Action Research with Street Children: A Role for Street Educators

The paper is on using participatory action research to identify the research needs of street children. The paper mentions the difficulty faced by the authors in starting research with children, since prior to that there had not been any research in which children had been actively involved in all stages of research. The authors started a series of workshops and seminars that helped in setting goals and priorities for the research programme with street children. Also, a dialogue was started with people who were in constant dialogue with children. It was realised that there was a huge gap between children and the experts who work with them, and that this could only be closed through on-the-job training of street educators. The paper discusses the design of a project to meet this need, and the training of the street educators. It mentions that children and educators are sources of knowledge and have their own tools which they use in understanding the world.