Introduction

Personal narratives are powerful tools that can be used to introduce competing mindsets into the academic discourse. They are especially powerful if they challenge a master narrative that seeks to portray the weak or powerless, such as Chicanos, in negative images or social contexts. This paper uses personal narrative to examine how Chicanos perceived the 1970s as a period of change in academe, one that would increase their presence and voice. The personal narrative also examines how academe is structured and organized to constrain the Chicano’s search for presence and voice.     

Formative assessment: the role of participatory action research in blending policy and practice in Uganda

This paper documents teachers’ assessment practices and pupils’ learning to read and write in large classes. To gain insights into the assessment practices and pupils’ learning, the principles of Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development and participatory action research (PAR) design were adopted. Collaboratively, teachers reflected on their assessment practices, developed, implemented and monitored the assessment practices. Through observation, in-depth interview and review of exercise books, data were obtained. We argue that teachers’ involvement in PAR has contributed to changing assessment practices in large classes and in improving pupils’ competencies in reading and writing. On the other hand to promote better assessment practices, we advocate for reduced number of pupils in a class and teachers’ workload to enable them offer more support to the pupils during assessment of reading and writing.     

What builds student capacity in an alternative high school setting?

Good mental health is a learning enabler for adolescents, demonstrating a reciprocal relationship between mental health and learning outcomes. This article describes a Canadian participatory action research partnership between students, staff and a nurse researcher working together to explore student capacity-building experiences at an alternative high school. Fourteen themes including the importance of supportive healthy relationships within the school environment demonstrated what was happening that built capacity in students. We found that when students’ voices were nurtured and they participated in school decision-making processes, a sense of capability resulted; often extending into long-term positive effects. Research outcomes were shared with key decision-makers including the Board of Education Trustees.     

COZY JOURNALISM

In recent years applications like CoveritLive have diffused with great speed throughout online newsrooms. Such technologies create an interface where audience participation and journalistic reporting potentially merge into a text-production system marked by a high degree of immediacy and interactivity. This paper investigates the consequences of such practices for the professional ideology of journalism. What norms and ideals do journalists who initiate and partake in such practices adhere to? To what degree does their practice conflict with traditional ideals of journalistic reporting? The paper analyses the “live” coverage of football matches in the two most popular Norwegian online newspapers, VG Nett and dagbladet.no. The findings suggest that the merger of audience participation and immediacy creates conflicts of ideals for the journalists involved, and that ideals of subjectivity and social cohesion are promoted by such practices of journalism.     

USING CITIZENS FOR COMMUNITY JOURNALISM

Hyperlocal journalism is thriving. This article describes the case of a Belgian regional newspaper experimenting with citizen journalism and user-generated content (UGC) for hyperlocal news coverage. For each municipality of the region, an online news page has been created where all citizen contributions are published side by side with professional stories on local community news and events. The fact that the UGC is not separated from the professional articles makes it an interesting case to examine commonalities and differences between both types of community reporting. The findings, based on a content analysis of 474 news items, suggest that the newspaper seems to use citizen volunteers primarily as a means to outsource the “soft”, “good” and “small” news coverage of local community life, while preserving the “hard” and “bad” news provision as the exclusive domain of professional journalists. Further, the study's findings support previous research indicating that (1) local community journalism is characterised by a mix of crime reporting and news coverage of fires and accidents, on the one hand, and positive human-interest stories about social club activities, cultural events, health and sports, and school life, on the other; and that (2) citizen journalists tend to rely heavily on first-hand witnessing and personal experience due to a general lack of access to official sources of information.     

Re-presenting the ‘forgotten estate’: participatory theatre,place and community identity

In this article, we discuss the work undertaken in the first phase of a participatory theatre project which took place on a council housing estate in the Midlands of England, in which residents were invited to share their memories for a production which would present the history of the estate. This community is often characterised as deficient, ageing, welfare-oriented, low in educational attainment and aspiration. Interviews and field notes suggest that there was not a great amount of hope within the community for the success of a participatory arts project such as this. However, the performance attracted a large number of participants who performed to full houses over five nights. Using a place-based approach, we argue that a model of open participation led to the presentation of alternative, more positive, narratives of this community as a place to live.     

Teaching English Through Play in a Chinese Classroom

Many schools in China focus on memorization of facts for the purpose of performing on standardized tests, causing a lack of enthusiasm among teachers and students. This essay discusses some of the challenges surrounding education practices in China and identifies participatory environment, book-related pretend play, and the use of technology as three components of a playful environment to enhance the quality and endurance of Chinese students in English learning.     

Design lessons about participatory self-directed online learning in a graduate-level instructional technology course

This article reports on a case of participatory self-directed online learning within the context of a graduate-level instructional technology course. The course was about online learning environments and relied on both asynchronous and synchronous technologies. In this case, the instructor and students engaged in collaborative course design through one of the assignments where student teams and the instructor led one week’s worth of course activities and discussions. This article begins with a discussion of the literature on participatory self-directed online learning. Then, the article presents an overview of the course design, detailed discussion of the assignment that framed student participatory self-directed learning and two examples of student assignments. The framing question for organising this case was as follows: What lessons can a team of graduate students and the instructor learn about self-directed participatory online learning from a collaborative design project? The article ends with the overall lessons learned from the case and implications to future design of online activities.     

Pupils' perspectives on the lived pedagogy of the classroom

This paper is based on a pedagogical action research initiative that explores what constitutes the ‘lived pedagogy’ of the classroom from the pupils' perspective. Photography and group interviews were utilised to allow pupils to express their perspectives. The results show that pupils considered situations meaningful when they were able to work, solve problems and create items together. The pupils appreciated situations in which they experienced a sense of belonging and could influence the use of time and space during the school day. The paper considers possibilities and challenges related to acknowledging pupils' voices in the lived pedagogy of the classroom.     

Participatory Action Research and MSW Curricula

Abstract

The value of partnership and participation for human empowerment is routinely stressed in today's social work practice literature, in which scholars emphasize the need for consumer participation, co-inquiry, and client collaboration. Because research is recognized to be a crucial element in such collaborations, one would expect that, alongside traditional research topics, the goal of empowerment would likewise be recommended in current social work research literature and curricula. One might further expect that the curricula, as part of the menu of research methods, would espouse specific kinds of participative inquiry available in the social work and social science literature.

The purpose of this study is to explore to what extent social work research methodology courses offered through social work MSW graduate programs in the USA include content that encourages active involvement in the process of research by the people whose lives are being studied. In other words, the question put to test has been how much emphasis (or how little) is placed on a relationship of partnership between “inside” and “outside” participants in the design, implementation, and analysis of the research activity? Utilizing a content analysis research design, the study posed and addressed three exploratory hypotheses in an attempt to answer this question.