The purpose of this study was to explore secondary/high school students’ enactment of participatory pedagogies promoting experiences and understandings of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) in Physical Education. Forty-two ninth and tenth grade students (30 female, 12 male) aged 14–16 participated in data collection, with inductive and deductive data analysis applied. Utilizing participatory pedagogies and action research led to an explicit and intentional focus on SEL that enhanced students’ understanding and appreciation as to how emotions, behaviors, social roles, and responsibilities influenced their participation in physical activity within and beyond physical education settings. The promotion of SEL competencies and skills in physical education through action research and participatory pedagogies that align with a contemporary framework can support secondary/high school students in attaining knowledge, skills, and attitudes for pursuing a physically active lifestyle and a lifetime of autonomous wellbeing.
In this article, we discuss the results of our efforts to collaboratively engage in participatory action research with children ages 10-11. Despite our best efforts to be intentional about breaking down the adult-child binary to create space for the child participants to act as co-researchers, in reflecting on the results of the project, we ultimately determined we did not achieve our intended emancipatory aim. Here, we describe the lessons we took away from this project and how they might inform future practices for working with children, as researchers, teachers, and advocates.
This study explores the use and organizational impact of youth engagement practices within the public Youth Mental Health and Substance Use (YMHSU) sector. This study used a youth participatory action approach, co-led and co-authored by youth researchers, to interview representatives from seven Canadian YMHSU organizations through a social constructivist lens. Transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis and synthesized by a national youth research team. Respondents articulated that meaningful youth engagement necessitates a foundational organizational commitment, the creation of safe and inclusive spaces, the nurturing of authentic relationships, and the provision of diverse opportunities tailored to resonate with the unique needs and perspectives of youth participants. These practices supported organizational innovation, recruitment, retention, goal attainment, and sustainability. Participants shared success stories that illustrated the transformative impact of engagement practices within their organizations. This study highlights the organizational benefits and critical success factors for effective youth engagement in mental health decision-making and leverages a youth-centered approach to do so. Youth engagement strategies have the potential to yield significant benefits when implemented with a focus on safety and equity. We propose these strategies can and should be leveraged widely across fields to support organizational effectiveness, workplace mental health promotion, and service delivery.
Living labs have been deployed in numerous settings including agriculture, public services, urban planning, and technology development. Despite significant conceptual developments in living lab theory and methodology, there remain significant gaps in the sharing of concrete experiences alongside challenges faced by developers and users of living labs in specific political and social contexts. To address such gaps, we embarked as a collective of living labs on a knowledge co-development process based on actual experiences of developing and operating 10 active Canadian living labs. In this paper, we report and discuss common advantages, challenges, and lessons learned through our experiences.
The prominence of community-based research is growing, driven by its commitment to a social justice, diversity, and equity approach. However, challenges persist in actualizing the transformative potential and the promise of community-based research approaches, as community-academic partnerships are strained by structural issues such as funding mechanisms, power dynamics, and diverging priorities and temporalities. This paper proposes Community Steered Research and offers a novel conceptual model on the research process to address these issues, drawing from the experience of conducting research in the Canadian immigrant-serving settlement sector. The model flips the academic-community hierarchy, proposing that research be initiated and steered by the community, rather than the university. This model argues that embeddedness, relationality, and dynamism are essential to what is commonly termed ‘community-based’ research, if it is to move towards meaningful application and its transformative aims.
This article recounts the researcher's experiences with two specialist English teachers at a model school in Rwanda, navigating how English as a Second Language can be taught using a variety of pedagogical strategies. Following Participatory Action Research (PAR), the study documents how Primary 4 (P4) and Primary 6 (P6) learners and their teachers actively construct the discourse for L2 learning. The engagements between the researcher and participating teachers are interpreted through the lens of the socio-cognitive theory for second language learning and plurilingual education. Multi-layered levels of data analysis occur simultaneously with data collection throughout the stages of the PAR. Findings reveal challenges that impede L2 development, including limited vocabulary, inadequate time for practicing the target language, and difficulties constructing extended responses. Findings also reveal useful approaches for developing L2 proficiency, including teaching receptive and productive skills sequentially, modelling and demonstrating the target language, and engaging in translanguaging. We conclude that in contexts similar to this study where learners are struggling with L2, mother tongue can be used as an additional language resource through plurilingual pedagogies.
Community-based action research (CBAR) is designed to facilitate community members’ identification of challenges in their lives, as well as to collaboratively develop ways to confront those challenges. It is also designed to be an inherently ethical and justice-oriented paradigm for social change and inquiry. When working with community members in areas such as the Peruvian Andes and North India, the problems community members now identify inevitably include the effects of environmental degradation and climate change on the community, as well as challenges with economic opportunities. When engaging in collaborative action to address these challenges, tensions can arise regarding community land-usage and its economic implications. Inherently, there are ethical implications when tensions arise between different facets of community identified needs and the possible effects of solutions. In this paper, we reflect on two projects that have had ethical tensions and consider ways CBAR can transform tensions into constructive ways forward.
