Researching community engagement: current methodological approaches, challenges, and opportunities - GradSN_Sponsored Round Table

Abstract: To explore the Conference call for Redefining Research, we propose a roundtable as a Collaborative Research opportunity to identify common challenges in research methodologies. How do methodological decisions shape the questions we are raising and the debates we are having at the IARSLCE Conference? Can we identify certain methodologies that are best suited to study community engagement? What role does the community play in our research projects? Should our research be engaged research? What epistemological assumptions run in our methodological decisions? How do we connect data produced in the context of university studies (e.g., for internal or certification uses) and scholarly research (e.g., dissertations)? How does the anonymity of higher education institutions help or hinder our research outcomes?
The goals of this roundtable include:
To compare different methodological approaches used in recent Ph.D. dissertations on community engagement.
To develop a common understanding of challenges and opportunities in the field.
To co-create a plan to support future research projects on community engagement.
The IARSLCE Graduate Students Network will gather the outcomes of the group discussion and open a conversation for future collaborative research on research methodologies in community engagement. The outcomes of this roundtable will also be used to orient the future work of the IARSLCE Graduate Students Network Professional Development Committee. The GradSN will also engage the audience in a conversation for a potential graduate student-led special issue of the International Journal of Service-Learning and Community-Engagement that will focus on methodological approaches, challenges, and opportunities for engaged scholarship.

Narrative: Statement of Purpose
The field of community engagement expands across multiple disciplinary and epistemic cultures and is informed by academic and practitioner perspectives, producing a largely contested knowledge base. Most of the field’s richness comes from this practice-based approach, the multiple definitions of community, university, and engagement, the different cultural contexts, and the various actors involved in community engagement projects. However, this could be overwhelming for scholars designing their research projects, particularly in deciding which methods will be used. Graduate programs often do not equip graduate students with principles of engaged scholarship and offer their students training in conventional and often dominant paradigms of quantitative, qualitative, or historical research. Engaged graduate students then will have to often rely on their own to learn about methodologies that will advance their community-engaged research projects. As graduate students, we usually struggle to find references and methodologies to frame our research projects, having to borrow from other disciplines and fields and navigate the onto-epistemological tensions of weaving in traditional research methodologies with engaged scholarship principles.

How do methodological decisions shape the questions we are raising and the debates we are having at the IARSLCE Conference? Can we identify certain methodologies that are best suited to study community engagement? What role does the community play in our research projects? Should our research be engaged research? What epistemological assumptions run in our methodological decisions? How do we connect data produced in the context of university studies (e.g., for internal or certification uses) and scholarly research (e.g., dissertations)? How does the anonymity of higher education institutions help or hinder our research outcomes? How do programs and advisors address the specificity of research on community engagement?

Scholarly Significance and Goals
These questions are not only important to graduate students and early-career researchers, but are also central to the community engagement movement and its futures as it regards the questions of epistemic injustice and power imbalances between universities and their excluded others. Therefore, we anticipate this roundtable session will contribute to the emerging conversations in the field around epistemic injustice, decolonization, and anti racism. The goals of this roundtable include:
To compare different methodological approaches used in recent Ph.D. dissertations on community engagement.
To develop a common understanding of challenges and opportunities in the field.
To co-create a plan to support future research projects on community engagement.

Session Format
As a way to explore the Conference call for Redefining Research, we propose a roundtable as a Collaborative Research opportunity to identify common challenges in research methodologies. The IARSLCE Graduate Students Network will gather the outcomes of the group discussion and open a conversation for future collaborative research on research methodologies in community engagement. The outcomes of this roundtable will also be used to orient the future work of the IARSLCE Graduate Students Network Professional Development Committee. The GradSN will also engage the audience in a conversation for a potential graduate student-led special issue of the International Journal of Service-Learning and Community-Engagement that will focus on methodological approaches, challenges, and opportunities for engaged scholarship.

Plans for Allocation of Time
We will start the session by sharing a short video from Dissertation Dish participants in 2022-2023 and an overview of the methodologies, methods, and techniques used by 40 Ph.D. dissertations published between 2018 and 2022 (see References). The second part of the session will be thematic group discussions based on general specific methodological approaches: qualitative, quantitative, mixed methods, engaged research (community-based, participatory action research), and historical research. Each group will have to explore the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

Keywords: research methods, graduate students, epistemology