Research-Practice Partnerships as Community-Engaged Learning: Lessons Learned from a Collaborative Project with Youth Development Programs

Abstract

To bridge the gap between community-engaged learning and research-practice partnerships, we describe our experiences in a project jointly conceptualized and implemented by undergraduate students and youth development practitioners over the course of two academic semesters. The project offered students the opportunity to apply the skills they learned through coursework in a way that also supported the needs of community practitioners, providing both groups with opportunities to learn from each other. In this paper we describe the collaborative project, our process, the challenges we faced, and the impact of the project on the student researchers and the youth development practitioners. Written by representatives of both the student researchers and the practitioner collaborators, we hope this paper will inspire others to incorporate students in research-practice partnerships and that our reflections on the strengths and challenges of this process will facilitate more effective implementation of community-engaged scholarship in the future.