Engaging Undergraduate Students in Public Scholarship

While courses that utilize public scholarship are less straightforward than traditional courses, their inherent complexities afford students the chance to acquire invaluable skills.
by LSA Learning & Teaching Technology Consultants

Public scholarship is research, teaching, and practice that is conducted for and with the public. The goal of public scholarship is to serve the public by meeting a community identified need. In most cases, a faculty member has an established relationship with a community partner and works with that partner to identify a mutually beneficial project. Undergraduates can participate in public scholarship through faculty research or a course. The benefits of engaging students in public scholarship include:

  • Fostering students' comprehension of the societal impact of their field of study.
  • Developing transferable skills that are applicable in professional work environments.
  • Offering students a firsthand experience of graduate-level work.
  • Creating opportunities for authentic assessment, allowing students to demonstrate their understanding and mastery of course material through real-world, practical tasks.

The following steps aim to help anyone interested in designing a course component to engage students in public scholarship.

Determine your project

The first step when designing a course that integrates academic work with the public is to determine a project with a manageable scope. You may already have a community partner with a need aligning with your course content. During discussions with the community partner to determine what students can contribute, keep in mind that any task assigned to students to produce for the community partner is a skill you will need to teach. Resist the role of project manager where the feasibility of the project is decided based on available time for desired output. Instead, prioritize teaching knowledge and skills that students will need to be successful when working with the community partner. To do this, consider the skills necessary for the proposed project and break down those skills into learning goals. This approach will give you a sense into what is realistically teachable within the available time and will help you refine the project’s scope.

Communicating Course Expectations

Courses that partner with community organizations will likely experience shifting deadlines and competing priorities. The project outlined in the syllabus at the beginning of the semester may undergo changes in order to maintain alignment with the fluid needs of external partners. Students may find it difficult to navigate both the organization’s deadlines and expectations, along with their course-specific commitments. Given these challenges, it is important for instructors to elicit frequent communication with students. When adjustments are made to the syllabus, students will need frequent updates. For the same reasons, flexible deadlines are more common in courses with public-facing projects.

While these courses are less straightforward than traditional courses, their inherent complexities afford students the chance to acquire invaluable professional skills. Additionally, the opportunity for students to make a tangible contribution to the public through their scholarship could open their minds to career paths previously unconsidered.

Protect Students’ Privacy

The goal of public scholarship is to make impactful student work accessible to the public. To achieve this, students must give permission for their work to be shared outside of the course. Students will need to provide written permission for their work to be published. The permission form should make explicit whether students' work will be exclusively accessible to the University, the community partner organization, or to a broader audience. You can revise the provided permission form to fit your use case.

Publish Student Scholarship

Many LSA courses incorporating public scholarship components utilize WordPress as a tool for publishing student work. You have the option to request a course site that you and your students collaboratively develop. An example of this is Matt Lassiter’s course–Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab. This course is a research collaboration to investigate the history of policing and criminalization in the city of Detroit during the 20th and 21st centuries, document the politics of crime control and civil rights activism, and excavate and map police-civilian encounters including homicides, brutality, and misconduct. All of the research conducted through the course is publicly available on the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab site

Students who have taken the Policing and Social Justice History course learn the impact that their research has on real people. Abigail Najar, a senior at the University of Michigan and a researcher for the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab, shares her experience below:

Before I began working on Detroit Unaccountable, I did not fully understand what it meant to do historical research. I thought it was simply documenting and analyzing historical events…

As the project went on, however, I began to realize that these specific instances and policies were just small pieces of an incredibly complex and powerful story…

Our mission is not just to document, but to tell each victim’s story, to give forgotten activists a permanent place in history, and to force people to recognize the never-ending problem of injustice in Detroit’s justice system with irrefutable evidence…

When people read our website, I want them to not just acknowledge the problem of police brutality and prosecutorial misconduct, but to understand why the problem existed, what was done incorrectly, and that this is still a pressing issue in Detroit today. Most important, however, I want them to know that the best way to achieve change and to begin repairing a broken system is through tireless effort. Without the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality, much less progress would have occurred. They made changes without the help of the government and without officials on their side. Their work should serve as a lesson, therefore, that we cannot rely on leaders to fix the problem of police brutality. Instead, we have to demand change ourselves by putting pressure on the police, the prosecutors, and the entire justice system.

If you are interested in sharing student scholarship on a public facing site like the Policing and Social Justice Course site, complete this quick request form to create a new course site. Once your requested site is created, you will be connected with someone who can help you start planning and constructing your Wordpress site. For course sites, the Learning and Teaching Consultants are available to provide WordPress training to you and your students.

 

References:

https://rackham.umich.edu/professional-development/program-in-public-scholarship/

https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/dcc-project/2022/11/30/abigail-najar-documenting-police-brutality-and-community-activism-nov-29-2022/

https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/dcc-project/policing-social-justice-historylab/

Email
Release Date: 03/07/2024
Category: Learning & Teaching Consulting; Teaching Tips
Tags: Technology Services

TECHNOLOGY SERVICES

G155 Angell Hall, 435 South State St, Ann Arbor, MI 48109–1003
734.615.0100
[email protected] 

Technology Services Contact Center Chat