University and democratization: A training project in action research with social movements

Introduction

This article describes a project carried out between 2017 and 2018 by 7 students in the Master’s in Community Participation and Development taught by the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). This master’s is organized by Parte Hartuz (“Take Part” in Basque), a research group formed 20 years ago by 30 researchers who work in training, research and implementation of participatory processes. The objective of this text is to describe a training experience in Participative Action Research in which the University acts as a democratizing agent, mediating between institutions and social movements in disagreement.

The internship activity that we present is grounded in community-based learning (Nelson et al., 2004) and is framed within a Participatory Action Research process (PAR) run between 2007 and 2023 by the Parte Hartuz Research Group. The master’s internships are usually part of broader intervention projects directed by the research group. Therefore, the internships have two objectives: firstly, to strengthen, with the support of the master’s students, processes piloted by Parte Hartuz; and secondly, to enable students to get applied experience of the theoretical and methodological contents taught in the master’s, which specifies the design and implementation of participatory processes or PARs with social movements or institutions.

For these internships, students are organized into working groups of between 5 and 7 people, supervised by one or two teachers from the research group. For 100 hours of practical training, students carry out an applied intervention project (often although not always Action Research), learning and collaborating with the actors involved, always within a community. This makes it possible to relate the PAR methodology with the rationale of community-based learning within the framework of a master’s degree for the training of participation professionals.

The internships implemented over the 19 years that the master’s has been running have allowed students to experience the potential and complexity of participatory processes and further-reaching PARs. Thus, master’s internships have been carried out to support broader PARs (fomented by the Research Group; sometimes for years, as is the case here) on gender inequalities, multicultural management, vulnerability management and community or urban planning. The Parte Hartuz research work that the internships are part of can be of three types: those where the local public institutions are the initiating partners; those where social movements are the promoters; and finally, if the relationship between the social movement groups and institutions is fluid, students can experience methods that go beyond participation by invitation (from the institutions) or by irruption (by the social collectives).

The social-community focus on strengthening democracy that lies behind the more than 40 internships from the master’s degree (and other studies carried out by the research group over nearly twenty years) shows similarities to the experiences analyzed by Reardon in various parts of the United States, such as East St. Louis (2000). Like those society-university relationship models based on empowerment and skills building (Reardon, 2006), these internships aim to support the reconstruction of spaces for participation and the generation of social infrastructure (Wolfe & Klinenberg, 2021) in order to bring about social transformation, and overcome situations of injustice and inequality. For this reason, the student internships are part of an ambitious training program that links community development and participation, training students in Participatory Action Research. After an introductory module on the debates around participation and democracy, students are trained in the epistemology, phases, methodologies and techniques of PAR. In addition to the theoretical and methodological contents, the master is reinforced by presentations from participants who have completed successful local projects, or examples from a transverse point of view (feminism and eco-social transition, among others). As a result, dozens of institutional and social movement representatives participate in the 300 hours of classroom time in the master. As an applied complement to the training program, in clear harmony with the methodology of community-based learning (Nelson et al., 2004; Reardon, 2006), students must do their internships in the community, collaborating in participatory processes set up by associations or institutions, in order to experience the meaning, potential and limits of PAR.

Here, this article presents a unique internship project in which students have taken part in a participatory process by irruption carried out in 2005 by a group that was squatting in an old abandoned arms factory in the Basque town of Gernika. In 2006, this collective, Astra, contacted our research group and requested methodological help to develop a project for institutional recognition of this space. Since then, Parte Hartuz has exercised an advisory function, supporting and facilitating agreements between the squatter movement and Gernika city council. Within this framework, after the agreement between the parties and the restoration of the building between 2012 and 2015, Astra tried to define a Strategic Plan in 2017 for the promotion of culture using alternative methods to those of the market. The student internships we present here are part of this context.

