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The research questions probe into the heart of participatory learning’s scholarly landscape. They inquire about historical trends, shifts in research interest, and regional contributions, highlighting the global reach of participatory learning discourse. The study also reaches into the most cited papers, emphasizing their pivotal role in shaping the field’s trajectory.

The research design of our study involves a retrospective analysis focused on the topic of participatory learning in education. A retrospective analysis is a methodological approach that entails examining existing literature, data, and publications within a specific field to identify trends, patterns, and insights over a defined period. In the context of participatory learning in education, this research design allows us to gain a comprehensive understanding of the evolution, contributions, and emerging directions within this pedagogical approach.

The culmination of this study lies in formulating 75 thought-provoking future research questions. These questions are designed to guide the future trajectory of participatory learning research, addressing existing gaps and propelling the field toward new horizons. The findings of the study contribute to a panoramic view of participatory learning’s evolution, global impact, and potential for reshaping education. It is a compass for researchers, educators, and policymakers navigating the intricate landscape of participatory learning in education.

Themes and topics are thoroughly explored, unrevealed the multidimensional nature of participatory learning research. The investigation spans time, revealing enduring themes while unveiling emerging areas of inquiry that capture the attention of researchers and practitioners. Current trends and focus areas are scrutinized, offering insights into the ever-evolving scholarly pursuits within participatory learning.

This comprehensive study investigates the evolution and impact of research on participatory learning in education from 1995 to 2023. The research objectives encompass a broad spectrum, including trend analysis, geographical distribution assessment and identification of influential papers, thematic exploration, and the formulation of future research questions. Through a meticulous examination of published literature, this study aims to shed light on the development of participatory learning as a transformative educational approach.

This study’s originality lies in its comprehensive analysis of participatory learning in education from 1995 to 2023, revealing temporal trends, global contributions, influential papers, thematic nuances, and emerging trends. By amalgamating these dimensions, it offers a holistic view of participatory learning’s evolution, impact, and future directions, enriching the understanding of this transformative educational approach and guiding further research and practice.

The literature review explores how multidisciplinary approaches based on critical pedagogy and participatory research can provide frameworks for equitable partnerships and genuine participation in educational design and research practices. Additionally, the essay aims to expand understandings of equitable engagement within educational research and design based on principles from critical pedagogy.

The essay draws from diverse literature in the learning sciences, health informatics, industrial design, disability studies, ethnic studies, rehabilitation science, and to a lesser extent HCI research to understand how critical pedagogy and participatory research methods can provide useful frameworks for disabled peoples' equitable engagement and genuine participation in educational research and design. The literature reviewed in the paper concern topics such as participatory approaches to community development with disabled adults, the implementation of university-initiated community partnerships, participatory research with students and disabled people, and the importance of culturally-responsive research practices. The design literature in this review explores various arenas such as the co-design of assistive technologies with disabled children and adults and the design of curricula for students with and without disabilities. This review focuses on research practices that engender disabled peoples' participation in educational research and design, with focus on developing multidisciplinary frameworks for such research.

The literature review concludes that participatory research methods and critical pedagogy provide useful frameworks for disabled peoples’ participation in educational design and research practices. Critical pedagogy and participatory design allow for the genuine participation of disabled people in the research process.

Emphases on collaboration and collective knowledge-building in social transformation are present in scholarship concerning critical pedagogy, participatory research, and disability studies. However, these connections have been routinely underexplored in the literature. This paper aims to underscore these integral connections as a means to build solidarity between disabled and other marginalized people.

The connections between participatory research methods, critical pedagogy, and disability studies have been previously underexplored. The literature review proposes a combined approach, which has the potential to radically transform multiple realms of research beyond the learning and information sciences.

This article explores the applicability of participatory action research (PAR) on two levels: on the one hand, as a participatory evaluation method for community engagement and community development; on the other hand, as a tool to link ex ante and ex-post evaluation that situated at various stages of the policy cycle.

Through a practice-based case study of the community engagement process of Valletta Design Cluster, this paper aims to illustrate how PAR can offer collaborative and continuous evaluation by facilitating social action through a practical, situative, context-bounded, responsive and transformative framework.

