Participatory Action Research

I am good friends and colleagues with Amy Best. She has told me about this institute for a long time and how it would be such a good fit for us and the Youth Research Council, which I co-founded and co-direct with her. Also, I teach participatory action research regularly, which is also a perfect fit for this approach. All of my teaching is experiential, and I'd love to get a sense of how others do this well.

This graduate advanced level research course focuses on a qualitative approach to inquiry that actively engages participants in confronting and changing their life situations or patterns. It is community-based in that it engages with already existing communities privileging the terms, interests, complexities and challenges of the communities themselves.

Action research, often attributed to the work of Lewin who was concerned about the psychological effects of "minority" social life on individual members of those communities, is specifically aimed at involving people in solving their own community challenges by coming to better understand those challenges and their own place in them (Freire also emphasized this in his pedagogy of the oppressed) as well as the potential for change and action. Participatory action research brings together concepts of research, learning, and change. Action research aims for democratic, inclusive, equal practices with goals to better the lives of people involved in ways that honor and privilege their experiences, perspectives, and efforts.

In this class you will learn foundational history and principles associated with action research, with an emphasis on the epistemology, ethics, and practice of critical participatory action research. In the critical tradition, research works best when it is open to critiquing inequity in its findings, research practices, relationships, and purposes. It is not a neutral way of approaching research nor does it enact a hierarchy of expertise with the researcher at the top. You will engage in reading and discussions as well as the conduct of an action research project. Through these means, you will come to your own understanding of and appreciation for practitioner-centered research known as PAR.

PAR "is concerned with efficacy and must answer to the participants, whose current welfare is at stake. Participatory Action Research is inscribed within the temporality of a life and its immediate needs, lending this research an urgency, particularly when at-risk populations are involved and during periods of economic crisis or political change, with all their attendant feelings of insecurity" Hajdukowasid-Ahmed. M. (1998). Bakhtin without borders: Participatory research in the social sciences. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 97(3/4), p.667.

Meagan Call-Cummings

Associate Professor

School of Education

Johns Hopkins University