Responding to cultural diversity through action and community-based participatory approaches in qualitative research

The lack of success in providing an adequate education for children from lower income and culturally different backgrounds continues as a central concern in most nations. Internationally, there is continuing and strong evidence of the failure of school systems to provide an adequate education for the children of poorer and culturally diverse families. This chapter presents processes of participatory, community-based action research as an important means to enable educators and educational institutions - schools, colleges, universities and so on - to modify and adapt their standard educational procedures to accommodate the realities of the diverse cultures that comprise the reality of modern societies. By extension, we also suggest that the imposition of current educational processes into developing nations and other sites of cultural diversity continues the processes of colonization that have created so many problems in the past.