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The literature review explores how multidisciplinary approaches based on critical pedagogy and participatory research can provide frameworks for equitable partnerships and genuine participation in educational design and research practices. Additionally, the essay aims to expand understandings of equitable engagement within educational research and design based on principles from critical pedagogy.

The essay draws from diverse literature in the learning sciences, health informatics, industrial design, disability studies, ethnic studies, rehabilitation science, and to a lesser extent HCI research to understand how critical pedagogy and participatory research methods can provide useful frameworks for disabled peoples' equitable engagement and genuine participation in educational research and design. The literature reviewed in the paper concern topics such as participatory approaches to community development with disabled adults, the implementation of university-initiated community partnerships, participatory research with students and disabled people, and the importance of culturally-responsive research practices. The design literature in this review explores various arenas such as the co-design of assistive technologies with disabled children and adults and the design of curricula for students with and without disabilities. This review focuses on research practices that engender disabled peoples' participation in educational research and design, with focus on developing multidisciplinary frameworks for such research.

The literature review concludes that participatory research methods and critical pedagogy provide useful frameworks for disabled peoples’ participation in educational design and research practices. Critical pedagogy and participatory design allow for the genuine participation of disabled people in the research process.

Emphases on collaboration and collective knowledge-building in social transformation are present in scholarship concerning critical pedagogy, participatory research, and disability studies. However, these connections have been routinely underexplored in the literature. This paper aims to underscore these integral connections as a means to build solidarity between disabled and other marginalized people.

The connections between participatory research methods, critical pedagogy, and disability studies have been previously underexplored. The literature review proposes a combined approach, which has the potential to radically transform multiple realms of research beyond the learning and information sciences.

Research literature presents lively debate about whether research approaches traditionally belonging to distinct paradigms can be combined (Creswell, 2011). While much of this discourse has focussed on mixed methods studies that combine quantitative and qualitative data (Morgan, 2007), there has been less discussion of the implications and benefits of combining different approaches from two “alternative” paradigms. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the confluence of constructivist grounded theory as detailed by Charmaz (2006, 2011, 2014) with participatory research.

The authors discuss points of tension and convergence between the constructivist and participatory paradigms that underpin these approaches, and consider how the differences might be reconciled through a notion such as critical grounded theory. The authors illustrate these points through examples from the research practice in youth mental health.

The authors propose that incorporating some of the critical aspects of participatory philosophy into constructivist grounded theory offers a useful strategy for generating local theory in mental health research informed by social action agendas.

This paper extends thinking in the field of participatory and grounded theory research and offers new concept for researchers engaging in critical inquiry.

This article reports on a study undertaken to explore the feasibility of using a participatory research approach as a method for determining information needs. Dissatisfaction with the use of quantitative methods and techniques in information needs research resulted in a gradual move towards the use of qualitative methods focusing on the users themselves in determining their information needs. Participatory research is a qualitative research methodology that challenges the principles and practices of objective, detached, quantitative research approaches. The use of participatory research methods in this project resulted in the identification of reliable and relevant information needs. These results can serve as an example for the increasing use of qualitative techniques in information needs research and affirm that participatory research methods can be a valuable alternative in the area of information needs research.

The research questions probe into the heart of participatory learning’s scholarly landscape. They inquire about historical trends, shifts in research interest, and regional contributions, highlighting the global reach of participatory learning discourse. The study also reaches into the most cited papers, emphasizing their pivotal role in shaping the field’s trajectory.

The research design of our study involves a retrospective analysis focused on the topic of participatory learning in education. A retrospective analysis is a methodological approach that entails examining existing literature, data, and publications within a specific field to identify trends, patterns, and insights over a defined period. In the context of participatory learning in education, this research design allows us to gain a comprehensive understanding of the evolution, contributions, and emerging directions within this pedagogical approach.

The culmination of this study lies in formulating 75 thought-provoking future research questions. These questions are designed to guide the future trajectory of participatory learning research, addressing existing gaps and propelling the field toward new horizons. The findings of the study contribute to a panoramic view of participatory learning’s evolution, global impact, and potential for reshaping education. It is a compass for researchers, educators, and policymakers navigating the intricate landscape of participatory learning in education.

Themes and topics are thoroughly explored, unrevealed the multidimensional nature of participatory learning research. The investigation spans time, revealing enduring themes while unveiling emerging areas of inquiry that capture the attention of researchers and practitioners. Current trends and focus areas are scrutinized, offering insights into the ever-evolving scholarly pursuits within participatory learning.

This comprehensive study investigates the evolution and impact of research on participatory learning in education from 1995 to 2023. The research objectives encompass a broad spectrum, including trend analysis, geographical distribution assessment and identification of influential papers, thematic exploration, and the formulation of future research questions. Through a meticulous examination of published literature, this study aims to shed light on the development of participatory learning as a transformative educational approach.

This study’s originality lies in its comprehensive analysis of participatory learning in education from 1995 to 2023, revealing temporal trends, global contributions, influential papers, thematic nuances, and emerging trends. By amalgamating these dimensions, it offers a holistic view of participatory learning’s evolution, impact, and future directions, enriching the understanding of this transformative educational approach and guiding further research and practice.

