Building a PAR Team

Creating change in our school community

What is Participatory Action

Research (PAR)? An approach to research

Incorporates an inclusive environment

Everyone is an ‘expert’, and their knowledge helps us to answer our questions

Uses research to promote action and/or change

Why PAR?

All voices need to be heard to adequately support action

Considering a community problem, community involvement is important

Applying PAR

Student success requires support from both the school and parents.

If we can get the school and the parents in a cooperative collaboration, student success will improve.

Build a team with families of students and the school personnel (teachers, administrators, etc.) to work together to create strategies and solutions that work for you and might work for other communities

Selecting a team

We need a team that: Represents various perspectives Is committed and passionate Can work through potential conflict Communicates well Shares a common goal

Setting goals and norms

After the team is established, we need to work together to set goals and norms

Goals Norms

• What do we want to accomplish? (Long term goals)

• Who do we want to include (or exclude)?

• How will we know what success looks like?

• What steps along the way will be our short term goals?

• How will we operation as a research team?

• What do we expect of each other?

• How will we minimize conflict?

• If conflict arises, how will we handle it?

Data Collection Techniques

We want to start our research assessing what the different community members feel. What does ‘family involvement’ look like

according to the schools and the family members?

Data collection can be done in various ways

Then we want to see how we might better the communication process.

Observations

Interviews

Surveys Focus Groups

What do we do with what we learn?

Create change in our community

Promote change in other similar communities Social media

Blogs, twitter, facebook Videos (youtube)

Lobbying school boards for adopting policy and practice changes

Other ideas?

But … It’s Cyclical

Plan

Act

Reflect

Research/

Observe

Potential challenges

Commitment of the entire team

Making sure all voices are heard and respected

Unforeseen setbacks or barriers

Following norms and revisiting our goals will help reduce challenges as much as possible

Want to know more?

http://www.svfreenyc.org/research_factsheet_119.html

https://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/beacon/PARtoolkit.pdf

http://www.researchfororganizing.org/index.php?page=participatory-action-research