Health and Participatory Action Research/Evaluation

Learn and apply new skills and tools for participatory action research and evaluation in a variety of health settings, including global and aboriginal health and work with people of different ages living with physical and mental health issues and disabilities.

Originating with the pioneering work of Kurt Lewin and the Tavistock Institute, participatory action research (PAR) is a well-documented tradition of collective reasoning and evidence-based learning for social change. Taken together, the various formulations of PAR (pragmatic, critical, psycho-analytic) constitute a robust alternative to positivism’s denial of human agency and justice in the global era. As a practice, it builds on what people know but also their capacity to learn, discover, and act on reality.

This three-day workshop in Toronto, Ontario will engage you in hands-on learning and practice using flexible and rigorous PAR tools developed and tested by an international community of practice in settings around the world. Participants will learn and apply practical tools for exploring problems, knowing the actors and assessing options. These tools and associated skills will be modelled drawing on your own content and examples from applications in the health field from Canada and international settings.

The workshop is designed for people in the non-governmental, voluntary, academic, private and government sectors who are involved in community-based health initiatives. By the end of the workshop all participants will have:

• Examined the fundamentals of participation in action-oriented research and evaluation;
• Applied basic and advanced tools to situations or proposed actions meaningful to people living with physical and mental health issues and disabilities;
• Discussed research and evaluation challenges in global and aboriginal health, and ways to manage them.

The agenda is organized into four modules: Planning systems that learn, Exploring problems, Knowing the actors, and Assessing options. Some tools are practiced in depth while others are introduced as a ‘window’ for self-study and reflection on examples provided by the facilitators. Participants are encouraged to bring ideas and information on their own projects to the workshop so they can learn and create useful results along the way.

Become part of a worldwide community of researchers, facilitators, activists and evaluators that bring a shared vision of dialogue and action learning to life in communities, workplaces, educational institutions and the public sector.

Click here for a detailed agenda.

You can download the course handbook at: http://www.participatoryactionresearch.net/skillful-means.

For testimonials, background and details on the approach, see www.participatoryactionresearch.net.

The fee for individuals is $760 plus HST, or $610 plus HST for full-time students (contact Daniel Buckles for group registration options). The fee includes registration, a 110 page handbook of tools and health-break snacks during the workshop. Space is limited to 12 student places and 25 places in total, so please register early.

Your instructors: 

Rachel Thibeault is Full Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Ottawa (Canada). She has extensive experience in the field of occupational therapy, psychology and community development. Her current work focuses on community-based rehabilitation, psychosocial care and issues of meaning, resilience and social justice in health care, using an approach that is at all times community-driven. Her participatory action research has taken her to many hard-to-access regions of the world, including communities affected by HIV/AIDS, ex or current war zones and leprosy communities. Rachel received her B.Sc in Health Sciences (Occupational Therapy) from Laval University (1979), her M.Sc. (Psychology) from Acadia University (1986) and her Ph.D. (Community Psychology) from the Université de Montréal (1991). She completed post doctoral studies at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles) and at the University of Århus (Denmark). In 2012 Rachel was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, in recognition of a lifetime of achievement in expanding the boundaries of occupational therapy and advocacy on behalf of people with disabilities in Canada and abroad.

Daniel Buckles is the Co-Director of SAS2 Dialogue and an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. He is co-author of Participatory Action Research: Theory and Methods for Engaged Inquiry (Routledge, UK. 2013). Other recent publications focus on the experience of inequality among India’s adivasi communities (Fighting Eviction: Tribal Land Rights and Research-in-Action, Cambridge University Press, 2013) and research with farmers in Bangladesh trying to break their dependency on tobacco production. As senior staff at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) for 10 years Dr. Buckles helped design more than 60 research projects on rural poverty, biodiversity conservation and urban environment. Previously, he was a Senior Scientist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) in Mexico and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow.

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