LeaderPAR: A Participatory Action Research Framework for School and Community Leadership

Abstract

As educational leaders and teachers are increasingly expected to engage in school-based inquiry, it is important that they adopt an approach to research that leads to authentic grassroots forms of inquiry rather than top-down forms based on current business models such as data-driven decision-making. In this chapter, we will explore participatory action research (PAR) as a model for school-based inquiry that provides leaders and teachers with an approach that is more process oriented, more inclusive, and less hierarchical. PAR challenges the framework (or subverts the framework) of traditional research by moving away from a hierarchical researcher-participant model toward an engaged, cyclical relationship between communities and researcher to define, examine, and develop action steps to their own problems. The methodology is deeply rooted in the belief that communities can define and solve their challenges and a researcher, as a participant, can be an active part of that process. Unlike other forms of more standard, academic research, PAR continually loops through a set of questions, analysis, solutions, and back again, ensuring that the process is grounded, situated, and fulfills the goal to develop both solutions and empowerment. Our contention is that if educational leaders either collaborate with researchers trained in PAR or are trained themselves as PAR researchers, they are more likely to see themselves as facilitating a more democratic, inclusive, and authentic form of inquiry that is more likely to result in organizational learning, the building of greater instructional capacity, and greater awareness of the contextual factors that impact students’ lives.