Using practice-based research to maximize positive community outcomes and enhance research quality

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Developing Youths’ Engagement in Democratic Practices in the U.S. through Arts-based Youth Participatory Programs

Proposal

This paper describes a community-engaged youth program design process that involved people from different disciplines/college at a university with local community members in education and youth development. This paper argues that a community-engaged, practice-based research approach enhances that quality of research because it can widen the field of potential data,it enables scholars to deliberately apply findings throughout the ongoing program implementation process, and by improving trust between universities and local communities (Scholarship of Engagement, 2022). This paper highlights ways in which research and community engaged program design can work synergistically, yielding positive change in the community while also advancing the field of youth development.

Most public institutions and universities in the United States have a public mission to engage with communities to translate research into effective practices--improving the lives of local citizens. Still, individual faculty members or departments lack a sustained community presence and infrastructure to support longer term community impact. For this reason, public engagement scholars (e.g., Cook & Nation, 2016; Fitzgerald et al., 2012) recommend that university administrators based in the U.S. look to Cooperative Extension as a primary unit through which to foster sustained and positive community change because of its embeddedness in local communities (Franz, 2014). Extension is the largest outreach program in the U.S. land-grant university system whose mission is to address pressing social issues in local communities through the implementation of evidenced-based programs designed to improve communities. Paramount to Extension’s program design and implementation is the process through which it engages with local stakeholders (e.g. youth, families, local government) and with scholarship to design programs that draw from community and scholarly knowledge.

The program featured in this paper, 4-H Portraits of Home (4-H POH), is both a research study and a 4-H youth program. (The 4-H youth development program is part of the Extension system.) 4-H POH is designed to bridge social divisions by supporting the development of civic skills and by fostering trust and empathy among a diverse group of young people representing the changing county demographics. The project is co-led by an education faculty member and an Extension faculty member, who came together to conduct practice-based research through the implementation of programs supported by Extension’s localized and sustained infrastructure. The POH university team collaborated with community members who identified the need to address social divisions--as the community has received media attention around youth-led racists acts targeting other youth in the community. The program design draws from the Critical Youth Empowerment framework (Jennings, et al, 2006) that centers on the ideas that relationships, trust, empathy, and praxis (reflective action) are important for civic engagement. The core activities of the program include: meeting in community spaces (museums, cultural centers) and talking with community members to explore diverse historical perspectives about changes in the community; creating digital stories to promote youths’ awareness of different perspectives and lived experiences related to the community spaces; and showcasing their learning and digital projects at events, such as the County Fair and local libraries.

Authors

• Joanna A Tzenis, U of MN

• Joan Dejaeghere, University of Minnesota

• Erma Mujic, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

• Heidi Ione Fahning, Purdue University

• Zhuldyz Amankulova, University of Minnesota