ABSTRACT
As our awareness of decolonizing strategies deepened, it became clear to us that adopting a PAR approach would likely be most effective in achieving the outcome that inspired the work in the first place: creating instructional strategies that would help students become more successful, more critical readers and writers. We were especially intrigued by Heron and Reason’s (1997) idea that the primary purpose of PAR is “human flourishing.” The “flourishing” we were striving for came from the Belizean community of educators. Their goal for higher levels of literacy among their students was the heart and soul of this work. Another foundation of PAR that resonated with us is that research doesn’t only provide knowledge or an abstract ethos of the cosmos, but transformation on the ground as well. We wanted to engage in research that might extend the reach of “human flourishing” to the entire Belizean region where we worked, especially with respect to the identity and practice potentials of our Belizean teacher colleagues.
