Educational action research in development projects applies participative methods to include people with diverse backgrounds, experiencing learning collaboratively. In this article, I explore the learning activities, and their outcomes, unfolding in those settings. Based on project documents, 34 interviews with project staff and smallholder…

Place-based knowledge, a legacy from our ancestors, is inherently sustainable. However, modern lifestyles have eclipsed this wisdom, leading to environmental issues such as land and water pollution. Similarly, the current pedagogical practices often fail to connect place-based knowledge. It resulted in a deviation of students' contextual learning.…

This article will discuss "reflections" by six youth activists in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, who were interviewed for an international collaborative research project which explored civic forms of youth-led activism which could lead to social change. The aim was to investigate different forms of civic engagement and youth activism in…

This article reports findings from a study using arts-based and embodied (ABE) approaches to enhancing capacity for distributed leadership and explores the professional learning which took place as a result. The data reported in the article are from the UK research which formed part of the ENABLES (European Arts-Based Development of Distributed…

In this paper, I discuss participatory action research (PAR) as a way to support social and political engagement and develop civil society. After a short overview of my personal journey to participatory action research, I describe a general structure that I have developed for organizing PAR projects and a short introduction to the state of civil…

Purpose: This study aims at understanding how higher education institutions (HEIs) can contribute to sustainable development, by designing their programmes for bringing about a transformative impact on communities and students, and also to examine what alternative pedagogical approaches could be used for that. In the past decades, HEIs have…

The goal of this work was to explore ways, within an existing engineering curriculum, to address the culture of disengagement by challenging the dominant engineering mindset. We conducted Collaborative Action Research to explore the implementation of Transformative Learning pedagogies in a Human-Centered Design context to understand how students…

Motivational interviewing is an evidence-based counseling approach. However, its learning processes and their influencing factors are understudied, failing to address the suboptimal use of motivational interviewing in clinical practice. A participatory action research was conducted in collaboration with 16 primary care clinicians, who encountered…

Clinical nurse educators within Queensland, Australia, tend to be selected for the job based on their clinical expertise and consequently may lack knowledge of educational theories and practices. Within the Nursing School in which this project was based, there is interest in developing expertise in Transformative Learning theory. To share this…

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted daily life globally, including education. Environmental science cautions that we must expect further disruptions as the sustainability crisis deepens. Resilience to these disruptions will be key to humanity's survival in years to come. The pandemic constitutes a litmus test for environmental education's…

The article demonstrates an action research approach for constructing Transformative Sustainability Pedagogy (TSP) to empower teachers for a sustainable future. The starting point for the TSP was a Transformative Education for Gross National Happiness (GNH) teacher action research project in Bhutan (2010-2013) -- a collaboration between the…

Education for global citizenship is one of many of strategies adopted by higher education institutions. We share the findings of a qualitative study in one Australian university that examined the impact of a university goal to embed global citizenship. We found Bronfenbrenner's ecological model to be a suitable framework to examine the process of…

Environmental education looks to motivate and empower positive environmental actions that respect the complexity of natural systems. It follows that related educational research takes up a multiplicity of voices, and possibilities for exploring ecological curriculum and practice. Participatory action research (PAR) does this as it brings together…

To address linguistic, social, and settlement needs among professional and highly educated newcomer language learners in Canada, a Service Learning program was established at an urban community college. It incorporated field-specific language instruction, cultural humility and intercultural communication training, and meaningful Service Learning…

Learning spaces in higher education are fraught with colonial barriers such as teacher-centered, front facing, stark, feelingless, and unwelcoming classrooms that diminish students' feelings of well-being. For pre-service teachers, these are also the types of classrooms that they often inherit as they foray into the profession. Three Bachelor of…