The Urban Research-Based Action Network

• In Event: A Discourse of Democracy: The Role of Researchers, Faculty, and Community Organizations in Education Reform

Abstract

The Urban Research Based Action Network (URBAN) is an emerging multidisciplinary network of scholars, educators and community leaders and activists whose mission is to promote research collaborations that produce knowledge relevant to community needs and that support community action. URBAN also works to build the skills and knowledge needed to produce high quality collaborative research and to promote its value within the academy.
Educators and community practitioners often find that scholars who conduct research in the traditional, disconnected mode have not asked the questions, collected the data, or written up findings that would be most relevant to their concerns. Yet community-based organizations typically lack the capacity to conduct systematic data collection and analysis on their own. Scholars have research expertise, but most work in isolation from communities. Meanwhile, community-engaged scholarship is not well understood in the academy and that restricts the ability of scholars to devote time and energy to collaboration. In order to create policies and initiatives that respond to the complex challenges facing low-income communities and communities of color, community organizations, educators and academics need to find ways to connect and work together to conduct research that is relevant to community concerns and that can inform action.
URBAN is building a national network that connects scholars, educators and community leaders and activists. This network serves to facilitate partnerships where scholars and a variety of community change agents work together to identify research questions, design appropriate research, collect and analyze data, produce research reports, and design social and policy initiatives based upon research findings. In this way, URBAN facilitates the creation of new and rigorous knowledge that is relevant to community needs and that supports innovative community initiatives and public policies. URBAN is a forum for the dissemination of best practices and for raising the standards and appreciation of community engaged scholarship within the academy.
Education researchers have made a number of calls for making research more relevant (Oakes & Rogers, 2005; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 2006; Coburn & Stein, 2010).This presentation by one of URBAN’s national co-chairs will discuss the lessons learned in building collaborations for rigorous and relevant research over the two year period of URBAN’s existence. It will discuss the challenges presented by ethical issues, power imbalances among academics, educators, and community leaders, institutional barriers (e.g., tenure and promotion), and resource challenges as well as ways to address these challenge through long-term, sustained practice (Hale, 2008).

Author

• Mark R. Warren, University of Massachusetts - Boston