Walking towards Inclusion through Participatory Action Research in an Educational Community

Abstract

This article presents the experience of a group of teachers with Participatory Action Research (PAR) in an educational center in Andalusia (Spain). Their strategy is to improve their own teaching. With this purpose in mind, they propose a more active and leading involvement by the members of their education community. The research arises from a common concern of a group of teachers: How to build a school where all girls and boys without exceptions could be happy and could learn? We started, as a first step, asking ourselves what the school we wanted is like and what the school we had was like. Subsequently, we collected information from the entire Community so that we all can decide which issues to address first, in order to design strategies that, brought into action, would allow us to build that beloved and dreamed school. The steps followed during the investigation were observation, diagnosis, planning (elaboration of a Comprehensive Action Plan), action and evaluation of the process. The tools we used during the process were participant observation, open interviews or sociograms, among others. The results obtained allow us to conclude that the IAP experience has allowed us to improve our school.