My pedagogical efforts over the years have focused on two key challenges I have faced in mentoring undergraduates:

1. How do I help undergraduates discover the thrill and value of social scientific research?

2. How do I help undergraduates connect meaningfully with their communities and become active and responsible citizens?

Community-based research (CBR) has become the means I employ to overcome these challenges.

How do I connect research methods instruction with real questions that captivate students' interests? Novices often feel overwhelmed by details of methodological mechanics and miss the point that methods are just tools for exploring fascinating questions. Instructors in social scientific research methods courses typically try to overcome this challenge by encouraging students to define research questions and hypotheses relating to students' experiences. While some of these studies are entertaining, to students they still often feel similar to the typical "canned" learning experiences that go no further than the professor and, after receiving a grade, are relegated to the "circular file."

The undergraduate research movement has heeded this call for more meaningful engagement of undergraduates in the research process. Working with close faculty mentoring, students engage in real research projects, sometimes of their own design and other times as an apprentice in the faculty mentor's research. Students working in such rich undergraduate research programs benefit as much from involvement in real research as from close faculty mentoring and disciplinary socialization.

But at the same time, I am increasingly concerned about contemporary undergraduate students' civic apathy and disconnection from the "outside" world. Undergraduate students' struggles with finding meaning in the research process seem to be symptomatic of a bigger disconnect between personal action and understanding how action can make a difference. Moreover, many youths who are privileged to attend college are dissociated from individuals whose opportunities have been overtly limited by social injustices. This dissociation is often further reinforced by the rigid boundaries of time (e.g., an eighty-minute class period, a fourteenweek semester) and space (e.g., rows of chairs in a classroom, the protected walls separating a college or university from area neighborhoods) that structure learning in higher education. Undergraduate education needs to focus as much on providing exposure to and fostering civic awareness as on helping students learn knowledge and skills that will allow them to make a difference.

Certainly, the burgeoning service-learning movement in higher education has been an answer to this call for facilitating students' connection with the real world. Students have been sent to community locations nationwide to provide direct service and extend a helping hand. But students are infrequently given opportunities to use new higher-order academic skills in these experiences, and because they are typically unaccompanied by faculty, they miss the benefit of direct faculty role-modeling and engagement.

How can the best of the undergraduate research and service-learning movements be united so that their respective strengths compensate for their weaknesses? Community-based research answers this challenge by engaging undergraduate students in a collaborative partnership to work on real research that will make a difference lor local communities. Students are socialized as public acholan, learning actively about the research process and about how empirical inquiry can be applied to real social issues.

Community-Based Research

Community-based research is collaborative inquiry that is dedicated primarily to serving the research or information needs o( community organizations. The CBR coininiiuitycampus partnership includes representatives of the community organi/ation. students, and faculty. These partners work together to address a community organization's need to study itself (e.g., to evaluate a program), or to gather information necessary for organizational or program development (e.g., a community needs/assets assessment).

CBR is public scholarship-rigorous research as a form of service to the public good. Community organizations aim to provide services for target populations. To ensure that limited resources are used as effectively as possible and to compete for increasingly limited funding resources, community organizations must study the needs and assets of their target population and the effectiveness of their programs and services. Yet community practitioners typicullv lack training in research, and therefore are at a disadvantage as they seek to sustain their organization.

The expectation in CBH is that all partners will bring some skills and expertise to the partnership and all partners will learn from the collaborative experience-all partners are both teachers and learners. Community partners are professionals who are experts in working with the target community and with the issues at the heart of their agency's mission. They are experts in nonprofit management, fundraising, and navigating the political terrain. Campus partners bring knowledge of research design and methodology, time and energy for studv implementation, and skill in data analvsis and presentation. Thev may also bring connections with relevant theory and basic and applied research. By the conclusion of the partnership, community partners have developed research acumen that will be of continued benefit to organi/ational development. Campus partners have developed deeper understanding of social justice, of the nonprofit sector, of the applied value of research, and often of the social policy implications of their work.