for children and families with complex care needs. In this instance logic modeling helped the team to clarify program goals and objectives, and to logically illustrate how the program would work.

A logic model usually includes a statement about the context in which an intervention or service will operate. We used logic modeling partly for this purpose—to facilitate community engagement in reviewing the needs of young people and collaboratively planning ways to disrupt and refine the places, spaces and supports that help young people to stay engaged in the middle years of schooling.

The community stakeholders with whom the authors worked were coalesced around the Hume Whittlesea Local Learning and Employment Network (HWLLEN) and the Whittlesea Youth Committee (WYC).

The HWLLEN is a membership-based, not-for-profit organization, which is part of a state-wide network of LLENs. These receive some funding from the Victorian State Government, to raise young people's aspirations and improve their transitions beyond Year 12 (the final year of secondary schooling). Their mission is also to create and strengthen partnerships between schools, industry and community agencies.

The WYC is a community-based network of social support services focused on improving young people's involvement in education and their transitions into training and employment (Brown et al., 2020).

The HWLLEN and WYC are part of a place-based response in the City of Whittlesea to issues of relative disadvantage associated with Melbourne's Outer Northern suburbs.

Whittlesea's suburbs have a fast-growing youth population—many from migrant/refugee backgrounds— and high levels of youth unemployment. Whittlesea's Youth Plan 2030 projected the population of over 40,000 young people in the city in 2017 would reach over 70,000 by 2037, with a high percentage from a non-English speaking background (City of Whittlesea, 2017).

In several ways, young people in Whittlesea live in a situation of relative disadvantage compared with young people across Greater Melbourne. This is revealed most starkly in regard to differing experiences of education and employment pathways:

There are more young people (aged 15–24 years) in the City of Whittlesea disengaged from both education and employment compared with Greater Melbourne (9.8% and 7.5%, respectively) (City of Whittlesea, 2018).

Data from the Middle Years Development Instrument survey in Whittlesea in 2016 revealed that middle years students experience a declining sense of belonging at school, self-esteem, and optimism about their futures (City of Whittlesea, 2018).

Faced with these challenges, our research was aimed at enabling evidence-informed co-design of innovative responses using an action research approach through engagement with HWLLEN and WYC as community partners.

Literature Review

In several studies, evidence of community engagement is often missing from the results section, but present as statements in the conclusion that acknowledge the need for community involvement when considering interventions (Benjamins & Whitman, 2010; Ling et al., 2014; Tucker et al., 2011; Wright et al., 2013; Zahnd et al., 2017), advocate for long-term community partnerships (Waters et al., 2018), and emphasize the necessity for a true collaboration to ensure successful outcomes (Langhout et al., 2002). McMullen et al. (2020) also stress in a recent systematic review of community engagement outcomes research in school-based health interventions, the need to better understand both community stakeholders’ roles in interventions and their engagement as an outcome of such responses to school and youth service challenges.

Our research was undertaken with this action research focus in mind. Supported by a small grant from the Collier Charitable Fund, the authors, and stakeholders from the HWLLEN, and the WYC, piloted a conceptual model, and a methodology for collaborative practice, framed by the need to identify and explore innovative and disruptive socioecological understandings of young people's wellbeing, resilience and engagement in the middle years, ages 9 to 14 (Brown et al., 2020).

Concepts such as resilience, wellbeing, and engagement often have been described in government policy and third sector organization literature as being able to inoculate individuals from education and work disruptions that characterize the start of the 21st century. Resilience and wellbeing are described as individual protective factors that can help keep young people engaged in “pro-social” activities (Liebenberg et al., 2012; Ungar, 2011; Woodier, 2011). In other words, a resilient young person is “one who bounces back having endured adversity, who continues to function reasonably well despite continued exposure to risk” (Gilligan, 2000, p. 37). In this sense, resilience tends to be conceptualized as an individual capacity—of self-esteem and self-efficacy. The authors have noted previously their concerns about the limited scope of these psychobiologically based conceptions of resilience, wellbeing, and engagement:

A significant gap in these approaches is that they take little account of the roles played by communities, Third Sector Organisations (TSOs), businesses and governments in shaping urban ecologies, and in building and supporting young people's well-being, resilience and enterprise. Given the scale of the challenges faced by young Australians, there is an urgent need to build ‘socio-ecological’ models of young people's well-being, resilience and enterprise that are grounded in the relationships between communities, policies, practices and knowledge production. (Brown et al., 2018, p. 11)

