The Foundations of Community-Engaged Research Micro-Credential program
The Community-Engaged Research (CER) Toolkit is housed in Canvas and is open to all CU Boulder employees. It focuses on collaborative approaches to community-engaged research which engage in knowledge production with active involvement of community members, organizations and researchers in all phases of the research process.
The toolkit was built through a collaboration between the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science (CIRES), Masters of the Environment program (MENV), the Environmental Studies department (ENVS) and Public and Community Engaged Scholarship (PACES). The toolkit curriculum incorporates Shared Equity Leadership approaches, Indigenous knowledge and equity-lens principles. Specific educational objectives include identifying researcher values and positionality, developing dialogic skills for collaboration with other researchers and community partners, using an equity-lens approach in research and applying data sovereignty principles to sharing project results. Each unique module can be copied into other Canvas courses to supplement course curriculum. Instructions are provided on the home page.
Public and Community-Engaged Scholarship also offers a micro-credential program, Equitable Approaches to Community-Engaged Research, to allow researchers to achieve the educational objectives of the Community-Engaged ResearchToolkit with an interdisciplinary cohort of CU Boulder researchers. Through workshops and assignments, participants will learn how to build and sustain equitable community-research partnerships. After completion of the micro-credential program, learners will be equipped to sustainably achieve research objectives by integrating their expertise within reciprocal community partnerships, ultimately translating research findings into actionable solutions.