Although the project run since 2007 by the research group is extremely interesting, the objective of this article is more limited; to show the learning that students experience by designing and implementing action research within the framework of an irruptive experience. Consequently, in the following section we explain the territorial and institutional context in which these internships have been developed. We continue by presenting the conceptual framework of the PAR used in this university teaching activity. We then share the methodological design of the project and the learning chronicle, to end with a discussion and the identification of the lessons and potential of this experience. We conclude by pointing out that taking advantage of the PAR in a community-based learning context, as well as promoting students’ acquisition of knowledge, experience, and social, research and evaluation skills, shows that it is possible to find another way of teaching and doing research through action, in this case, based on the collaboration between the University and Social Movements, and aimed at strengthening democracy (Torres, 2020).

The context for the university internships and the case of Astra

The training project that we present has been developed in a process of participation by irruption that began with an act of civil disobedience (the illegal occupation of an abandoned factory), in which the driving force and protagonist is civil society organized in local social movements. Astra (https://astragernika.net/) is an alternative, feminist, eco-socialist project committed to community art, and is backed by groups and associations from the Basque town of Gernika (17,016 inhabitants). The project was designed to recover an old arms factory that had closed in 1998, using civil disobedience. Needless to say, in a town like Gernika (Guernica in Spanish), the recovery of an arms factory for culture had great symbolic value. After the building was taken over, various participatory processes began, organized by the social groups involved in the project, and they have had the facilitating support of the Parte Hartuz research group since 2006.

These processes have made it possible for the old factory to be a public and community space since 2012, recognized and financed by the city council, but self-managed by the Astra Coordinating Assembly, in which different groups and activists come together. Consequently, in the words of Bussu & Bua (2021), it is an experience that exemplifies “governance driven by democracy”, which emerges from the bottom up, from social movements. It is a type of democratic innovation (In Elstub & Escobar, 2019) with greater potential than “governance-driven democracy”, which is characterized by institutional openness to society in terms of mere invitation. Precisely because of this unusual aspect, it makes an ideal setting for running some of the student internships.

Theoretical framework: Participatory action research

Whenever the conditions are right, the approach model that is adopted in the internships for the master’s students is PAR, a way of creating and managing learning communities that aims to recover the meaning and original intention of the social sciences, oriented towards the improvement of society. At its epistemological center is the collective creation of knowledge to improve reality, in this case through the educational process (Noffke & Somekh, 2009). This aspect is linked to the need for universities capable of transcending the corsets of the neoliberal model to support the strengthening of values such as justice, democracy and sustainability (Wright & Greenwood, 2017).

Among the defining elements of PAR is a clear democratic commitment to social change; the commitment to a union of theory and practice; the close link between action and learning; a pedagogical aspiration that not only transforms the collective it collaborates with, but also the person or groups that promote it (Ahedo-Gurrutxaga, 2021; Brydon-Miller et al., 2020; Greenwood, 2007, 2008; Reason & Bradbury, 2008; Bradbury et al., 2019). Consequently, the PAR that the master’s students implement through community action research internships (Ozanne & Anderson, 2010) is based on an epistemology that assumes that one must “be there”; and that “to be there” is to “take sides” (Ahedo, 2022; Fals Borda, 2001; Rapapport, 2020).

Specifically, the students’ internships are supported by community-based learning so that they can experience the start-up of a PAR project in an applied way (Ozanne & Anderson, 2010; Taylor & Pettit, 2007). In this way, the aim is for academic knowledge production to impact society, the students and the participants (Caraballo & Lyiscott, 2020). There are many studies that show the potential of incorporating PAR in the educational process: Friedman and Rogers (2009) stress that it facilitates the development of new conceptual and interpretive frameworks of reality; Leigh and Freeman (2019) highlight the transfer of agency to the student body; Lucio-Villegas (2016) underlines the ability to democratize knowledge; Ahedo et al. (2022) show how female students can be politicized in the analysis of gender inequality in higher education; Maguire (2005) points out that it forces research with and for the community compared to the traditional model, which seeks to investigate about and for the area and people (Caraballo & Lyiscott, 2020).