Some researchers therefore have called for understanding student disengagement in ways that look beyond considerations of self-efficacy, economic disadvantage, low engagement or interest of parents, learning skills, and so on (Richardson, 2008; Smyth & McInerney, 2013). We share this view and have examined student's “engagement” and “disengagement” in Whittlesea through exploring the various factors that affect young people's school experience. This approach is “socioecological,” in that it adapts sociological and ecological frameworks used by some educational researchers (Nicholson & Putwain, 2015). These socioecological models provide support for community stakeholders such as youth services and community organizations to co-design new ways of working with each other and to facilitate successful school (re)engagement as well as postschool trajectories for young people (Brown et al., 2020).

Methodology

Our approach involved conducting four action research workshops to promote engagement of young people in middle years schooling and reduce nonattendance by a cohort of students identified in school satisfaction surveys and other research instruments as constituting up to 30% of students in the middle years across Whittlesea (Whittlesea Youth Commitment et al., 2017).

Such an approach is consistent with the principles and practices of “co-design,” a method for participatory service or product development which is increasingly being used in fields such as education, health, and community support services. Co-design provides an inclusive and respectful process that enables a range of partners to work together in an iterative process of collaborative innovation focused on improving outcomes (New South Wales Council of Social Service, 2021).

A partnership mapping tool was used to depict the range of community collaborations, relationships, and partnerships in Whittlesea. We adapted an action research approach used by one of the authors, which involved taking a policy continuum approach to identifying levels of policy responsibility for initiating, implementing, and delivering regional partnership activities for increasing the participation of economically disadvantaged students in higher education (Phillips, 2012). The partnership mapping tool is an adaptation of a policy continuum model developed by British researchers (Fuller & Paton, 2006).

At the macro level are organizations associated with formulating national policy.

At the meso level are organizations associated with implementing national policy.

At the micro level are organizations associated with service delivery (Phillips, 2012).

Using this partnership mapping tool, we worked with workshop participants to map collaboration partners for each intervention idea they co-designed around middle years school engagement. This helped to identify resource requirements, which was valuable for subsequent logic modeling.

Logic models describe interventions in terms of their inputs, outputs, and outcomes. They model how program designers expect programs to “work” in a specific situation by showing that IF they use a particular combination of inputs to produce specified outputs, THEN they should produce outcomes that will change the situation being addressed (McCawley, 2014). In this way, a logic model portrays the ideal causal relationships among program elements and identifies underlying assumptions about how the program should operate and the influence of external factors (Nutbeam & Baumann, 2006).

The action research approach involved twelve participants recruited from the WYC attending four 2 hour action research workshops from July to September in 2018. Due mainly to work pressures and conflicting demands on their time, not all twelve participants attended each workshop. Where possible, in these circumstances, an alternate attended on behalf of their organization. Key stakeholders represented a range of sectors and levels including local schools, nongovernment community service providers, local government agencies, state government departments, and postsecondary education and training institutions.

After each workshop, as part of the action research process, participants reflected on what they learned about working collaboratively, using a socioecological approach. Specifically, they recognized the relational and place-based nature of the issues associated with disengagement of local young people from middle years school, and this helped them to identify the relationships and commitments required from various levels to improve engagement and reduce nonattendance.

The action research involved four workshops. In workshop 1, participants considered issues affecting school engagement, like mental health, drug and alcohol abuse, the complexities and challenges of parenting, bullying, infrastructure, a patchy service sector, and the complications of family life. In workshops 2, 3 and 4 stakeholders’ previous discussions informed development of “disruptive” ideas about interventions to reframe the way schools manage middle years transitions. These ideas were translated initially into five intervention statements.

In workshop 2, participants mapped possible community collaborations, relationships, and partnerships for implementing their interventions. This stimulated thinking about inputs and participants for each intervention.

During the third workshop, the original five interventions were compressed into three initiatives.

The first initiative was focused on reframing times and spaces to maximize middle years engagement with school and family.

The second initiative concerned building and honoring family involvement with school life and learning.

The third initiative was about empowering independent young learners to flourish.

