Parents’ popular universities

The popular parents’ universities are a system created in 2008, which consists of groups of parents, most of them living in sensitive urban areas, who carry out research on a topic related to parenthood in collaboration with a researcher.
There are currently 16 such universities in France with the aim of crossing their reflection about parenting with other actors (schools, social workers, other parents, elected officials…) searching together how to improve the daily life of children and their parents.
It is a question of modifying the vision of the parents in situation of exclusion on the institutions as well as that of the institutions on them.
These parents’ universities take place in several stages: the mobilization of the parent group, the construction of a collective research question based on individual questions, and a collection of data and analysis.
The themes of the research focus on three major themes: school dropout, the transmission of values and coeducation.
Once the research is advanced enough, the parents define actions to take in the neighbourhood, the city or other scales to discuss their research and confront them to the reality of the field.