В Пенн-Стейт стартовал первый летний интенсив по применению академических исследований для социальных изменений

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Ten graduate students from universities across the country came to Penn State this summer to learn how to make their research a vehicle for social change. Led by Ray Block Jr., Brown-McCourtney Career Development Professor in the McCourtney Institute for Democracy and professor of political science and of African American studies, the inaugural Mixed Methods Summer Intensive for Practice-Based Researchers program trained participants how to study civic engagement, organizing and democratic participation as a means of practicing community-engaged research, which brings academics and community groups together to solve problems and influence public policy. “At a high level, the program is about training scholars who can bridge academic research and civic practice — research that speaks both to scholarly debates and to the needs of communities,” Block said. “Community-engaged research that extends beyond the trappings of academia is very important. We want people who value that to have some kind of home and see examples of how it can be done.” The two-week residential program included workshops led by faculty from Penn State and other universities. Funding came from the Democracy and Power Innovation Fund and the College of the Liberal Arts. Block, who also serves as the RAND Corp.’s Michael D. Rich Chair for Countering Truth Decay, said the program came out of the Forum for the Study of Organizing and Collective Action, an organization he formed four years ago with fellow scholars Deva Woodly, Hahrie Han and Daniel J. Galvin to help academics connect with community groups. He and his colleagues recently collaborated on an article about the group’s work that was recently published in the journal The Forum. “We were doing this work because we honestly cared about it and we think it’s important to be involved in civic engagement,” Block said. “But it’s not obvious how a college professor goes about doing it, so we decided it was something we wanted to share with others who want to do this but don’t have those obvious recommendations on how it works and how to go about doing it.” The program’s first week focused on methods training, specifically qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods design, as well as ethics and challenges such as selection bias when studying real-world organizations. In the second week, the students applied what they had learned to their own research projects while working alongside one another, exchanging ideas and feedback, meeting with program instructors, and preparing their final presentations. Block said he was thoroughly impressed with the students’ rigor. “I see with this cohort a bunch of people who are very motivated and very intentional in how they’re moving,” he said. “When you have a good class like this, it makes you as their teacher work harder.”