In the fourth and last workshop, participants reviewed these three and combined them into two final program logic models: one about reframing times and spaces, and the other about empowering young people and families to flourish in school life. Empowerment describes the process of working with others so that individuals and communities can exert greater control and autonomy over resources, events, and outcomes to achieve success (Block et al., 2011; Perkins & Zimmerman, 1995). These final logic models crystallized how the innovations were situated within an authorizing environment that facilitates local innovations to yield promising practices which might facilitate system reform. For example, the logic model on reframing times and spaces reflected the ways that principals can flex education department policies about school start and finish times. Specifically, principals can respond to the needs of student cohorts by reconfiguring school timetables. In this way, timetabling no longer constituted a barrier for middle years students’ participation. Similarly, the logic model on empowering young people and their families to flourish indicated how principals could exercise budgetary discretion to employ social workers and youth workers to work alongside staff, students, and parents. This promised to offer an innovative means for promoting engagement and reducing nonattendance. Having developed their logic models to guide their interventions, members of the WYC reflected on the mapping of key players in the local policy ecology and agreed that the HWLLEN should be the key meso-level organization for coordinating partnership collaborations when implementing the interventions described in the logic models.

Results

In finalizing the logic models, we ensured the titles, context statements, and intervention elements were consistent with the ideas expressed by participants in the action research workshops. The elements of the logic models were phrased so they strongly reflected the participants’ keywords of engagement, disengagement, wellbeing and resilience, identity, belonging, and time. Last, the logic models were framed to focus practical attention on the authorizing environment in which innovation activities and system reform can be co-designed, implemented, and evaluated.

The insights gathered in the action research workshops were captured in the logic models, as described in Appendices 1 and 2. In Appendix 1 (Reframing time and spaces) we modeled two key activities identified by action research participants:

A multistakeholder working party to develop an early intervention approach to support Year 6 students in transitioning into high school by placing them in small “belonging” groups in Years 7 to 9.

A similar working party to develop a plan to enable young people at risk of disengagement from school, their families, and schools to build innovative understandings of time, and how these can be used flexibly to engage in school life, fulfill family roles, and achieve learning success.

In Appendix 2 (Empowering young people and families), we modeled two key activities identified by action research participants which again involved multiple stakeholders contributing to a working party co-design process:

• One to develop a plan for resourcing social workers and youth workers to be employed as “Middle Years Transition Brokers” to work in schools as part of an integrated school re-engagement team in Whittlesea schools.

• Another to develop a plan for communicating and engaging with the socioeconomic status, ethnic and gender/sexual diversity of Whittlesea's young people and families about participating in schools in ways that express and affirm their identity (through involvement in events and celebrations at convenient times) and encourage a diversity of recreation activities and nonschool/work activities in safe spaces at or near schools.

For each of these activities, the two logic models portray who the participants are for each activity and what outcomes were intended in the short, medium, and longer terms. Furthermore, each not only provides a model of what is expected to be a productive, “promising” intervention. They also provide a model for guiding implementation of these new ways of working, and for evaluating the extent to which participation and processes were undertaken as planned and outcomes were achieved.

Discussion

The work undertaken in this pilot project bears direct relevance to the United Nations (2021) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which provide a framework of action to address global challenges such as poverty, inequality, prosperity, peace, and justice to obtain a more sustainable future. The 17 interconnected goals are to be achieved by 2030. Consistent with the SDGs, this action research project aspired to impact on three of the seventeen goals using a socioecological approach: Goal 4: “Ensure inclusive and quality education for all and promote lifelong learning”; Goal 5: “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”; and Goal 8: “Promote sustained, inclusive, sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all.”

To do this, we considered how issues like those identified in workshop one are entangled with each other and affect young people's engagement in the middle years of school. The promise of a socioecological approach aligned with the SDGs is how it disruptively connects to existing networks and initiatives, and introduces “socioecological thinking” into place-based interventions, so that, as a long-term outcome, young people:

flourish in middle school and beyond, and continue to successfully complete secondary schooling;

become critical, creative, and disruptive “agents of change” in their communities; and

are supported in achieving this by key stakeholders to create ecologies of young people's wellbeing and resilience that improve school wellbeing and middle years engagement.

A socioecological approach also helped participants who were members of the WYC to map key players in the local policy ecology. Consequently, they reflected in the logic models for each intervention the backbone agency role of the HWLLEN in coordinating links between local partners and state government system partners.