Thus, it is expected that the implementation of PAR within the framework of community-based learning practices will have an effect on the students, allowing them to experience and internalize key principles of PAR, such as the equality of the actors involved, the awareness and empowerment of the participating people and the need to build shared meanings between and with the territorial agents (Le Grange, 2009). Furthermore, Brydon-Miller et al. (2020) point out that the use of PAR as an orientation allows changes at further levels. Thus, the triple objective of this PAR experiment is that this experience should not only allow the students to change, but the participating people and the community also. This is the aim of the internships deployed in the squatters’ social center Astra.

Methodology

After the occupation by the squatters, their recognition and the refurbishment of the building (Kilometers 1, 2 and 3 respectively), from 2017 onwards Astra aimed to define an action plan, with the support of Parte Hartuz. Within this framework, according to the Astra Coordinating Assembly, the master’s students were entrusted with supporting this process by carrying out a more limited PAR, aimed at: (a) finding out what the young people of Gernika thought about the project and (b) contributing ideas for the subsequent definition and implementation of the action plan, including youth sectors.

The design, implementation and closure of a PAR by the students, with the support of two members of Parte Hartuz, was devised for them to develop applied skills, with four specific objectives for the students. Firstly, the idea was for the students to learn to create an intervention project, and see the difference between what is initially programmed and what can finally be implemented. The students were expected to be able to carry out this project with the protagonists. Secondly, they were to run the meetings, assemblies and work sessions, preparing meetings, defining objectives and laying out the methodology. Thirdly, they had to experience how a process of debate and collective participation evolves, learning to order and synthesize the contributions to meetings or work sessions, identifying progress throughout the process. Finally, the students were expected to learn how to manage disagreements or conflicts.

The work carried out by the students was based on a series of tasks. To begin with, they had to carry out interviews with young people from the town, having identified profiles that reflected a real, varied picture of the feelings of young people who were either organized into social movements or not. This approach was complemented with another interview with a municipal official to see the institutional perspective. The second task was the implementation of direct observation initiatives to learn about the project priorities and spaces for youth socialization. This led to identifying that young people not linked to social movements tended to organize themselves in non-politicized autonomous spaces. The third activity was that after contacting several young people in these places, workshops were held to gather information and ideas for the action plan. Another two workshops were then run in a high school with young people aged 14 and 17. In all the interviews (10 in total) and workshops (4 in which 45 young people participated), the areas discussed were: (a) youth (needs, diversity); (b) participation (needs, impediments, opportunities) and (c) Astra (level of adhesion, proposals and criticism). To conclude, the PAR implemented by the students closed with a reflection session with all the people participating in the process invited, together with members of the Astra Coordinating Assembly. At this meeting, a socio-gram of the youth of Gernika was carried out and agreed upon by the participants, and a representation of the situation of young people in the municipality was made using Playmobil figures.

Learning outcomes

We have tried to identify knowledge, skills and attitudes that students have acquired in their learning process, and we have used three analysis tools: observation, evaluation of the work through the memory of the students and informal training evaluation. In social sciences, observation techniques are a diverse and complex analysis tool (Ciesielska & Jemielniak, 2018). In our case, we opted for indirect observation, based on the self-assessment carried out by the students during the process. Specifically, the Parte Hartuz tutors designed a self-assessment sheet for the students that had to be completed by each participant, prior to each of the 12 meetings held in this process. This turned into 73 sheets where the students reflected on the internship and the skills acquired. Likewise, we have examined the internship reports written by the group of students, to be able to monitor its effectiveness and fulfillment of goals. In addition, informal training assessments were used, focused on getting spontaneous information about their learning (Ruiz-Primo, 2011). This informal evaluation was carried out after the workshops or meetings with the Astra Coordinating Assembly, in informal meetings in bars with the students. The information was taken down in a field notebook by the tutors. Finally, the master’s closed with a joint evaluation session of all the internships, where each group of students presented their experience to the rest and reflected on the learning and limitations identified along the way.

