Community Engaged Scholarship

Why should faculty do community-engaged scholarship?

1. Community-Based Research (CBR) provides new opportunities to connect with the community and to apply research
2. CBR increases both "hard" and "soft" skills
3. Junior and Senior faculty both benefit from CBR
   1. Junior faculty like entree into the community
   2. Senior faculty like to try something new
   3. Both like being on cutting edge of publishing and presenting options
4. In spite of some evidence that CBR can negatively impact the efforts of faculty to gain tenure, etc., faculty report that the “cumulative effect of individual faculty members' involvement in community partnerships was having a positive impact at the departmental and university levels, contributing significantly to institutional buy-in.”

Community-based participatory research

While there are many forms of community-engaged scholarship, community-based participatory research (CBPR) has had the benefits of evolving out of the others and being the most intentionally reciprocal.

CBPR is research that is conducted as an equal partnership between traditionally trained "experts" and members of a community. In CBPR projects, the community partner participates fully in all aspects of the research process. CBPR encourages collaboration of formally trained research partners from any area of expertise, provided that the researcher provides expertise that is seen as useful to the investigation by the community and be fully committed to a partnership of equals and producing outcomes usable to the community.

Equitable partnerships require sharing power, resources, credit, results and knowledge, as well as a reciprocal appreciation of each partner's knowledge and skills at each stage of the project, including problem definition/issue selection, research design, conducting research, interpreting the results and determining how the results should be used for action.

CBPR differs from traditional research in many ways. One of the principal ways in which it is different is that instead of creating knowledge for the advancement of a field or for knowledge's sake, CBPR is an iterative process, incorporating research, reflection and action in a cyclical process.