Participants appreciated the value of understanding the authorizing environment for the interventions, and how this can help secure buy-in from the state government's Department of Education and Training (DET) Area Director and staff. Participants thus recognized how the logic models and final project report can assist in securing the involvement of the DET Area Director as a project sponsor and advocate for resources to trial the interventions that demonstrate promising practices worthy of further rollout and scaling up.

COVID-19 Considerations

Evaluation literature demonstrates that logic models are a useful tool for thinking logically and strategically about a program of activity (or an intervention) that has been developed to address a situation specifically, an issue or issues within a complex set of circumstances (Cooper et al., 2020). They also provide the basis for formulating evaluation questions, to help program stakeholders evaluate their processes as well as their impacts (Nutbeam & Baumann, 2006).

In the logic modeling and action research process described here, school and community stakeholders in 2018 collaborated to clarify the context they were working in. From 2020 onwards of course this context includes understanding the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic and its variants, and how schools need to be prepared to address outbreaks so their impact on school engagement, learning, and student wellbeing is minimized. For example, stakeholders in Whittlesea might communicate with students and caregivers about preferences for either on-campus/virtual hybrid instructional or traditional, face-to-face instructional formats. In places such as Texas, experiencing high numbers of COVID-19 infections, caregivers of children and adolescents preferred an on-campus/virtual hybrid instructional format (Limbers, 2021).

Some Final Observations

As the “COVID-19 normal” context for middle years young people becomes clearer, stakeholders can specify the inclusive participatory school-based interventions they wish to design to facilitate young people's wellbeing and learning (within school settings as well as via virtual hybrid instructional formats). These can be framed in terms of “If-Then” relationships, to draw out the logic of activities and how they can contribute to producing learning and development outcomes for students. For example, schools with the help of key stakeholders can create flexible learning spaces that allow for more student engagement, collaboration, interaction, and better educational outcomes than traditional classrooms, and that offer opportunities to address classroom sedentary behavior (Karippanon et al., 2021).

Our research has shown how interventions can include a socioecological approach that addresses the diverse needs of the community. For example, in a COVID-19 context, stakeholders might re-imagine the role of school-based health centers to strengthen the capacity of telehealth options for healthcare, establish better communication between parents and the school and community resources, and build trust with caregivers and students around risk mitigation policies and COVID-19 infection safety controls (Abdul-Raheem et al., 2021). Stakeholders can adopt a plan to continuously evaluate the impact of the interventions and allow for the community to give feedback and feed forward to stakeholders.

Participants in our community-based action research project in Whittlesea collaboratively developed and used logic models to focus on the elements of interventions that they co-designed regarding middle years engagement in school. The resulting models provided a useful planning tool for using social workers and youth workers to improve family and student functioning and integrating “transition brokers” into the school staff and community. They also helped to describe expected changes to be produced by interventions to improve middle years engagement as part of a place-based strategy to make school spaces more welcoming, by inviting families to participate and become integrated into the school culture, and by making school start times more flexible and appropriate to middle years students’ sleep and study patterns.

Conclusions

Learning from this project is that more time needs to be allocated to the planning dimension of the logic modeling process. This would allow participants to discuss more fully how “usual practices” might actually be disrupted by the interventions they were considering and modeling. This would have helped them to reflect on how partners could help them to achieve new and promising practices with schools and families that would improve middle years engagement.

Workshop participants therefore recognized that a tactical means for doing this would be to create working parties—involving key partners (micro, meso, and macro levels)—to formulate a plan that focuses attention on changing practices in bespoke and flexible ways so young people can be (re)engaged in school life during their middle years. Participants agreed that the HELLEN was best suited to guide implementation and evaluation.

The next step in any process like this is to agree upon, and secure resources for, implementation of the interventions expressed in the logic models which participants have co-designed, and to use the input and output statements as the basis for formative evaluation at the 6 months point, and the outcome statements as the basis for impact evaluation at the 12, 18, and 24 months stages. Identifying and resourcing the meso level coordinating agency, in this case the Local Learning and Employment Network, is also vital for ensuring the intervention can be taken forward with local level leadership. Though the implementation and evaluation of these interventions were not a part of this pilot project, the authors recognize the important role that logic models can play in these regards.

Finally, it is valuable to build in the capacity for ongoing research and evaluation. Our project demonstrated the power of a community collaboration with a university research team to research and collaboratively develop project activities as part of building evidence-informed practices to improve middle years school engagement in a disadvantaged region.