Participatory Action Research

History

The origins of the PAR paradigm can be traced to Europe, to a climate of critique of mainstream social science research, popular education models and social movements in general.

In 1940, the German social psychologist Kurt Lewin held that social science research must reject the positivist outlook of science, which prefers that researchers study an ‘objective’ world separate from the ‘subjective’ meanings understood by agents as they act in the world. He coined the term action research to describe a process in which social scientists worked collaboratively with a group, organization or community that had stakes in the issue at hand. Action research emphasized a problem-solving approach to research and rational decision-making by a group aided by an external facilitator. The underlying principles of action research—self-reflection and critique through dialogue, collaboration, mutual learning and action—formed the basis of PAR. Somewhat conservatively, Lewin's work placed relatively less emphasis on active community participation and did not challenge existing power relationships. Yet it provided a useful way of combining theory and practice to facilitate organizational change.

Another significant influence on PAR was the Brazilian educationist Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), which evolved from his experience with adult literacy in Brazil and highlighted the power of education as a political tool for stimulating the consciousness of oppressed people. Freire's notion of ‘conscientization’ reinforced the idea that socially marginalized people, through dialogue, can critically analyze their own situation as well as organize action to improve it.

His thematic investigation, employed in 1973, first in Brazil and later in Chile, inspired scholars and activists to collaborate with community residents to bring about community-controlled social change projects whose central principle was learning through investigation.

International adult education movements, particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America, also set the stage for PAR. The philosophy of adult education focused on a learner-centric approach, yet adult educators had to adopt a research-centric approach in understanding the programme content and educational methods. This precipitated a crisis of identity, with adult educators questioning the dichotomy between their two distinct roles as in-field practitioners and off-site researchers. An alternative research paradigm was sought, which was learner-centric and required popular community mobilization. [Page 584]During the early 1970s, Marja Liisa Swantz and her team of social scientists working as aid specialists in Tanzania found that students and village workers were far more effective than trained adult educators in eliciting the required information from people. Attributing this success to data collection methods that relied on communal sharing of locally specific knowledge, Swantz proposed that both the researcher and the researched could become agents of development and change. The new practice among adult educators of relying on local knowledge for technical solutions of local problems began to be known as ‘participant research’.

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