The global call to ‘leave-no-one behind’ cannot be achieved without tacking the intractable social issues faced by the most excluded people. There is increasing interest in using visual methodologies for participatory research in contexts of marginalisation, because they offer the potential to generate knowledge from people’s lived experience, which can reveal subjective, emotional, and contextual aspects missed by other methods; alongside the means for action through showing outputs to external audiences. The challenge is that the perspectives of those in highly inequitable and unaccountable contexts are – by definition – rarely articulated and often neglected. The author thus begins by assuming that there are unavoidable tensions in using visual methods; between perpetuating marginalisation by inaction, which is ethically questionable; and the necessary risks in bringing unheard views to public attention. Many experienced practitioners have called for a situated approach to visual methods ethics (Clark, Prosser, & Wiles, 2010; Gubrium, Hill, & Flicker 2014; Shaw, 2016). What is less clear is what this means for those wanting to apply this practically. In this chapter, the author addresses this gap through the exemplar of participatory video with marginalised groups. Drawing on cases from Kenya, India, Egypt, and South Africa, the author contributes a range of tried-and-tested strategies for navigating the biggest concerns such as informing consent; and the tensions between respecting autonomy and building inclusion, and between anonymity and supporting participant’s expressive agency. Through this, the author provides a resource for researchers, including prompts for critical reflection about how to generate solutions to visual ethical dilemmas in context.

The purpose of this chapter is to document the use of Participatory Action Research methods as an effective approach for community empowerment and strategies for more inclusive public policy.

The methodology draws on a “participatory video” project with recycling cooperatives in São Paulo, Brazil, and documents the process, benefits, and challenges of using action-oriented methods and tools as an approach to build capacity for political and social change. The authors provide a step-by-step process of facilitating a PV project, its application for policy engagement, and some of the major dilemmas in using PV, including representation, power, and vulnerability.

The research findings conclude that the application of Participatory Action Research as a research method in social entrepreneurship, contributes significantly to build transformative capacity in participating members, in addition to creating new spaces for inclusive policy.

The research is unique in that it points to creative and transformative methods of engagement for inclusive governance, embracing multiple forms of personal identity, knowledge and creative expression in moving toward new solutions for equal opportunities and possibilities for change. Participatory video is argued to be an innovative avenue for the inclusion of multiple voices in these arenas, voices of people otherwise left on the margins. Participatory video is an approach that has the potential to transform the way we (local and global) move toward greater social equity, human compassion, and environmental flourishing.

One common feature of different variants of participatory and action research is rejection of technocratic, undemocratic elements in science and inquiry, aiming to break the dominance of traditional academic views of science. These variants open up broader participation of people, and emancipate knowledge creation for the production of actionable knowledge with transformative potentials. The purpose of this chapter is to recognize and clarify a striving for knowledge democracy in these explicit or implicit democratizing ambitions and tendencies in the sense of broadening the participation of concerned parties in research and development work on open and equal terms. This recent concept, still in the process of formulation, has been proposed as a global mobilizing and unifying thinking for distributed networks and movements for participatory oriented research. The concept and movement had an initial embedding in the First Global Assembly for Knowledge Democracy in June 2017, Cartagena, Columbia. The purpose of the chapter is to elaborate on the meaning of knowledge democracy as a vision for the participatory and action research community. Particularly I will distinguish between different orientation to knowledge democracy, and the character of the logic of a more, open, democratic and coproductive science that can be a carrier of it.

There is a need for more in‐depth exploration of the e‐learning experiences of disabled learners in higher education, taking into account the complex relationship between learners (skills, knowledge and beliefs), their assistive technologies and the e‐learning contexts in which learners are required to operate. Participatory methods appear to have great potential in enabling the voice of disabled learners to be a more central focus of e‐learning studies. This paper will describe and evaluate a two‐year research project called LExDis, which aims to use participatory methods to explore the e‐learning experiences of disabled learners in one higher education institution. The experience of conducting phase one of the LExDis project will be discussed with regards to three main challenges to using participatory methods: informed participation; valued participation; and empowered participation.

The open science movement calls for transparent and retraceable research processes. While infrastructures to support these practices in qualitative research are lacking, the design needs to consider different approaches and workflows. The paper bases on the definition of ontologies as shared conceptualizations of knowledge (Borst, 1999). The authors argue that participatory design is a good way to create these shared conceptualizations by giving domain experts and future users a voice in the design process via interviews, workshops and observations.

This paper presents a novel approach for creating ontologies in the field of open science using participatory design. As a case study the creation of an ontology for qualitative coding schemas is presented. Coding schemas are an important result of qualitative research, and reuse can yield great potential for open science making qualitative research more transparent, enhance sharing of coding schemas and teaching of qualitative methods. The participatory design process consisted of three parts: a requirement analysis using interviews and an observation, a design phase accompanied by interviews and an evaluation phase based on user tests as well as interviews.

The research showed several positive outcomes due to participatory design: higher commitment of users, mutual learning, high quality feedback and better quality of the ontology. However, there are two obstacles in this approach: First, contradictive answers by the interviewees, which needs to be balanced; second, this approach takes more time due to interview planning and analysis.

The implication of the paper is in the long run to decentralize the design of open science infrastructures and to involve parties affected on several levels.

In ontology design, several methods exist by using user-centered design or participatory design doing workshops. In this paper, the authors outline the potentials for participatory design using mainly interviews in creating an ontology for open science. The authors focus on close contact to researchers in order to build the ontology upon the expert's knowledge.

Change is integral to the concept of development. Research in the development process is therefore implicitly, if not explicitly, directed to achieving change. What is important is how far development researchers see themselves as agents of change. In some cases they are helped by methodologies such as action research and participatory action research (PAR) that have change as integral to the research design. However for qualitative research methods in general there is no necessary connection with change. In fact, for many qualitative methods the aim of the researcher is to have as little impact on the research process and the people being researched as possible. In much ethnographic work, the research scene is to be represented in as “natural” a way as possible. This is very different from the development context where a process of change is assumed to be ongoing, or is encouraged to be so. The role of the researcher in relation to change has become even more marked with the advent of more participatory approaches to development. Research participants are no longer seen as passive objects of research but as active agents in creating their own knowledge and action.