New center promotes community research

New center promotes community research

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News staff

When Houston Mayor Bill White delivered the commencement address at Rice this year, he encouraged graduates to perform public service at some point in their careers.

Rice’s new Center for Civic Engagement gives undergraduate students a head start on achieving such a goal by promoting civic research courses that send students out into the community as part of their studies.

JEFF FITLOW

From left, Claudia Jaime, education director for the Magnolia Park Community Family Center, tours a neighborhood in Houston’s East End with Rice students Celina Davila, Esther Tricoche, Alexandra Bacalas and Meagan Alley, who are enrolled in the Urban Life and Systems class.

“Our goal is to engage students in substantive, quality community-based research projects that complement and enhance the research agendas of Rice faculty,” said Robert Stein, director of the Center for Civic Engagement.

The center creates opportunities for students to acquire research skills and to apply those skills in solving real-world problems. It facilitates community-based research projects that encourage faculty and students to work alongside Houston-based community partners to address various challenges facing the city.

Rice Professor Michael Emerson’s new “Urban Life and Systems” course in the Department of Sociology is a good example. The course is designed to help students better understand urban development and the life experiences of urbanites. Working in groups of four, students are assigned to two Houston-area neighborhoods — one of which is significantly poorer than the other. The students visit their two neighborhoods each week to carry out an assignment, such as interviewing local residents, and they volunteer at a local public school. After studying people in their neighborhood environment for a semester, students will write an ethnography of the neighborhood. As part of the course work, students will share their final report with a community partner for feedback.

“Through this course, the students get hands-on experience of the issues we talk about in class, such as the working poor,” said Emerson, the Allyn and Gladys Cline Professor of Sociology and director of the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life at Rice. Because the course will be conducted yearly, the students’ reports can be used to create a living record of the neighborhoods and the neighborhoods’ changes over time.

“The Center for Civic Engagement will be a great aid in helping us coordinate the activities of this class and identify projects and partners and more,” Emerson said.

Stephanie Post, executive director of the Center for Civic Engagement, noted that the center can provide faculty who are teaching civic research courses with resources to assist with course development; the center also can help match a course with community-based research projects and partners.
Other faculty resources offered by the center include assistance organizing and funding transportation, stipends for student researchers outside of class, and research space.

The Center for Civic Engagement manages the effort previously known as the Quality Enhancement Plan, which was geared toward the intellectual development of Rice undergraduates in urban Houston. It also has taken the Community Involvement Center and Leadership Rice under its wing. All of these programs contribute to the goal of Rice becoming fully engaged with the city of Houston, as stated in the university’s Vision for the Second Century.

In support of that goal, the center’s staff is now looking for faculty in all six undergraduate schools at Rice who might be teaching classes in the 2007-08 school year that are relevant to civic research (CR) so that their courses can be included on the list of “CR” courses. The center also wants to make students aware of courses that will be offered in spring 2007 so they can register for them this November.

To qualify as a CR course, the course must entail a major assignment that is a community-based research or design project that results in a “product” that could be used by a community partner.

“A civic research architecture course might include a design project,” Post said. “A CR economics course might entail a financial analysis of a nonprofit organization. A CR humanities course could involve recording oral histories of racial and ethnic group experiences. A CR engineering course might include an analysis of flooding during hurricane conditions. All of these would focus on Houston.”

Whenever possible, the major assignment should allow for the students to meet with community partners to help define the research or design problem, to conduct the research and to present research findings. Students must also give a public presentation of their work to campus or community audiences.

For more information about civic research courses or the Center for Civic Engagement, contact Post at 713-348-4327 or <post@rice.edu>, or stop by the center on the second floor of Rice Memorial Center.