Participatory learning methods and student travelling: our experience in Sri Lanka

Methods for data collection and analysis may vary according to the students’ backgrounds and specific interests. However, it was interesting seeing how students with different specializations merged in groups to study common topics using integrated approaches. In this course, students in development, tourism, education, urban, planning, physical geography and geoinformatics, chose to focus on different research themes, namely: risks and vulnerabilities, migrations, gender tasks, eco-tourism and land-use changes. Despite this thematic diversity, a common idea was to use participatory methods, involving locals in their research as far as possible. For us, participatory methods are not only specific methods to gather information from the locals, deriving from the Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) tradition and involving different ways to conduct interviews, focus groups, transect walks, workshops, and so on; more relevantly, they allow researchers being involved in local dynamics and cooperating with local communities, to forge the common understanding about specific realities, and to support their projects.