Monica Williams is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice and a faculty advisor for the Community Engaged Leaders Research Team at the Center for Community Engaged Learning at Weber State University.

Many faculty members want their students to be more engaged in their communities, but have few ideas about how to successfully facilitate this engagement. At the same time, faculty also want to expose students to the realities of research to help them prepare for graduate school, learn how to solve real-world problems, and/or competently evaluate research they may come across in their careers. Co-curricular, community-based research provides an avenue through which to achieve both of these goals.

Based on my experiences as a faculty advisor to students undertaking community-based research, I have developed four keys to success in engaging undergraduates in this type of research. These four keys stem from my experiences in the past year as a faculty advisor for a unique program at Weber State University’s Center for Community Engaged Learning called the Community Engaged Leaders Community Research Team. Each academic year, we select a small group of students to design and implement research projects requested by community partners. Under the mentorship of myself and one other faculty member, the four to six students who comprise the Community Research Team work with and for community partners to address the needs of the community through research. We have conducted a variety of projects, including surveying city residents about their perceptions of local government departments and services; surveying current, former, and potential students to assess how the university’s continuing education department can better meet the needs of the community; analyzing whether a charter academy’s practices align with their mission and goals; and reviewing the literature on the relationship between K9 units and crime rates. Our program is building momentum and the keys I describe below reflect lessons from both the successes and failures of the program as we continue to develop and grow.

The first and most important key to success is that students, not faculty advisors, must own their projects. They are working with the community partner to do research for that partner. When students do not own their projects, faculty members may end up conducting most of the research themselves. This places inordinate demands on faculty time and, more importantly, fails to give the students opportunities to meaningfully engage with the community and develop their research skills. In my experience, student ownership of projects increases dramatically when students conduct meetings with their community partners very early in the process. Faculty advisors can facilitate and attend these initial meetings, but the students should lead the meetings. By working with community partners to establish expectations for final products, timelines, and methods of communication, students build rapport with their community partners and they begin to own their role as the primary researchers.

The second key to success requires faculty advisors to carefully select students who are self-motivated, organized, and passionate about solving community problems. Prior research experience is a bonus, but is by no means an absolute requirement because students work as a team. Retreats and weekly team meetings build a sense of group cohesion that allows students who have had little experience with prior research learn from their teammates in order to successfully complete their projects.

Third, while selecting the right team of students is important, choosing appropriate research projects will increase students’ chances of success. In our program, we send out a call for proposals to all community partners in the spring semester. The call asks partners about their research needs and how conducting the research will help them advance their mission. The faculty advisors then review all proposals and select small-scale projects that can either be finished in an academic year or can be broken into pieces that can be finished within the year. For instance, we have found that large-scale surveys of entire cities may involve too many pieces, but more localized surveys of an organization’s target population provide excellent opportunities to teach students about sampling, survey design, data collection, and data analysis.

The final key to success relates to implementing the projects. First and foremost, students must commit a specified amount of time per week to their projects. I have found that students do not realize how much time research actually takes. Without a commitment of at least seven hours per week, they fail to put in the time required to complete high quality projects. Our Community Engaged Leaders program emphasizes that these students are leaders on their projects and in the campus community; as such, we do not require them to complete the entire research project on their own. Instead, we train them on how to recruit volunteers to help at every stage of the research. This serves the purpose of building their leadership skills, as well as engaging more students across campus in community-based research.
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Co-curricular community-based research can have its limitations: faculty advisors must be willing to let students experience the minor and sometimes major setbacks involved with any research project, while also ensuring that students meet their obligations to community partners. This may mean that faculty advisors end up taking on the bulk of a research project if their students fail to perform. Engaging the four keys to success will help minimize these potential problems and maximize the benefits for both faculty and students. Faculty will find that guiding undergraduate research can create networks with a wide variety of people and resources across campuses and communities, and provide a sense of purpose as we share our passion for solving complex problems through research with our students. For students, the benefits include opportunities to present and possibly publish their research, and, more importantly, increased civic engagement now and in the future. For these reasons I believe that, despite the potential pitfalls, engaging our undergraduates in co-curricular community-based research is an essential part of developing well-rounded citizens who know how to solve complex community problems.
 

Susan Gaunt Stearns is the Jack C. Miller Post-Doctoral Fellow for the Alexander Hamilton Project at the Center for Legal Studies, Northwestern University.

When I conceived of my class on the Ratification of the Constitution, I envisioned using my students as the creators of resources that could help their peers in other classes and at other institutions better understand the conflict surrounding the writing and ratification of the Constitution. Using a class website, hosted by the free blog site Wikidot, the students work collaboratively to create content that could help explain the origins of the U.S. Constitution. The entire class is built around a series of explorations of the causes of the Constitutional Convention, the writing of the Constitution, the ratification debate, and the aftermath of the adoption of the Constitution. In turn, students examine the British constitutional tradition, the political conflicts that presaged the Revolution, state constitutions, the United States under the Articles of Confederation, the Constitutional Convention, the ratification debates in the states, and the aftermath of its adoption, including the creation of the Bill of Rights and the Whiskey Rebellion. 

