 traditional research methods such as semi-structured interviews and focus groups but we also introduced a number of strategies to them that are more kinesthetic and also visual. We integrated a lot of visual tools into the teaching of the PAR course because the three of us all have interest in visual anthropology but also because visual tools seem to suit the class so well I think that's one of the advantages of visual tools is it allows people to have a broader range of communication as opposed to the structures of verbally talking about things or written language they have this whole new media in which they can explore what they're learning and illustrate what they're learning literally and if they're creating something like a graffiti board they can draw people in and have people draw ideas challenges that they're facing and it creates a lot of interest for people it's also something that they can display later and communicate the information they've gathered. Two of the other really interesting visual tools that we use were community mapping which involves students sitting down together at a big table with some big sheets of construction paper and drawing a map of Bellingham and then having to locate their houses and community sites and different important things on it then looking at that as a data set to look at scale and where things were in proximity and things like that and also we did an activity where they had to draw personal quilts and they had a sheet of paper and they drew quilt squares that represented themselves and things that they felt were important and assets that they brought to the course or to the class and then sort of symbolically sewing them together with tape and then that then went up on the wall and sort of represented our par classes as sort of par community quilts. Another tool that we used midway through the quarter was the temperature gauge another thing that we thought we should have used in the beginning after starting it students were able to put on a grid what they were feeling from week to week with a symbol that they chose and then they drew those lines together so they could see where they were at different points in their research and how they felt about their research how their research was going and when all the students put their thoughts on this temperature gauge they could see that they all had had similar experiences and I think that this helped bring them together as a group and helped them realize that this was a natural part of the process. One of the other tools that we introduced about midway through the quarter was appreciative inquiry and it was interesting this ended up being one of the things that I think students identified as one of something they wished they'd gotten sooner actually. Appreciative inquiry takes a different tact than traditional inquiry. Traditional inquiry and anthropology as I've learned about it has a tendency to look for problems what's going wrong what's not working in the community and students went in with the community with these kinds of questions in the community identified these questions as well and appreciative inquiry allowed them to take a different approach and identify strengths instead and to look at what was going well and they had glowing results from this in fact with some students that completely turned around their experience with the community that they were working with. I think one of the big assets of the tools where we presented them was that all the tools were interchangeable and that each class day that the students would come they would get sort of new tools to add to their toolkit and so the class kept evolving in that way and two of their sites their sites kept evolving because they would always be learning new tools new ways of looking at a situation or a problem which I think the sites found really beneficial as well. Which I think the advantage of PAR. The advantage of PAR is that it is flexible and that it gets tailored to the specific needs of a specific community as opposed to traditional approaches that take a best practices approach where this works in one place so let's apply it to another place without taking into consideration the differences that exist in that location or within that community. The main lesson that I learned while doing this work especially with regards to PAR was that you have to be willing to constantly adjust and I was kind of reminded of something something that you're taught when you're learning to be a bartender which is that the key to a good cocktail is lots of ice so however much ice you think you will need make sure you have three to five times as much on hand with you every night I felt like the key to a smooth PAR process was flexibility and however flexible you think you will need to be you have to be three to five times as flexible over the course of the course.