Participatory Learning Approach (PLA) principles are often apllied within environmental movements. I know directly a successful grass-root experiment called Our Children Trust that used PLA and lead to the constitutional climate lawsuit called “Juliana v.s. US”, against the U.S. government in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon in 2015.

If we transfer these empowering principles within an academic program, students may become active participants in the full life cycle of homework, projects and examination. PLA incorporates Project Learning and Inquiry Learning giving to students a structure to increase, first of all, learning of course materials and, secondly, assessment skills. Moreover, it provides and evaluates a collaborative approach to assignments, projects and examinations, focusing on active participation and peer evaluation. Finally, it integrates multimodal learning through the use of software that maximizes student learning, facilitates collaboration, and minimizes student and instructor overhead in conducting PLA (Participatory Learning Approach: An Overview, 2004).

I never thoroughly applied PLA, but I created collaborative projects that had some PLA elements. For example, in one course - advance Italian language and culture - the student work collaboratively to research on the Italian family's recent demographic and cultural makeup. First of all, each students posted on a open forum a report on this topic; secondly, pair of students had to extrapolate a specific issue (es. marriage age/type of marriage/civil unions and family size/natality rate, etc), and demonstrate its impact on the main topic, Italian family makeup. Later, they wrote an article in pairs collecting info from the forum postings and other resources (especially infographics and census data). Then, they post their articles in a new forum for peer review/comments. Finally, they insert their articles in a pubblication for intermediate level students of Italian. 

Newsletter Inside Pages "La famiglia italiana" - April 2017

What was missing in the above PLA/collaborative plan was the structured participatory evaluation. Beside a few peer comments, not supported by peer rubrics, the evaluation process was teacher lead. The picture below shows three examination process and highlight how the evaluation is pervasive in the participatory and collaborative exams (green arrows).

Comparison of the Exam Modes (Shen J., 2005)

The participatory evaluation is central to the PLA. But students do not how to evaluate, so it is important to work on assessment training and repeated experience. Assessment is a skill that should be learned because trains students to develop life-long skills such as critical thinking and fair-mindedness.

Both rubrics and logistic seems to be a key factor for a successful PLA evaluation process (Dezhi Wu et. all, 2008). The use of rubrics introduces advantages for the teacher, as it facilitates the evaluation of competencies as well as for the student, as they clearly perceive the different dimensions that are being evaluated in each activity, increasing, with that, their academic performance. The PLA logistic fosters autonomous learning, but requires time. The following PLA model shows the interplay between teacher and students. 

Participatory Exam Process (Dezhi Wu et. all, 2008)

Shen, J. et al., Participatory Learning Approach: An Overview, Encyclopedia of Distance Learning, Information Science Referencep. 1476, 2005

Shen, J. Collaborative Examinations in Asynchronous Learning Networks: Field Experiments On Collaborative Learning Through Online Assessments. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of InformationSystems, NJIT, May, 2005.

Dezhi Wu et al, Engaging Students with Constructivist Participatory Examinations in Asynchronous Learning Networks, Journal of Information Systems Education, Vol. 19(3), 2008