Reflecting on the Cuny cPAR Institute
I had the opportunity to attend the critical Participatory Action Research (PAR) Institute at CUNY Graduate Center this past week. It was a fantastic workshop, and I met a lot of great teachers, community organizers, and researchers who are heavily involved in PAR work throughout the USA (and even one in Canada). The Institute did bring up a few interesting thoughts and reflections that I thought would be beneficial to share.
If you’re not familiar with PAR, it’s important to note up front that it is not Research on students, but a pedagogical shift in which the students are the researchers (technically, by studying PAR as a teaching method, I am a Participatory Action Research researcher :) ). Throughout a PAR curriculum, it is the students that decide on the topic to research, and then they go through the entire process of forming a meaningful problem statement, designing their methods of inquiry, collecting and analyzing data, forming conclusions, and