ABOUT
Participatory Action Research & Praxis
Participatory Action Research (PAR)
has its roots in popular education, an adult education movement.
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​It is research which places emphasis on ‘collective self-reflective enquiry, the
co-construction of knowledge, and the development of skills for speaking back to power and organizing for change with others’
(Kemmis and McTaggart 1998, p. 5).
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Praxis
is a group based experiential 'learning for action' process and a mode of knowledge production used in adult education & PAR.
In the Freirean tradition (1970), a praxis process involves cycles of group reflection and dialogue to inform collective political actions to bring about social justice change.
At the centre of this dialogue are people discussing their lived experience of struggle, oppression, inequality and social action. The knowledge this process generates informs the groups next social action.
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Giselle Harvey: Praxis Illustration, 2022
The process of praxis often takes the form of verbal and text based communication which can exclude the voices of some people in the group. This exclusion can be due to people feeling less able to speak in a group context due to language or cultural barriers, confidence issues, group power dynamics or neurotype differences. The expression of voice and knowledge in groups is heavily impacted by gender, class, race and dis/Ability.
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​The purpose of this research was to take a more holistic approaches to communication and knowledge making by incorporating art, craft, technology and nature into praxis workshops.
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PAR was selected as the research methodology for this project to enable the proposed holistic praxis tools to be co-created with the public, not just for the public so that the outcomes can be more relevant to the public who will ultimately use them
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Participatory Action Research is
Collaborative research, learning & action used to gather information to use for change on social or environmental issues. It involves people who are concerned about or affected by an issue taking a leading role in producing and using knowledge about it (Pain et al., 2011, p 2). ​
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• It is driven by a group of people who have a stake in the social and environmental issues being researched
• offers a democratic model of who can produce, own and use knowledge,
• can be collaborative at every stage, involving discussion, pooling skills and working together.
• is intended to result in some action, change or improvement on the issue being researched' (Kindon, 2008).
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PAR is about acting on social and environmental problems rather than answering a research question.​ PAR originated from radical adult education and the social movements of the global south. Its philosophy of knowledge making (epistemology) challenges the way knowledge is produced in academic contexts which is decontextualised from the lives of ordinary people effected by the issues being researched. This form of research and learning questions who benefits from knowledge production and who can produce it. PAR enables people outside of academic contexts to take a leading role in research as active collaborative decision makers informing the research direction by drawing from their own lived experience of these issues, rather than simply being participants in a research study responding to set research questions posed by a researcher. ​Instead, PAR is both open and responsive to the research needs of the group, which may not be known at the start of the research, and also creates a supportive and flexible framework for the group to undertake their research action activities to enable them to work in an iterative and emergence way.