CU-Boulder is a member of the national network of publicly engaged colleges and universities, Imagining America. Imagining America works to support community-engaged scholarship in the humanities, arts and design. Their “publications” page on their website is an excellent resource for anyone looking to learn more about publicly engaged scholarship.

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Edited by Margaret A. Post, Elaine Ward, Nicholas V. Longo, John Saltmarsh

The concern that the democratic purposes of higher education -- and its conception as a public good -- are being undermined, with the growing realization that existing structures are unsuited to addressing today's complex societal problems, and that our institutions are failing an increasingly diverse population, all give rise to questioning the current model of the university.

This book presents the voices of a new generation of scholars, educators, and practitioners who are committed to civic renewal and the public purposes of higher education. They question existing policies, structures, and practices, and put forward new forms of engagement that can help to shape and transform higher education to align it with societal needs.

The scholars featured in this book make the case for public scholarship and argue that, in order to strengthen the democratic purposes of higher education for a viable future that is relevant to the needs of a changing society, we must recognize and support new models of teaching and research, and the need for fundamental changes in the core practices, policies, and cultures of the academy.

These scholars act on their values through collaboration, inclusiveness, participation, task sharing, and reciprocity in public problem solving. Central to their approach is an authentic respect for the expertise and experience that all stakeholders contribute to education, knowledge generation, and community building.
 

This book offers a vision of the university as a part of an ecosystem of knowledge production, addressing public problems with the purpose of advancing a more inclusive, deliberative democracy; and explores the new paradigm for teaching, learning, and knowledge creation necessary to make it a reality.

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Polling for Justice is a project of the Public Science Project in New York City. Aligned with young people’s organizing and advocacy in New York City, Polling for Justice created a city-wide (five borough) survey of youth experiences and desires/demands, in reference to education, health and justice. As a collaborative of young people, organizers, educators, and researchers, working across generations, organizations and neighborhoods, youth researchers designed a participatory action project (PAR) to assess urban youth experiences of education, health (including sexual and reproductive), criminal justice and policing in their schools, on the streets and on mass transit in the five boroughs of New York City.

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Introduction to Participatory Action Research

By Rebecca Kaplan, CU Engage and University of Colorado

This lesson plan is part of a packet that you can download to begin teaching about Participatory Action Research (PAR). Developed by CU Engage and CU-Boulder graduate student Rebecca Kaplan, the lesson plans packet will help educators who wish to incorporate PAR methods into their teaching and research. The packet is available for download via the YPAR hub website at University of California at Berkeley.
 

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Youth Activism in an Era of Inequality

by Ben Kirshner, Associate Professor of Education and Faculty Director, CU Engage: Center for Community-Based Learning and Research

Winner, 2016 Best Authored Book presented by the Society for Research on Adolescence

This is what democracy looks like: Youth organizers in Colorado negotiate new school discipline policies to end the school to jail track. Latino and African American students march to district headquarters to protest high school closure. Young immigration rights activists persuade state legislators to pass a bill to make in-state tuition available to undocumented state residents. Students in an ESL class collect survey data revealing the prevalence of racism and xenophobia.

These examples, based on ten years of research by youth development scholar Ben Kirshner, show young people building political power during an era of racial inequality, diminished educational opportunity, and an atrophied public square. The book’s case studies analyze what these experiences mean for young people and why they are good for democracy. What is youth activism and how does it contribute to youth development? How might collective movements of young people expand educational opportunity and participatory democracy? The interdependent relationship between youths’ political engagement, their personal development, and democratic renewal is the central focus of this book. Kirshner argues that youth and societal institutions are strengthened when young people, particularly those most disadvantaged by educational inequity, turn their critical gaze to education systems and participate in efforts to improve them.

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