The Undergraduate Perspective on Community-Based Research.

"What we learn to do, we learn by doing." --Aristotle Over the last decade, universities across the country have increasingly recognized that ideologically-and financially-committed institutional support for community engagement pedagogy is necessary to improve the university and community. Institutions such as many of the more than 800 members of Campus Compact, a coalition of universities that have made express commitments to community service, reflect the increasing understanding that verbal, written, and financial support are necessary steps toward actualizing larger visions that have atrophied for much of the last century (Zlotkowski, 1996). An important component of this movement toward civic engagement in higher education is community-based research (CBR). An emerging practice to engage students in research with the community in conjunction with academic courses, CBR is becoming an increasingly prominent choice of civic engagement in classrooms across the country. CBR is distinct in its in-depth student engagement in a collaborative research project with the goal of social change. Delving further into community partnerships than short-term direct service work allows, CBR offers numerous potential benefits for all parties. As with service-learning, more and more is written about the benefits of CBR (Kellet & Goldstein, 1999; Nyden, Figert, Shibley, & Burrows, 1997). As individuals who have experienced significant personal and intellectual growth thorough involvement in CBR as part of our institutions' commitment to service-learning, we hope that CBR will be recognized as an intensive form of service-learning, wherein collaboration with the community toward social change is at the center of academic research. The CBR community has the potential to experience the same benefits that have been attributed to well-executed service-learning experiences (Eyler & Giles, 1999). We urge CBR practitioners to more systematically investigate and document the benefits of CBR to all its partners, but especially to students. As student practitioners of CBR, we are in a unique position to document and validate CBR's effects on students who engage in it. The student perspective brings insight from a different place and different culture. Students provide questions that clarify and help to fine-tune the research practices and principles. They provide the youthful and invigorating labor-intensive hours that many other practitioners do not have the time to offer. Finally, student perspectives help affirm the very teaching practices faculty use in their courses. While many faculty papers strive to represent CBR's value to undergraduates, the experiences of, and effects on, students are best communicated by students themselves. The field has firmly established that CBR involving undergraduate students must effectively integrate the targeted knowledge base of the curriculum and the research component to result in a highly positive learning experience for the student. However, little is known about the effects upon students' personal, practical, and interpersonal skills development and social responsibility. Previous research, in fact, has largely forgotten the undergraduate student perspective, addressing it only tangentially through secondhand observation or ad hoc aggregations of student perspectives (Strand, 2000; Troppe, 1994). Much of the literature to date on CBR has described effective campus-community partnerships that use research as a primary activity (Nyden et al., 1997). In many cases, what has resulted is a better understanding of principles that occur across all such research projects. Consequently, practitioners may have inadvertently already taken the first steps toward looking at CBR's benefits for the undergraduate student. Across the variations of this work (e.g., participatory action research, CBR, participatory research, community-based participatory research), practitioners have established principles of good practice, including: 1) collaboration is a key component and necessary factor for a project's success; 2) community goals and objectives are primary in the eyes and actions of those involved in the research project; 3) the use of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary methods of study; and 4) the integration of knowledge and findings into the social, political, and economic structures that directly or indirectly impact those communities with whom the research is conducted (Greenwood, Whyte, & Harkavy, 1993; Israel, 2000; Strand, Marullo, Cutforth, Stoecker, & Donohugh, forthcoming). …