The study explores how PAR can contribute to cultural sustainability by linking community development with participatory evaluation, and it offers new perspectives on the applicability of PAR as a tool to link ex ante and ex-post evaluation, situated at various stages of the policy cycle.

Although based on a single case, the paper demonstrates that the method has the potential to be applied in various contexts, as it helps to foster local ownership and to develop future cultural strategies, thus providing a base for cultural sustainability.

The novelty of this study is to link evaluation – a majorly top-down and ex ante approach – with participatory planning. PAR-E offers a continuous participatory framework for the whole European Capitals of Culture (ECoC) cycle, as well as serving as a tool for empowerment and community development.

Culture is increasingly recognized as a key component of local development, but this attention is largely focused on large cities. This paper aims to focus on the ways in which the innovative, participatory action-research (PAR) methods of IdeaLabs and community intervention workshops are used by two projects with solidarity economy enterprise (SEE) participants to activate place-based cultural resources for local development in small communities.

An in-depth reflexive analysis undertaken by researchers involved in the two projects, taking a feminist ethics of care perspective, demonstrates the ways in which these two PAR methods promote local development with the goal of fighting against the economic, social and cultural degradation of small cities and rural areas.

The PAR methods used by the two projects examined stimulate place-based local development initiatives through collaboration and knowledge co-production among participants and researchers. The projects go beyond an instrumental view of the use of culture and the arts for local development to innovate and demonstrate new methodologies for more participatory approaches.

This paper addresses a gap in social economy literature, presenting methods that can be used in PAR projects to catalyse the use of culture as a local development tool by local SEEs.

Through a review of the literature, this article seeks to outline and understand the evolution and extent of user–participant involvement in the existing library and information science (LIS) research to identify gaps and existing research approaches that might inform further methodological development in participant-oriented and design-based LIS research.

A scoping literature review of LIS research, from the 1960s onward, was conducted, assessing the themes and trends in understanding the user/participant within the LIS field. It traces LIS research from its early focus on information and relevancy to the “user turn”, to the rise of participatory research, especially design-based, as well as the recent inclusion of Indigenous and decolonial methodologies.

The literature review indicates that despite the reported “user turn”, LIS research often does not include the user as an active and equal participant within research projects.

The findings from this review support the development of alternative design research methodologies in LIS that fully include and involve research participants as full partners – from planning through dissemination of results – and suggests avenues for continuing the development of such design-based research. To that end, it lays the foundations for the introduction of a novel methodology, Action Partnership Research Design (APRD).

Researchers who work in partnership with older adults in participatory studies often experience various advantages, but also complex ethical questions or even encounter obstacles during the research process. This paper aims to provide insights into the value of an intersectional lens in participatory research to understand how power plays out within a mixed research team of academic and community co-researchers.

Four academic researchers reflected in a case-study approach in a dialogical way on two critical case examples with the most learning potential by written dialogical and via face-to-face meetings in duos or trios. This study used an intersectionality-informed analysis.

This study shows that the intersectional lens helped the authors to understand the interactions of key players in the study and their different social locations. Intersections of age, gender, ethnicity/class and professional status stood out as categories in conflict. In hindsight, forms of privilege and oppression became more apparent. The authors also understood that they reproduced traditional power dynamics within the group of co-researchers and between academic and community co-researchers that did not match their mission for horizontal relations. This study showed that academics, although they wanted to work toward social inclusion and equality, were bystanders and people who reproduced power relations at several crucial moments. This was disempowering for certain older individuals and social groups and marginalized their voices and interests.

Till now, not many scholars wrote in-depth about race- and age-related tensions in partnerships in participatory action research or related approaches, especially not about tensions in research with older people.

Responding to the continuing separation of participants and researchers in LIS participatory research, a new methodology is proposed: action partnership research design (APRD). It is asserted that APRD can mitigate or remove the hierarchical structures often inherent in the research process, thus allowing for equal contribution from all.

Building on the bonded design (BD) methodology and informed by a scoping literature review conducted by the same authors, APRD is a human-centered research approach with the goal of empowering and valuing community partnerships. APRD originates from research investigating the use of participatory design methods to foster collaboration between two potentially disparate groups, firstly with adult researchers/designers and elementary school children, and secondly with university faculty and IT professionals.

