Research Circles on World-care in ECEC:a participatory research approach

This article presents Research Circles (RC) as a participatory research approach situated within a broader landscape of collaborative research approaches, including PAR and PR. We exemplify and develop RC through the project Green Transition and World-care in Danish early childhood education and care (ECEC), where researchers and practitioners collabora-tively explored how caring might be expanded to include the natural environment and eco-systems in World-care. Methodologically, we show how RCs—structured around roundtables, researcher-led lessons, and negotiated tasks—were extended through locally organized Learning Circles (LC) to secure ownership, return-flow, and institutional anchor-ing across all staff members. Based on practitioners’ feedback, we discuss conditions ena-bling democratic co-creation (time, support, trust), as well as pitfalls, including moral pres-sure, and a tendency to emphasize the success stories over barriers for more sustainable practices. We argue that a two-tier RC–LC design supports co-venturing of locally grounded transformation and conceptual development without promising a direct transferable world-care model.