Participatory education is ‘a collective effort in which the participants are committed to building a just society through individual and socioeconomic transformation and ending domination through changing power relations. As educators and students work toward building a just society, participants share, create, analyze and act on their knowledge and experiences.’³

Pat Campbell identities three themes of participatory education:

1. Community: Participatory education promotes the development of community by combining literacy education with social action and interaction.
2. Social Relations: Participatory education examines and challenges unequal power relations within our societies.
3. Knowledge: Learning is built around the knowledge that learners have developed from their social, cultural, and political experiences.⁴

Participatory Education: Sharing the Power⁵

In a traditional classroom, teachers and curriculum developers control the learning process. They identify what is to be taught, how it is to be taught, and how to assess students’ learning. In contrast, participatory learning is a collaborative process in which teachers and students share the decisions about content, teaching and learning styles, and assessment.

The essential issue for participatory educators is maintaining a perspective on the degree to which power is shared. This means that teachers and students ask questions such as these:

• Who selects the materials?
• By whose standards are learners’ abilities assessed?
• Who defines the learners’ goals?
• Who evaluates learners’ progress and the learning process?

So much of everyone’s educational experiences stem from a top-down, teacher– knows-all model that it is difficult to manage such a fundamentally different relationship between literacy facilitators and learners. More time is needed to prepare for classes as well as for reflecting on your role as a teacher, learner and facilitator. Learners need concrete ways to take more control of their learning and actively participate in defining their goals and ways of learning.

3. Participatory Practices in Adult Education, edited by Pat Campbell and Barbara Burnaby, published by Lawrence Erbium Associates, 2001
4. Teaching Reading to Adults, A Balanced Approach, by Pat Campbell, published by the University of Alberta, 2003
5. From It Brought a Richness to Me, A Resource Manual for Participatory Literacy Practitioners, by King, Esters, Fingeret and McCullough, produced by Literacy South, Durham, NC, 1993, page II-3