Specific assignments include reading a series of state constitutions, comparing and contrasting, for instance, the first Pennsylvania and Massachusetts constitutions. Students use the examination of these constitutions to judge for themselves the types of problems that those involved in framing a government must grapple with: what is the source of the government’s authority, what is the relationship between the government and its source, how will power be divided, etc. This process also gives students a better idea of the models of constitutions that the framers in Philadelphia had available to them. Discipline- specific skills, like comparing the arguments of two historical monographs, are introduced too. Students read Woody Holton’s Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, and excerpts from Gordon Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, two books with radically different arguments that demonstrate to students how a historian’s outlook and research question will influence the work that they produce. These readings and class discussions provide students with the background they need to begin their own website projects. Each student is responsible for creating pages in the class website; deciding what they will research and write is a task I leave entirely up to them.

Having students construct a website as opposed to writing a traditional paper offers more benefits than just functioning as a gimmick to attract the interest of digital natives. Academic papers require students to perform one type of writing task: to generate a closed- form, argument- driven essay. This is a profoundly useful tool, but, it is only one of the many sorts of writing that matter, either in the discipline of history or in my students’ daily lives. Websites offer a venue for students to practice other types of writing. Rather than focus on creating an argument, in a website, students focus on informational writing; meanwhile, the public nature of a website means they have a built-in authentic audience for all of their work.
Websites have another advantage: they allow students to draw connections in new and fascinating ways. Websites allow students to make connections between their topics and related topics in ways that ultimately create a deep understanding of the material. As part of the course, each student chooses one Federalist Paper he or she will concentrate on. One layer of the site presents the paper as it would be read in a book, only, each student is required to gloss any word that they believe might confuse someone reading the document for the first time. They research references to ancient Greek generals, demonstrate how the author is borrowing from the political thought of Montesquieu, and link from a discussion of a topic like sovereignty in one paper to a discussion of the same topic in another. In the process, students learn to interact with the material that they read in different ways—exploring not just the text, but the ideas and events that inspired it.

My favorite thing about this model of teaching is that it shifts the role of the students within the classroom. Rather than being passive recipients of knowledge, students become, instead, knowledge creators, forced to think about issues such as organization, presentation, and audience as well as content. While ostensibly the website the class creates is intended for use by others, it also functions as a tool for helping my students to better understand the ratification debate. 

Shannon Portillo is an Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Coordinator at the School of Public Affairs & Administration at the University of Kansas. She is also a Board Member of the Consortium for Undergraduate Law & Justice Programs. 



I have a student named Carmen.[1] Carmen is the American Dream come to life. She came to the U.S. as a young child because her mother wanted to her to have the opportunity to work hard and get ahead. She grew up knowing if she worked hard she could achieve anything. Carmen was the first in her family to go to college. First a two-year community college, then she transferred to the flagship state university where I work to complete a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration. She knew she wanted to devote her life to public service.

Carmen is an earnest student. She always sat front and center, completed every assignment on time. Like many students before her, she said I was the first Latina she had as a professor. She asked how I made it to the very front of the classroom, and what graduate school was like. It took her a little while, but she opened up about her past and her hopes for the future. After doing well in my Diversity in Public Administration course, I asked her if she wanted to work with me on research about social justice.[2]

She did great work, and I encouraged her to go to graduate school and get a Masters in Public Administration. She said her family was counting on her working after her degree, and she didn’t think graduate school was a possibility. I pestered her, encouraged her, and she showed the dedication to education and the drive she always has.

This summer she was in my graduate Law and Public Management class. That was when she broke my heart. It wasn’t her work. As usual, she excelled. Her papers were insightful, well researched, and well edited. Her final project explored ideas of affirmative action, equal opportunity, and tokenism in hiring. After class one day near the end of the term she lingered. She said it was hard, and she was sad. Her classes, the research we did together, and her work for her final paper all exposed the gap – the gap between our ideals as Americans and the reality of lived experiences for people of color, women, and especially women of color. It was hard to see Carmen wrestling with pain I remember well from graduate school. She knows she has to work twice as hard, be twice as good to get the same jobs and opportunities as her white classmates. 

As a law and society scholar, that is what I research, what I devote my life to understanding. In our scholarship we talk about the gap between law on books and law in action. I research social equity, and the ways that race, ethnicity, gender, age, and other social identities frame the lived experiences of public servants. Everyday we learn more about the injustices of the criminal justice system and the inequities in opportunities and outcomes for people of color in our country.

I went home after that conversation really dejected. I felt like I had just told a happy child that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, I had slowly chipped Carmen’s American Dream. I was in a funk for a few days; upset that Carmen’s American Dream was crushed, and upset that I knew I had something to do with it.

I slowly came out of my funk, realizing that Carmen is the embodiment of the American Dream. As a young Latina, and a first generation college student, she has to work harder than many of her privileged peers. She had, and has, barriers to overcome. But, she is a badass student and will make an incredible public servant. I am honored that I was able to teach her and help prepare her for the world she will encounter as a working professional, all of the opportunities and obstacles. Carmen is my American Dream, she is going to make communities more equitable, she will be a thoughtful leader, and she will be a role model for others.

We often talk about creating safe spaces for students to discuss sensitive topics in the classroom, but learning often isn’t safe. I know it hurts to learn about inequalities within our community. It hurts to teach about it. I take solace in knowing that Carmen will help us live up to our American ideals. I take solace in knowing that she is my American Dream come to life. But, we also need to talk more about how we handle the pain of our students and the pain we face as scholars and teachers. I would love to hear more about your experiences and strategies for handling students’ pain, and your own, in the comments.    


[1] Carmen is a pseudonym, used to protect her privacy.
[2] She joined my Sociolegal Justice Project. You can read more about that project and the nested mentorship model we use here.