About

Mission

The Student Engaged Participatory Action Research Center (SEPARC) is a group of participatory action researchers and research projects housed within the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Participatory Action Research (PAR) is a partnership approach to action research that emphasizes participation from members of the community most affected by the research phenomenon through authentic collaboration and shared decision-making to answer questions that are most important to them and to use what they have learned to generate actionable change. SEPARC partners with historically marginalized or minoritized student groups in higher education settings to investigate the educational issues and experiences important to them through critical race, decolonial, and feminist lenses.

Our largest project to date is Our HMoob American College Paj Ntaub, which examines the college experiences of HMoob American students in Wisconsin. We also provide workshops to teach other researchers how to incorporate participatory approaches in their work, host social justice education events, and facilitate public presentations and webinars of PAR scholarship.