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Participatory action research as the approach for women’s empowerment
Women’s empowerment is key to the health and rights of women worldwide, and achieving women’s empowerment requires approaches that “promote participation and incite action”(Aziz, 303). This paper describes Aga Khan University’s (AKU) participation in Women’s Empowerment in Muslim Contexts (WEMC), a five-component study that used a participatory action research approach. The AKU-WEMC “adapted the participatory rural appraisal (PRA) tools to explore women’s perceptions and reflections on their existent situation and aspired needs with respect to empowerment, community’s overall health, mental health, reproductive health, daily work load, access to resources, participation in decision-making and violence against women” (Aziz, 103). A five-step…
Designing community-based courses: A guide for instructors to develop community partnerships and create public scholarship courses
This handbook is a guide for faculty, lecturers, graduate students, and staff to create, implement, or strengthen engaged scholarship courses. The handbook contains six sections: Engaged Public Scholarship, Building Campus-Community Partnerships, Developing Engaged Scholarship Courses, Supporting Student Engagement with the Community, Deepening the Learning with Reflection, Developing Evaluation and Assessment for Engaged Scholarship. Avila-Lynn, C., Rice K., & Akin, S. (2012). Designing community-based courses: A guide for instructors to develop community partnerships and create public scholarship courses. Cal Corps Public Service Center, University of California Berkeley. 3-45. Full Text.
The Dialogical Model: Developing academic knowledge for and from practice
In this paper, two management professors propose a new model for conducting engaged scholarship—the dialogical model. This model comprises five activities: specifying a research question, elaborating local knowledge, developing conceptual knowledge, communicating knowledge, and activating knowledge. The dialogical model provides guidance on how to maintain academic value and practical relevance in tension throughout the research process, and on how to justify validity in pragmatic constructivism. The authors explain how the dialogical model was developed in the pragmatic constructivist epistemological paradigm, and suggest how the model can be mobilized in other epistemological frameworks. Avenier, M.J., & Cajaiba, A. P. (2012). The…
Community-based archeology: Research with, by, and for indigenous and local communities
The past two decades have brought important changes to the ways archaeologists engage with indigenous, descendant, local communities and the public at large. This book outlines the principles of CBPR and demonstrates how CBPR can be effectively applied to archeology. It provides theoretical discussions as well as practical examples of CBPR in archeology. Atalay, S. (2012). Community-based archeology: Research with, by, and for indigenous and local communities. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. Full Text.
Principles of community engagement
This “primer” provides public health professionals, health care providers, researchers, and community-based leaders and organizations with both a science base and practical guidance for engaging partners in projects that may affect them. The principles of engagement can be used by people in a range of roles, from the program funder who needs to know how to support community engagement to the researcher or community leader who needs hands-on, practical information on how to mobilize the members of a community to partner in research initiatives. In addition, it provides tools for those who are leading efforts to improve population health through…
Between idealism and reality: Meeting the challenges of participatory action research
Participatory action research (PAR) is a methodological stance that researchers can find both inspiring and daunting. Community-based PAR offers a platform by which social scientists can contribute to the democratization of knowledge and its production, but also requires that they go beyond conventional roles and procedures to interact with community co-researchers in ways that may leave university-based researchers feeling exposed and rudderless. In this article, the authors present episodes from three different PAR projects that illustrate some of the challenges that PAR presents for university-based researchers, as well as what can be learned from them. (Smith et al, 2010, p….
Public Participation in scientific research: A framework for deliberate design
This article reviews and integrates recent scientific research involving public participation. In order to describe the current set of initiatives from diverse academic fields and traditions, the authors propose the term “public participation in scientific research (PPSR)”. The article describes three predominant models of PPSR, and offers a framework that considers how scientific and public interests are negotiated for project design. The authors suggest that this framework and models can be used to support deliberate design of PPSR efforts that will enhance their outcomes for scientific research, individual participants, and social–ecological systems. Shirk, J. L., Ballard, H. L., Wilderman, C….
Teacher action research: Building democracies
Written as a textbook for graduate level courses in action research, this book considers action research as a vehicle to develop knowledge democracies. It explores why action research is practiced, discusses the historical origin of the practice and relation to other theoretical perspectives, and offers research methods and case studies illustrating how action research contributes to democratic inquiry within institutions. Pine, G. (2009). Teacher action research: Building democracies. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1-396.
Community-based participatory research: A strategy for building health communities and promoting health through policy change
This 60 page report to The California Endowment offers an overview of community based participatory research (CBPR) – its definition and principles – and discussion of this research practice as a policy change tool. Eight “promising CBPR practices” are highlighted along with six case studies of CBPR utilized to effect policy change in California. The monograph concludes with a chapter on evaluating CBPR processes and outcomes and comprehensive lists of helpful websites and other CBPR resources. Minkler, M., Garcia, A.P., Rubin, V. & Wallerstein, N. (2012). Community-based participatory research: A strategy for building healthy communities and promoting health through policy…
Reconceptualizing engagement: a conceptual framework for analyzing university interaction with external social partners
This article contributes to the theoretical debate around the definition of “community engagement” in South Africa. It presents a conceptual framework that was developed to measure and map existing engaged academic activities. The article explains how the framework was developed, and how it can be used to guide empirical research, institutional strategic planning, and national higher education policy processes. Kruss, G. (2012). Reconceptualizing engagement: a conceptual framework for analyzing university interaction with external social partners. South African Review of Sociology, 43(2), 5-26. Full Text.