Looking at these follow-up mechanisms, we conclude that the students “managed the design and implementation of real work requirement based on the needs of a community environment” (Students’ Report). In other words, they deployed PAR within the framework of community-based learning, in which they had to “negotiate and design the objectives, methodologies and instruments for collecting information with those responsible for Astra” (Students’ Report). This PAR closed with a devolution assembly that put unorganized young people in contact with the participants of the Astra project.

According to the evaluation evidence collected, thanks to these internships, the students had the opportunity to learn the following skills: (1) Work as a team in a coherent PAR project for 8 months, responding to real needs expressed by social agents outside the university. They had to negotiate with and adapt to the collective and learned the importance of flexibility in execution, and clarity in design. (2) Organize the different steps of the PAR, in coordination with the agents commissioning it, facing up to the challenges that this involves. This caused frustrations: the difficulty of contacting people for interviews (7 of the 10 had to be done over the internet); the complexity of incorporating new agents in this type of process, as is the case with schools; the importance of discovering and approaching spaces for leisure socialization, in this case for young people, generating their trust; and the need to arrange all the elements that allow the success of a workshop or an assembly (e.g. prior organization, arranging breaks, management of holdups and facilitating inclusive deliberation). (3) Determine, through team reflection, the most appropriate methodology and technique to carry out the task requested. This was seen in the use of traditional strategies such as interviews or workshops, but also in experimentation with participatory techniques such as the sociogram, or creative ones such as the use of toys such as Playmobil to represent the state of young people from Gernika and the role of Astra. (4) Get to know the work dynamics of the associations, social movements and informal networks they worked with, through observations, interviews and workshops. (5) Find out how an innovative project is perceived and valued by the young people of the area, as a first step towards involving them in Astra’s activities. This was seen in the closing dynamics between the participants and the Coordinating Assembly.

The systematization of the report and the comments in the self-assessments show a series of impacts, but also some limitations. In particular, the final report written by the students, in addition to describing how their internship was based on the principles of PAR, ends by highlighting that this process “has allowed them to experiment with methodologies and ways of working that value the daily experiences of people, but allow for a collective construction of diagnoses, strategies and initiatives through participation” (Students’ Report). The students highlight in this report that a key lesson was “the systematization of the ideas and proposals generated in these assemblies and debates” through minutes, audios and graphic material. Another of the key elements refers to the management of impediments in the process. The final report details difficulties in finding certain profiles among young people, moments of overwork and great tension in the students due to the responsibility of the task. The self-assessment reports prior to the coordination meetings give some clues about how these difficulties were overcome. The reflection of one of the participants (Self-evaluation 23) gives rise to the idea of workshops in schools to break down access barriers; a reflection from another student (Self-assessment 14) shows that it is not possible to hold all the meetings face-to-face; another student mentions that it is impossible to fully define the action plan (Self-evaluation 31). These reflections, however, do not occur in a vacuum. They are raised in collaboration with the tutors and in close relationship with the Astra Coordinating Assembly. Thanks to this, among all the participating actors, contact with the school director was provided so that workshops could be held, or they decided to lower the initial expectation of creating a youth action plan and reduced it to just a diagnosis. This last aspect, finally, made it possible to reduce group pressure (Self-evaluations 44, 45 and 48) so that the students could close the process that was judged by all the participants to be a success (Self-evaluations 58–64).

