“Photovoice is a participatory action-based research process that allows its
participants to tell their own stories through photo exhibitions, public presentations, and
school displays […] Photovoice allows members of marginalized communities to
share their experiences with others and empowers them to become positive change
agents within their communities.” (Roxas et al. 2017 p5)

The first time I heard about Participatory Action Research was around this time last year. I was working on a project with a friend of mine, also in education, which we would present later on in the semester. Reading this article made me realize that I didn’t really understand what PAR was when he was explaining it to me then (or after, either).

When he introduced me to the idea of participants participating in research, I was unironically confused. I imagined big-glasses, white-coat scientists coming out of their labs, snatching up random people from the “community” and training them to mix test tubes and analyze data. Supposedly, this would help all of the people of the community because more of them can now conduct high – level scientific research. PAR, in reality, is more nuanced, less naïve, and more effective than what I envisioned.
The readings show how innovations on PAR can be used to gather qualitative information. I didn’t realize PAR could be used like that when my friend was explaining it to me, which lead to my misconceptions about it. In the article, photovoice, described above, a creative instantiation of PAR, is used to collect qualitative information about the experiences of recent immigrant children at a middle school in the Midwest. The children create year-long video projects, which are analyzed by researchers according to the various abstruse scientific methods.
However, because the children being researched are in complete control of the information presented to the researchers, the focus and quality of the data is vastly different from what the researchers would have gathered otherwise. How PAR reframes the data is similar in intention, to the Descriptive Review process described by Matthew Knoester in Learning to Describe[…] (2008). The intentions behind both strategies is to be as impartial as possible; They seek to gain higher quality information about a situation by going to great lengths to prevent the influence of personal biases and premature conclusions. Descriptive Review operates by describing things in as much detail as possible, without being “diagnostic or conclusive.” PAR distances the research from the researcher’s preconceptions and biases by letting the participants decide what is recorded. In the same way that Descriptive Review helps teacher’s interactions with marginalized students, I think PAR can create more equitable research on topics that involve marginalized communities, especially those susceptible to un/conscious biases