PAR with Teacher-Researchers as Field Building Knowledge

• In Event: Nothing About Us, Without Us: Black Teacher Researchers and Visions of Educational Justice

Abstract

As a team of Black researchers who work for a mid-sized educational research organization, we are invested in building evidence of the potential PAR for generating visions for systems change when Black teacher-researchers voices and epistemologies are centered. When included in research solely as “subjects,” Black teachers are rarely involved in designing studies or the sensemaking that informs the field’s knowledge production and resulting policy recommendations. By design, the PAR approach involves collaboration between researchers and participants as they work together on a social problem and develop research-based solutions. Unlike traditional research, PAR is a community driven approach to both research and social change. It aims to challenge researcher bias and address the needs of a particular group - often a historically marginalized group - whose expertise has been excluded from the research and resultant discourse and solutions. In this way, PAR disrupts traditional research practices to develop new ways of knowing and to root research in community-driven theories of change.
While teacher participatory action research is not new (Gilbert, 2022; Stapleton, 2022), it has typically been used for teacher pedagogical and practice-based inquiry and change. Drawing on a PAR approach with Black teachers nationally to drive systemic and transformational social change is a deeply underutilized and innovative approach. Central to our approach is positioning teachers as experts who feel empowered to produce knowledge that will benefit the field and to support systemic change by and for Black teachers.

Authors

• Siettah Parks, Research for Action

• Julia Camille Ransom, Research for Action

• Leana Cabral, Teachers College, Columbia University