The metrics presently being used to gauge student success have become outdated and irrelevant. Enrollment, persistence, and degree attainment are secondary measures, missing entirely the question of whether students are truly achieving an effective life skillset while attempting to complete degree or graduation fulfillment. Student success, and the success of the education system, will be based on collaborative and cooperative efforts by all stakeholders as well as those with vested interests in the future economic development of local communities as well as national development. Participatory Pedagogy: Emerging Research and Opportunities is an academic research publication that explores educational change and methodologies for the promotion of lifelong learning. Highlighting a wide range of topics such as educational achievement, learning experience, and public education, this book is ideal for teachers, administrators, curriculum developers, education professionals, practitioners, researchers, and students.

The early years are an important period for learning, but the questions surrounding participatory learning amongst toddlers remain under-examined. This book presents the latest theoretical and research perspectives about how ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) contexts promote democracy and citizenship through participatory learning approaches. The contributors provide insight into national policies, provisions, and practices and advance our understandings of theory and research on toddlers’ experiences for democratic participation across a number of countries, including the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Sweden, and Norway.

While many educators acknowledge the challenges of a curriculum shaped by test preparation, implementing meaningful new teaching strategies can be difficult. Active Learning presents an examination of innovative, interactive teaching strategies that were successful in engaging urban students who struggled with classroom learning. Drawing on rich ethnographic data, the book proposes participatory action research as a viable approach to teaching and learning that supports the development of multiple literacies in writing, reading, research and oral communication. As Wright argues, in connecting learning to authentic purposes and real world consequences, participatory action research can serve as a model for meaningful urban school reform. After an introduction to the history and demographics of the working-class West Coast neighborhood in which the described PAR project took place, the book discusses the "pedagogy of praxis" method and the project’s successful development of student voice, sociopolitical analysis capacities, leadership skills, empowerment and agency. Topics addressed include an analysis and discussion of the youth-driven PAR process, the reactions of student researchers, and the challenges for adults in maintaining youth and adult partnerships. A thought-provoking response to current educational challenges, Active Learning offers both timely implications for educational reform and recommendations to improve school policies and practices.

In this book the authors tell their stories of action research in their own ways, and indeed, give expression to their own cultural positioning as they draw upon their extensive experience in the field and the academy. They write in terms of their own experience, but with a collective as well as individual purpose. Contributors describe the history of participatory action research, and identify its interpretations in the diverse cultural contexts of Colombia, India, Austria, Australia, Venezuela, USA, England, Spain, Thailand, and New Caledonia. Drawing on the fields of nursing, education, community development, land reform, popular education, agriculture, and mass media, the authors describe the development of democratic research practice in quite different institutional and cultural contexts.Teachers, social workers, managers, nurses, adult educators, and agricultural extension and community development workers will all find this collection of writings from key participatory action research practitioners useful and informative.

This book presents a guiding framework for designing and supporting participatory research with young children. The volume shares detailed approaches to research designs that support collaborative work with young children and teachers in a wide range of early learning environments. It presents conceptual and ethical considerations for participatory work, and explores children’s agency through engagement in participatory practices. It examines challenges to accepted practices and understandings of young children, and discusses the analysis and dissemination of participatory work with children. In doing so, the book informs readers about the conceptual understandings and methodological approaches that can be used to support participatory research investigations where the young child is viewed as knowledgeable and capable of sharing unique opinions, interpretations, and understandings of her experiences as embedded within social, cultural, and political worlds. The book sets the stage for early childhood researchers and educators to develop new understandings grounded in post-developmental, critical, and social constructivist theories while exploring supportive methodological approaches.

A definitive statement of YPAR as it relates to education with an informative combination of theory and practice, this edited collection addresses both the political challenges and inherent power imbalances of conducting research with young people.

This volume brings together established and new scholarly voices to explore how participatory and situated approaches to learning can contribute to educational innovation. The contributors' critical examinations of educational programming and engagements provide insights into how educators, youth, families, and community members understand and enact their commitments to diversity and equitable access. Collectively, these essays complicate notions of community, alerting readers to ways in which community can be constructed other than in geographical and ethnoracial terms--as alliances and collaborations of individuals joining together to accomplish or negotiate shared agendas. The focus on agency combined with social context, a dialectic to which all of the authors speak, enlarges and invigorates our sense of what is pedagogically possible in societies characterized by diversity and flux. *Part I, "Linking Pedagogy to Communities," focuses on dynamic initiatives where practitioners collaborate with community members and other professionals as they acknowledge and build on the cultural, linguistic, and intellectual resources of ethnic-minority students and their communities. *Part II, "Professional Learning for Diversity," centers on the authors' experiences in facilitating opportunities for working with prospective and practicing teachers to develop situated pedagogies, highlighting both the challenges that emerge and the transformations that occur. *Part III, "Learning in Community (and Community in Learning), illustrates how educational innovation can extend beyond the realm of schools and classrooms by elucidating ways in which individuals construct learning venues in out-of-school settings. Learning, Teaching, and Community: Contributions of Situated and Participatory Approaches to Educational Innovation is a compelling and timely text ideally suited for courses focused on teacher education and development, informal learning, equity and education, multilingual and multicultural education, language and culture, educational foundations, and school reform/educational restructuring, and will be equally of interest to faculty, researchers, and professionals in these areas.