The special call on organizational education addresses organizations' current tensions and challenges. Participatory research methodologies (PAR) may significantly contribute to organizations and networks charting forward.

Unlike traditional research approaches, PAR involves the researchers as participants and embodied beings. It draws on their felt experiences as knowledge-makers, epistemic practices situated in discourses, and collective imaginaries (Castoriadis 1975). Especially in PAR (Bergold & Thomas 2012), design and arts-based research (Barone & Eisner 2012) strengthen the relational in-betweenness and connect different epistemic fields and their ‘worldmaking.’ As ‘worldmaking’ is based on senses, it is core in PAR settings. In the first part, we refer to body movement and visual and narrative approaches as participatory data gathering (Triple Symposium Part 1).

As PAR is based on systematically different perspectives between research and practice fields, we generate points of encounter that initiate shared processes of reflection and translation (Dewe, Ferchhoff & Radtke: 1992) in different organized and institutionalized educational fields. As emergent, co-creative processes sensitive to power/knowledge, difference, and embedded practices, PAR relates to learning for democracy in education (Seppälä; Sarantou & Miettinen 2021). Mirroring our understanding of democracy-as-becoming as a relational and lived experience, PAR is a critical inquiry that may change practice, values, and awareness. As a “practice-changing practice” (Kemmis, 2009: 463), it refers to relational perspectives between stakeholders and ourselves, to the researchers’ perspective between (auto-) and ethnography.

Two EU Horizon 2020 Projects, “Aesthetic and Embodied Learning for Democracy as Becoming”(AECED) and DEMOCRAT, reflect on the future potential of education for democracy in institutional settings. In AECED, 19 cases span primary -, secondary -, and higher education, as well as adult/professional and organizational settings. In DEMOCRAT, social movements and a bottom-up transformational approach are used. In these differently institutionalized settings, multiple levels of participation and opportunities to co-design, co-create, and co-evaluate are involved (Kemmis 2009). The second part therefore refers to multi-stakeholder PAR approaches (Triple Symposium Part 2).

Connecting to the three layers of learning in, of, and between organizations (Goehlich et al. 2018), we search for transforming organizational and educational cultures. Here, we relate to three levels: 1) Individual and Collective Learning, 2) Organizational / Institutional Transformation, and 3) Epistemic Transformation. Organizational and institutional change is more than just incremental learning. According to Collet-Sabé & Ball (2022), educational institutions need to change at the level of individual and collective or organizational learning and at the level of their onto-epistemic transformation.

Knorr-Cetina (1999) refers to the term visual discourse. She analyzes how the researchers’ gaze brings about not only epistemic patterns of seeing but also orders of seeing and orders of the gaze. Organizing multinational Cross-Case Analysis in this sense is to be understood as a practice ‘that systematically forms the objects (and results) of which it speaks’ (Foucault 1981: 74).

Reflecting on methodological analysis questions, we think about how to do (cross-) case analysis here. PAR is not only oriented towards causality but towards making inferences about it (Bennett & Checkel 2014: 11). Process theory, hence, regards events, activities, and trajectories and pays attention to entanglements and involvement. In such process-oriented research strategies, we reflect on how data analysis strategies can be organized. How do we deal with the different cultures, languages, institutional settings, methodical strategies, and research approaches? Should cross-analysis be organized along thematic, contextual, typological, or framework approaches? In which way can epistemic approaches can contribute here? (Bollier & Helfrich 2019). In the third part, we reflect on multi-case comparative analysis in organizational education (Triple Symposium part 3).

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