Beyond the changes, although for reasons of space we must be succinct, it is interesting to see how this PAR and the more far-reaching process deployed by Parte Hartuz have affected the participants and the project. Consequently, at the end of the closure and devolution assembly, Astra publicly recognized the importance of this PAR in that it allowed the project to reach sectors they had not been in contact with, such as the students of the high school and many unorganized young people. At the same time, the Astra Coordinating Assembly appreciated the role played by the students and Part Hartuz, considering that this “outside” view of the project allowed them to identify certain weaknesses. In particular, Astra decided to expand and consolidate its relationship with youth leisure spaces, organizing activities to coordinate them with each other and bring them closer to the project. Furthermore, several of the young people involved in this PAR will keep up the relationship started in this process by becoming part of the Astra project. Finally, beyond the internship and with regard to the PAR deployed by the group since 2006, Astra identified 3 key elements of Parte Hartuz’s work: (a) its legitimacy to draw up alliances with the institutions that allow the recognition of an initiative originating in civil disobedience; (b) its role in expanding and attracting new unorganized actors; and (c) its methodological help in the professional design of the process, the assemblies and the unblocking of conflicts. Thus, with regard to the students’ PAR (2017/2018) and Parte Hartuz’s PAR (2006/2023), an impact can be seen on the student body, the participating people and the project as a whole.

Discussion and conclusions

Astra is today a space that encourages the direct participation of citizens and the social fabric in the management of public and community infrastructures. Its philosophy of cultural creation is not limited to artistic production; it includes critical thinking and the dissemination of ideas and initiatives that promote the democratization of the public space. The opening up of the UPV/EHU to work with social movements has made it possible to intensify mutual learning and the transmission of skills and knowledge between academia and society over two decades. From these synergies, we have been able to frame the master’s internships within an ambitious project that emerges out of irruption and that, thanks to the role of the university and our research group, has improved and has been institutionally recognized.

Taking into account that the objective of Astra is to facilitate and enhance the capacity for social and cultural creation of individuals and groups, the work of the students in 2017/2018 and of the research group from 2006 to the present has meant that this project has improved its community self-management and, therefore, its forms of communication and socialization with the local population, and more specifically with the young people of the area.

Within the framework of a long-term PAR that began in 2007, the internships of 2017/2018 have allowed students to get applied experience of PAR. This has enabled students to acquire knowledge and skills from experience for their future training as facilitators and promoters of other PAR projects. In a context in which social inequalities and violence deriving from sexism, classism and racism are increasing, it is essential that university students should be able to access community management projects that aspire to repair and rebuild social networks (Wolfe & Klinenberg, 2021).

In short, the project shows that applied training in PAR, within the framework of higher education, helps to fulfill the function of public service and social responsibility of academia. However, this training experience has its limitations. On the one hand, time, since it is an 8-month process and is part of a training program in which students combine classes with practical experience. On the other hand, the contents, since the acquisition of competences is limited by the direction of the internship, in this case focused only on a youth project. Finally, the resources, since they do not always make it possible to achieve the objectives set at the beginning of the process. However, these limitations are compensated with flexibility, openness to new networks and creativity, which are aspects that the students have incorporated with the support of their tutors and the field knowledge of the Astra members they have worked with.

In short, despite its limitations, this project shows how the use of PAR in education, in addition to providing tools for students, allows the work of collective action networks and their initiatives to be reinforced (Caraballo & Lyiscott, 2020; Wright & Greenwood, 2017). We know that it is difficult for a PAR to face up to conflict, injustice and the search for equality in the Global North. When conditions exist, as sometimes happens in the Basque Country, and when universities accept the need to work with society, as is the case with many UPV/EHU research groups, then academia works to activate citizen participation and opens up an opportunity to democratize power relations (Martínez-Palacios et al., 2016). This story takes place in the midst of significant social and political conflict and adds a university to the mix as a facilitator of both social and political solutions while educating new generations of citizens in the relevant experiences and capability to carry this kind of work forward even in deeply divided societies. We are witnessing a world in crisis, in which the confrontation between institutions and social movements is increasingly present, and in this tension, democracy is at stake, attacked by reactionary movements. We believe that this experience shows that the University, thanks to PAR, can serve as a legitimate space to mediate between what is instituted and what is instituting, between order and incursion. And in this process, students can learn to become a democratizing agent.