To achieve this goal, in addition to BD techniques, APRD draws inspiration from elements of indigenous and decolonization research methodologies, particularly those with an emphasis on destabilizing power hierarchies and involving research participants as full partners.

APRD, which emerged from findings from previous participatory design studies, especially those of BD, is based on the premise of partnership, recognizing that each member of a design team, whether researcher or participant/user, has unique expertise to contribute. By considering participants/users as full research partners, APRD aims to flatten the hierarchies exhibited in some LIS participatory research methodologies, where participants are treated more like research subjects than partners.

The purpose of this study was to bring library practitioners and researchers together to develop two co-designed tools for helping library practitioners gain a more holistic understanding of families in underserved groups and identify their values with the goal of developing more relevant learning experiences for them. The co-designed tools were then tested with Master’s of Library and Information Science (MLIS) students at two universities, whose feedback yielded several valuable findings and informed revisions to the tools.

A participatory, design-based approach was used throughout the study, both with engaging library practitioners in the co-design of different tools and processes introduced in the Toolkit, and to help MLIS students and library practitioners test the tools and provide feedback on the tool revisions.

Students indicated that the tools helped them develop a deeper understanding of underserved groups and their values and gave the students the time and space to reflect on their understanding of the socio-cultural and value contexts of their communities and the values they hold.

This study can help libraries more effectively design strengths-based learning experiences that are meaningful and relevant to underserved groups and their values, particularly for children and families from underserved communities.

This paper describes the development of a digital role play game (RPG) designed to help construction apprentices to better communicate with their supervisors about issues with the potential to impact on their physical and psychological health and safety.

A participatory approach was adopted to utilise the knowledge and insights of the target users to inform the digital RPG development. Apprentices and supervisors were interviewed to identify characteristics of effective supervisor-apprentice communication, which became the RPG’s learning objectives. The scenarios constructed in the RPG were drawn from lived experiences shared by the apprentices in the interviews. During the development process, consultations were conducted with an advisory committee comprising of apprentices and supervisors to improve the realism of the RPG scenarios.

Three scenarios were developed for the RPG. In each scenario, players are asked to make decisions at various interaction points about how the characters should respond to the unfolding and challenging situations. Scripts were developed for the game, which were acted out and motion captured to animate digital MetaHuman characters embedded in a virtual construction site. Two example situations are introduced in this paper to illustrate the development process.

To our knowledge, the RPG introduced is one of the first applications of digital game-based training in the construction industry. The adoption of a participatory design approach ensures that the game content relates to real-world experiences. The digital RPG is highly interactive and engaging in nature and presents a novel approach to developing “soft” skills in construction.

This study aims to elucidate institutional analysis as an effective approach to investigating and designing the multilevel policymaking system of online social networks (OSN) for achieving a participatory model.

The institutional mapping approach has been used to analyze Iran’s OSN multilevel policymaking system. A combination of two matrices, including institutions-institutions and institutions-functions, was used to perform the institutional mapping. Two main steps were taken to draw the mentioned matrices. First, a review of related studies in Iran’s OSN policymaking system was conducted and the policy functions mentioned in these studies were identified and categorized using the meta-synthesis. Second, based on analyzing two policy documents of Iran’s OSN, institutions and their interactions were identified and policy functions were allocated to institutions.

Based on the results, the most important policy functions in the current OSN policymaking system in Iran are support, regulatory, monitoring and evaluation, business environment development, culture building and promotion, organizing licenses and permissions, policymaking and legislation. Also, the results show that there are shortcomings in this system, some of the most important of which are lack of transparency in regulatory, little work in culture building and promotion, neglect of the training of specialized human resources and research and development, slow development of the business environment and neglecting the role of nongovernmental organizations in policymaking.

By examining and analyzing how different institutions operate within a multilevel policymaking system, the policymaking process and its overall effectiveness can be enhanced. This analysis helps identify any inconsistencies, overlaps or conflicts in the roles and policies of these institutions, leading to a better understanding of how a multilevel policymaking system is organized.