Navigating challenges and tensions through engaged pedagogy: reflections on youth Participatory Action research in Sport for Development

Youth Participatory Action Research YPAR) is widely used in the Sport for Development (SfD) field and offers a critical framework for engaging young people as co-researchers. Despite its growing application, there remains limited discussion in the literature on how YPAR can be effectively enacted in practice and the pedagogies that support this enactment. In this paper, utilising qualitative secondary analysis, I explore the potential of YPAR in SfD contexts by foregrounding engaged pedagogy as a guiding pedagogy. Revisiting data from my previous four YPAR projects — two with young people from refugee backgrounds in Australia and two with youth living in favelas in Brazil — I offer a situated account of what it means to co-research with young people positioned at intersecting margins and to consider relationality as central to this process. In the findings, I reflect on how the core features of engaged pedagogy — mutual recognition, vulnerability, and a holistic approach — helped me navigate the challenges and tensions across these studies, particularly in relation to participation, power-shifting, and reflexivity. Practising mutual recognition enabled me to see and engage co-researchers as whole beings and to foster trust. Embracing vulnerability allowed me to share power and co-create democratic learning spaces. By taking a holistic approach, I welcomed emotions and relationships as central to building reflexivity and understanding positionality within diverse cultural contexts. Ultimately, I argue that engaged pedagogy holds significant potential to help us theorise power, inviting SfD researchers and practitioners to view young people not merely as participants or co-researchers but as whole human beings, intellectual, emotional and spiritual, whose lived experiences and relationships form the foundation of learning and transformation.