Community-Based Research: Teaching for Community Impact

Community-based research (CBR) refers to collaborative investigation by academics and non-academic community members that fosters positive change on a local level. Despite recent trends toward engaged scholarship, few publications demonstrate how to effectively integrate CBR into academic course work or take advantage of its potential for achieving community change.

Community-Based Research: Teaching for Community Impact fills these gaps by providing:
* An overview of language and methods used by professionals engaged in CBR
* A framework for orienting CBR toward concrete community outcomes
* Effective ways to integrate CBR into course content, student-driven projects, and initiatives spanning disciplines, curricula, campuses and countries
* Lessons learned in working toward positive outcomes for students and in communities

This text is designed for faculty, graduate students, service-learning and other engaged learning and scholarship practitioners, alliance members, special interest groups, and organizations that desire to strengthen student learning and utilize research for improvement in their communities.

Mary Beckman is the Associate Director for Academic Affairs and Research at the Center for Social Concerns, University of Notre Dame. Her publications can be found in journals including Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, Review of Radical Political Economics, Women's Studies Quarterly, and in books, for example, Handbook of Engaged Scholarship: The Contemporary Landscape Volume Two (2010) and Teaching the “isms”: Feminist pedagogy across the disciplines (2010).

Joyce F. Long is a research analyst in Memorial Hospital-South Bend’s Community Health Enhancement Department.