The Utility of educational action research for emancipatory change
Although the potential of action research (AR) to advance social justice and emancipatory change has become a popular and accepted concept, educational AR has fallen short of achieving these aims. This article focuses on how educational AR has been used as a method for teaching, increasing professional efficacy, implementing policy, and how each method of educational AR has its own emancipatory potential and challenges. Kinsler, K. (2010). The utility of educational action research for emancipatory change. Action Research, 8(2), 171-189. Full Text.
Youth as partners, participants, or passive recipients, A review of children and adolescents in community-based participatory research
This is a review of the CBPR literature related to youth. The review finds that a minority of the studies (15%) actually partnered with youth in some phase of the research process. This article outlines the content, methodology, and phases of youth partnership, provides exemplars of CBPR with youth, and discusses the state of the youth-partnered research literature. Jacquez, F., Vaughn, L. M., & Wagner, E. (2013). Youth as partners, participants or passive recipients: A review of children and adolescents in community-based participatory research (CBPR). American Journal of Community Psychology, 51(1-2), 176-189. Full Text.
Community-based Participatory Research from the Margin to the Mainstream: Are Researchers Prepared?
Developing sustainable and scalable strategies to prevent and control cardiovascular diseases is a challenging but necessary undertaking. This article asserts the ways in which CBPR is the appropriate approach to developing these strategies, providing background on CBPR in the following topics: definition, purpose, benefits, effectiveness, implementation, partnerships, study design, funding and ethics review, dissemination of findings, and translation of research to practice/policy. Horowitz, C.R., Robinson, M., & Seifer, S. (2009). Community-Based Participatory Research From the Margin to the Mainstream: Are Researchers Prepared? Circulation, 119, 2633-2642. Full Text.
What is good action research? Why the resurgent interest?
What makes a good action research project/paper? This article defines action research as knowledge creation arising in the context of practice requiring the researchers to work with practitioners to effect change through this generation of knowledge. How does action research relate to qualitative research, and business consulting? What are the perceptions, core features, and aims of action research? An experienced engaged scholar writes this paper as a “Note from the Field”. As she outlines her specific experience, she addresses the questions above and also discusses examples of research projects, criteria for scholars looking to publish their work, engagement in scholarly-practitioner…
Learning about scholarship in action in concept and practice
In an address to the campus at the end of her inaugural year (April, 2005), Chancellor Nancy Cantor announced her vision of Syracuse University as a Creative Campus whose faculty and students would be deeply engaged with the world, interacting with local and global communities in productive relationships and activities that she named “scholarship in action.” Recognizing the difficulty of fitting such public or community-engaged scholarship into the traditional framework for defining and evaluating faculty work, she called on the Academic Affairs Committee of the Senate to study the issues related to implementing this vision. This is a study of…
Sustaining CBPR partnerships to address health disparities in times of economic instability
This report addresses the reality that CBPR partnerships in underserved communities face unanticipated challenges because of unstable economic environments. It describes challenges experienced by HealthLink, a CBPR partnership to address cancer disparities in Queens, N.Y. and how Health Link adapted. Recommendations for designing CBPR partnerships to overcome unexpected challenges are provided. Weiss, E. S., Stevenson, A. J., Erb-Downward, J., & Combs, S., Sabino, E., Michel, T. … Rapkin, B. (2012). Sustaining CBPR partnerships to address health disparities in times of economic instability. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 23(4), 1527-1535. Full Text.
Evaluation of community-academic partnership functioning
Community-university partnerships should be assessed by process evaluations to confirm that the principles of CBPR are being followed and to improve the effectiveness of a partnership in achieving intermediate and long-term program objectives. This paper discusses the evaluation of the B Free CEED partnership coalition, describing the methods and findings of the process evaluation. In conclusion, the authors suggest that ongoing partnership evaluation is key in the reassessment of processes and procedures to improve partnership dynamics and cohesion. VanDevanter, N., Kwon, S., Sim, S., & Chun, K. (2011). Evaluation of community-academic partnership functioning: Center for the Elimination of Hepatitis B…
A community-university exchange project modeled after Europe’s science shope
This article describes a pilot project of the Morgridge Center for Public Service at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which is based on the European-derived science shop model for democratizing campus-community partnerships using shared values of mutual respect and validation of community knowledge. This science shop is called the Community University Exchange. The article analyzes how stakeholders have found meaning in the process of building an infrastructure to help create more authentic, reciprocal, and mutually beneficial campus-commu¬nity partnerships. This narrative describes the journey taken to develop the project and the direction for its future development. Tryon, E. & Ross, J.E. (2012). …
University-community partnerships: Bridging people and cultures in an HIV/AIDS health intervention in an African American community
In this article, members of the Communities and Health Disparities Project describe the project, which engaged North Carolina State University, a community-based organization, and members of the African American community to develop a culturally tailored toolkit to correct misinformation about HIV/AIDS. Through conducting the project, the authors identified five strategies for successfully building relationships across diverse cultural groups, which they present. Thompson, M. S., Head, R., Rikard, R. V., McNeil, C., & White, C. (2012). University-community partnerships: Bridging people and cultures in an HIV/AIDS health intervention in an African American community. Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 16(2), 79-106. Full…
Meaningful relationships: Cruxes of university-community partnerships for sustainable and happy engagement
In this essay, the authors draw on organizational theory’s use of the metaphor as a way of understanding and explaining sustainable university-community partnerships. They argue that pursuing and maintaining meaningful partnerships between universities and communities or organizations in many ways parallels our efforts to sustain healthy romantic relationships. Through a description and analysis of 10 cruxes for sustaining long-term, healthy relationships, the authors offer a model for achieving intentional, ongoing, and systemic campus-community partnerships. Stewart, T., & Alrutz, M. (2012). Meaningful relationships: Cruxes of university-community partnerships for sustainable and happy engagement. Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship, 5(1), 44-55. Full Text.