Participatory Action Research: A Case Study on the School Democratisation Process

Participatory Action Research (PAR) in the educational context is a coherent methodology to accompany processes of school democratisation focusing on the key elements of collaborative culture, a sense of belonging and social transformation from an inclusive and intercultural approach. The present case study of a rural school in the Valencian Community (Spain) takes an ethnographic approach to analyse how PAR strategies and processes facilitate the democratisation process and the educational community's perceptions of the transformations in the school culture. Results show an improvement in participation strategies and a more distributed leadership, but they also reveal some resistance to delegating responsibilities and difficulties in empowering children's voices. The conclusions highlight the need to institutionalise cultural change by understanding participation as a fundamental strategy with which to build a more inclusive and intercultural school and society.