The community Engaged scholarship Cohort Project

This page provides an overview of our Community Engaged Scholarship (CES) Cohort Project, including its purpose, primary goals, and examples of benefits. Contact information is provided at the end of the page for those who have questions or want to learn how to get involved. 

What is Community Engaged Scholarship (CES)? 

Community engaged scholarship (CES) often refers to scholarly activities related to service, research, and/or teaching that: 

• involves full collaboration of university students, community partners, and university faculty as co-educators, co-learners, and co-generators of knowledge; and 

• aims to address questions of social significance and public concern.

There is a wealth of literature that describes CES, frameworks for doing CES, and why this approach to scholarship is valuable within and outside of university settings.

Purpose of the CES Cohort Project:

The purpose of the CES Cohort Project is to strategically involve university students in a transformative process that allows them to learn about and actively facilitate (a) community engaged scholarship -- including but not limited to service-learning -- and (b) evidence-based teaching and service within NCSU and the broader Research Triangle community. 

Although several key elements of this work have been ongoing as part of the ERPAS team for more than a decade, this specific CES Cohort Project formally began at the beginning of the 2019-2020 academic year. 

Primary Goals of the CES Cohort Project:

• Provide doctoral students with an intensive, focused, and multi-year experience that allows them to successfully facilitate CES and other important professional skills.

• Strategically support involvement in research or program evaluation, and (occasionally) professional identity mentoring of undergraduate students within the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

• Strategically address critical needs of the non-campus community. For example, we aim to enhance learning outcomes for historically underserved children (K to 6th grade students) living in the Research Triangle or within North Carolina. 

• Meaningfully advance knowledge and scholarship related to areas such as (a) facilitating community-based approaches to improving children's academic outcomes, and (b) how to advance or support CES at universities.

Sample Activities of Doctoral Students Selected into the CES Cohort Project:

• Contribute to undergraduate teaching activities, such as offering additional sections of a high-impact, critical service-learning course and/or serving as a teaching assistant for that service-learning course or other high-impact courses designed for undergraduate students.

• Support effective program implementation at school partner sites (e.g., coaching teachers’ use of HELPS-SG, working with teachers to review data and make data-based decisions that support each child’s learning, etc.). 

• Host training workshops for volunteers and teachers involved with teaching at the after‐school sites.

• Work directly with nonprofit program directors to implement programs, ensure program success, and address systems-level challenges.

• Use quantitative and qualitative methods to evaluate program goals and characteristics.

• Help to produce scholarly publications and presentations based on this work. For example, graduate students have helped or can help to produce scholarship related to academic programming in schools and communities, facilitating a critical service-learning course, or evaluating the unique model/benefits that come from being part of a university-supported CES Cohort.

• Participate in regular professional development opportunities (e.g., discuss scholarly readings related to community engagement or undergraduate service-learning; learn about program evaluation methods in applied settings; participate in CES seminars open to the broader community within and outside of NCSU; present at professional conferences relevant to the work of the CES Cohort).

• Mentor undergraduate students at NCSU. For example, doctoral students will be responsible for co-mentoring at least two undergraduate students (across multiple years) while the undergraduate student contributes to our research team and the CES Project.

Some Benefits of the CES Cohort Project

Examples of benefits for doctoral students

Doctoral students will have the opportunity to:

• Participate in an innovative approach to community-university partnerships, and with this model of a CES Cohort, doctoral students receive focused and intensive training in CES (i.e., by actively engaging in and learning about CES, service-learning, and its reciprocal benefits within and outside of a university setting). 

• Participate in work that is directly focused on community-based partnerships and projects designed to improve educational equity.

• Co-produce several pieces of scholarship about (a) CES, and (b) the intervention work resulting from this form of CES. As part of the CES Cohort Project, each student in the cohort is anticipated to co-produce at least four scholarly publications—which also helps each student fulfill NCSU doctoral activities and/or requirements. 

• Take the lead in producing at least one piece of scholarship related to the CES Cohort project.

• Enhance their practice-based skills, scholarly accomplishments, and approaches to community engagement in ways that will be highly relevant to leadership-focused careers in areas of education and psychology. 

Examples of benefits for the community outside of NCSU

Our collective work with the CES Cohort Project will:

• Ensure that the community-based goals of partner organizations are met. For example, the work has supported teachers who work in YMCA after-school programs and improve essential literacy skills for elementary school students who need extra support.  

• Allow us to develop and evaluate a model for community engagement and after-school programming that could be transferred to other parts of NC and/or the United States. 

• Facilitate the development and evaluation of a potentially transferable model for preparing doctoral students to use effective frameworks of CES. 

Contact Us

If you have interest in getting involved with the CES Cohort Project as a community partner organization, a community volunteer, or a NCSU undergraduate student, please contact us. 

All questions or statements of interest should be sent to the project director, Dr. John Begeny (john_begeny@ncsu.edu).