Productive tensions—engaging geography students in participatory action research with communities

Pain, Rachel; Finn, Matthew D.; Bouveng, Rebecca; Ngobe, Gloria

doi:10.1080/03098265.2012.696594

Cited by 35 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…The benefits of student engagement in AR, particularly on co-collaborative projects involving community stakeholders, include providing opportunities for a better understanding of community (Moore and Gayle 2010) and enhanced community engagement resulting in enhanced intellectual, social and emotional engagement (Pain et al 2013), and improved theory-practice links and construction of collaborative knowledge (Katsarou and Tsafos 2013). Moore and Gayle (2010) Table 1 here please suggest that students' engagement in projects in collaboration with university teachers results in improved relations between them.…”

Section: Action Research Focusing On Student Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Literature review on the use of action research in higher education

Gibbs

Cartney

Wilkinson

et al. 2016

Educational Action Research

113

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This literature review considers the use of action research in higher education. It specifically looks at two areas of higher education activity. The first concerns academic teaching practice and includes a discussion of research and pedagogy practice, and staff development. The second considers student engagement. In both these core features of higher education, action research has proved to be a central approach to the investigation, reflection and improvement of practice. Each of these main foci includes a discussion of the limitations of the literature. The review illustrates the extent and range of uses to have benefited from an action research approach.Keywords: higher education; action research, literature review; reflective practice 2 Literature Review on the Use of Action Research in Higher EducationThe centrality of students as fee paying customerts, besides based on the value of their fees, has focused UK Government policy in the higher education sector on the importance of the quality of teaching and rates of retention. On 1 July 2015, Jo Johnson, UK Minster for Higher Education, confirmed the second of his party's election pledges concerning teaching in higher education: secondly, delivering a teaching excellence framework that creates incentives for universities to devote as much attention to the quality of teaching as fee-paying students and prospective employers have a right to expect. (Johnson 2015) The justification for such a scheme is as follows:to meet students' high expectations of their university years and to deliver the skills our economy needs, we need a renewed focus on teaching. (ibid.)A process was put in motion that seeks to enact changes to put teaching at the heart of higher education policy. The extrinsic value of teaching, or its value for money, is thus established as a metric of the level of skill, inferred from its calculative value: as a professional activity -as a vocation -higher education is undermined. Whether this exposes the essence of higher education provision is contentious, but the rebalance of emphasis from research to teaching in our mass participation higher education system clearly has intrinsic merit, and certainly possesses political leverage. Amid the development of lecturers' capability to teach and facilitate learning is the enhancement of pedagogical practice through reflection and research into practice (Gibbs, Angelides and Michaelides 2004). In this context, the importance of action research (AR) as a method of revelation, instruction and improvement, and as the realisation of technical skill and facilitation of learning, is hard to overemphasise. Informed practice removes the consumeristic notion of lecturers as emotional labourers, intent on satisfying students' consumerist desires, and balances the edifying mission of higher education institutions. This literature review is undertaken to contribute to this aim. It attempts to reflect AR from a number of perspectives and to consider its implications and limitations in regard to generating the...

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Section: Action Research Focusing On Student Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Literature review on the use of action research in higher education

Gibbs

Cartney

Wilkinson

et al. 2016

Educational Action Research

113

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Participatory Action Research (PAR) methods have recently gained more exposure in research on social innovations (Greenwood and Levin, 2007;Reason and Bradbury, 2001), sustainability transitions and work with 'hard to reach' groups (Cahill, 2007a(Cahill, , 2007bMason, 2015;Pain et al, 2013). A key part of this is the perception that PAR is somehow a 'more ethical' or just form of research.…”

Section: Ethicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Innovation and Participatory Action Research: A way to research community?

Aiken

2017

EPSIR

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Civil society actors gathered in so-called 'community' initiatives generate a particular impetus for low carbon transitions. This paper seeks to outline a methodological approach that can be used in order to help understand such movements, and more fundamentally, the role of community in Social Innovation (SI). The article offers an overview of Participative Action Research (PAR), and outlines its strengths and weaknesses in studying community-based social innovation, in this case the Transition movement. PAR is not an 'off the shelf' kit, or a 'conforming of methodological standards', but rather a series of approaches that ought to inform research. The paper argues that these approaches, rather than techniques, are essential to get right if the intangible, granular, and incidental-but-fundamental aspects of community are to be grasped by researchers. Given the small-scale nature of community low carbon transitions a granular analysis is preferred to a more surface, superficial overview of such processes. Qualitative research is preferred to quantitative aggregation of initiatives, due to the need to understand the everyday, more phenomenological aspects of community, and the specific tacit relations and subjectivities enacted through their capacity to cut carbon. Despite challenges with using PAR for SI, the Transition Research Network offers an active guide to achieving this.

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“…Collaborative fieldcourses have begun to gain traction within undergraduate programmes as a way of allowing for the possibility of dialogical, negotiated and inter‐cultural learning in a way that benefits both students and local communities (Pain et al . ; McEwen ; Hammersley et al . ).…”

Section: Negotiating ‘Responsibility’ In Participatory Fieldworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negotiating the responsibilities of collaborative undergraduate fieldcourses

Bhakta

Dickinson

Moore

et al. 2015

Area

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Undergraduate fieldcourses to destinations in the global South have received much critical scholarly and pedagogic attention. This article reflects on a third‐year Geography fieldcourse to Kenya, which aimed to collaborate with local partners in providing an immersive and co‐constitutive learning environment that transcended the politics of knowledge production defining the global South as a distanciated object of study. We shape our reflections on this fieldcourse through a conceptualisation of responsibility as a relational, inter‐subjective achievement borne out of negotiation and encounter. Focusing in particular on the trade‐offs that are required when taking into account different staff, students and partner organisations' positionalities, expectations and experiences, we argue that scholarship concerning the responsibilities of geographers' engagements with the global South needs to account for the emotional, embodied and affective challenges inherent in practising collaborative academic endeavour.

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Productive tensions—engaging geography students in participatory action research with communities

Cited by 35 publications

References 24 publications

Literature review on the use of action research in higher education

Literature review on the use of action research in higher education

Social Innovation and Participatory Action Research: A way to research community?

Negotiating the responsibilities of collaborative undergraduate fieldcourses

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