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From Ivory Tower to Urban Street: Using the Classroom as a Community Research and Development Tool

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2002

Jill Gregory
Affiliation:
Graduated from Chapman University with honors and a major in political science in May 2000. She currently attends the University of San Diego Law School.
Mark Mattern
Affiliation:
Ph.D., coinstructor for the course, was an assistant professor of political science at Chapman University and director of the HSSRL at the time of the course. He is now assistant professor of political science at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio.
Shari Mitchell
Affiliation:
M.A., coinstructor for the course, was the associate director of Chapman University's Ludie and David C. Henley Social Sciences Research Laboratory (HSSRL) at the time of the course. She is currently completing her doctorate in social ecology at the University of California, Irvine.

Extract

Radical democrat John Dewey ([1916] 1966) believed that education could be a powerful tool for developing citizens' character and drawing them into political engagement. He also argued that science could inform public debate and contribute to problem solving in the community (Dewey [1935] 1980, [1939] 1989). Here, we describe and evaluate our attempt to realize these twin ideals in a semester-long course at Chapman University during spring 1999. In this course, students were active learners holding partial control over their educational experience and democratic citizens attempting to make a contribution to their community.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2001 by the American Political Science Association

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