'Changing Play' is an ongoing project initiated by education curators from the Serpentine, a prestigious London art gallery, working with the Portman children's centre nursery. Viewed by curators as a collaboration between artist, children's centre staff and parents, and the gallery, Changing Play combines art and action research, and expands the…

The view of sign languages as bounded systems is often important for deaf community empowerment and for pedagogical practice in terms of supporting deaf children's language acquisition and second language learners' communicative competence. Conversely, the notion of translanguaging in the American Sign Language (ASL) community highlights a number…

This article documents the (often counter-normative) narrative journey of four South African adolescent girls whose biological parents had divorced--and one (or both) parent(s) remarried. Through purposive sampling within a qualitative research paradigm of feminist participatory action research, they were supported in group context by the primary…

Virtue, according to Aristotle, is doing the right things at the right time with the right people for the right end and in the right way. This concept is central to the work of the Early Learning Initiative, an Irish community-based educational initiative. This paper describes how a community of parents, early childhood care and education…

In this project, the research team--a collaboration between teacher researchers and university researchers--was interested in finding out about how "children as teachers" might engage their "families as learners" at a museum. This project had two parts. First, it was about young children as museum guides, explaining their…

This participatory action research study used the conceptual framework of social--ecological resilience to explore how Karen (pronounced Ka·rén) refugee parents re-construct cultural resilience in resettlement. The funds of knowledge approach helped to define essential knowledge used by Karen parents within their own community. Framing this study…

This paper examines how a community action research approach supported the implementation of an educational support programme for children, parents and local educators. The aim was the creation of a learning community that acknowledged, valued and used the expertise and experience of all involved. The action reflection cycle informed the…

This was a collaborative action research study by lead staff, researchers and parents at the Pen Green Centre for Children and their Families in England. The study focuses on the factors enabling access to children's services by nine parents from challenging family contexts. The critical questions were: What enabled some parents to overcome…

A considerable number of research studies that have involved mainly primary and secondary school students have shown that students' participation in collaborative projects through digital communities contributes to the positive development of intercultural interaction. The present research report examines the validity of the previous findings in…

This paper focuses on a population that has received little attention in migration and in youth-related research: those "left behind" when parents migrate to the United States in search of a better life for their families. Findings presented here are drawn from two sets of workshops with Mayan youth participants in the Southern Quiché…

Parents of children waiting for a diagnostic assessment for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience distress and anxiety while they wait. The present small-scale study took place in a multi-disciplinary therapeutic service in Ireland for children with ASD and was run between April and September 2011. The first author, an educational psychologist…

This paper evaluates a participatory action research (PAR) approach to conducting family research in Ireland. Drawing on PAR methodology it describes how parents of people with intellectual disabilities were recruited and trained to facilitate focus groups of parents in Ireland, in order to create an evidence base to support improved dialogue…

The study from which this article derives investigated some dominant assumptions of parent support policies and programmes, and suggests new possibilities for the conceptualization of the relations between parents and such policies, inspired by the possibilities of dialogical spaces and "relational citizenship". Parent support programmes…

This paper provides an overview of the challenges in learning a signed language as a second language, in particular for hearing parents with deaf children, and details an action research process that led to the design of a new curriculum for teaching Australian Sign Language (Auslan) to the families of deaf children. The curriculum was developed…

This volume of transformed research utilizes an activist approach to examine the notion that nothing is apolitical. Research projects themselves are critically examined for power orientations, even as they are used to address curricular problems and educational or societal issues. Philosophical perspectives that have facilitated an understanding…