Faculty and students present their projects at the community engagement showcase in the new Ofelia Miramontes and Leonard Baca Education Building, Oct. 4, 2024.
Patrick Campbell Photography
On the afternoon of Oct. 4, CU Boulder’s School of Education’s building dedication and open house brought together over 300 people to honor the school’s research, student work, donor support and community impact. Alumni, donors and K-12 partners joined university faculty, staff and students to celebrate the achievements and future goals of the school with an afternoon of dedications, building tours, activities and a showcase displaying the school’s community-engaged research.
“In an applied field like education, we can’t build knowledge in the abstract or in an isolated ivory tower,” said Joseph Polman, associate dean for research at the School of Education. “We need to be working with and in communities and sites where powerful educational practices and policies are being developed, tested and refined, to serve the needs of actual people.”
The school’s devotion to supporting its students, and its commitment to advancing public understanding of education, shone through at the open house poster session where faculty members and graduate students showed their community-engaged research. The showcase highlighted how community-engaged scholarship not only enriches the educational experience of CU Boulder students but also bridges the gap between the university’s academic research and community education needs.
“Throughout history and even to the present day, far too much research based out of universities has been extractive, and only of benefit to the academic researchers. To work toward a more just and humane world, university-based scholars must seek to build equitable partnerships with stakeholders that serve the needs of communities, not the needs of researchers,” said Polman.
The faculty and students’ commitment to social justice is evident throughout their research, which strongly reflects the school’s values in promoting and facilitating equal opportunity for all students throughout the country. Their research explores and confronts a range of systematic issues present in the education system, such as language barriers within classrooms, ethnic and racial discrimination within school systems, economic disparities leading to a lesser quality of education, and the rights of LGBTQ+ students.
The research of faculty members and graduate students continues to lead to an array of impressive project outcomes, including a documentary by A Queer Endeavor, CU Boulder’s nationally recognized center for gender and sexual diversity in education. Created in partnership with Denver Public Schools, Reclaiming the Narrative focuses on LGBTQ+ students’ intersectional experiences within schools, giving queer students a platform upon which to share their experiences and thus promote social change. You can discover more about their work.
Undergraduate members of Puksta Scholars, a scholarship program focused on civic engagement and facilitating positive change on campus and within external communities, presented their community-engaged project that tackles systematic barriers in education. Through a partnership with the Longmont Latino Chamber of Commerce, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) K-12 students, along with their guardians, are invited to participate in workshops that provide the necessary tools to assist them in their journey to college. Puksta Scholars intend to provide a ‘first-generation scholar guide’ to help high school students reach their potential and fulfill their dreams of a high-quality college education. Visit their website for more details on this project and the continuing work of the Puksta Scholars.
The School of Education and University Hill Elementary School presented the outcome of their five-year-old weekly after-school mentoring program. The Cultural Mentoring Program joins together Education and Ethnic Studies majors with 5th graders belonging to the Latinx community. The program strengthens cultural identity among underrepresented students and fosters relationships between CU Boulder and University Hill students.
These projects are just a few examples of the School of Education’s collective humanitarian approach towards community engagement. Through striving to build equitable partnerships that prioritize the needs of the community, and with the help of funding from the Office for Public and Community-Engaged Scholarship, the School of Education continues to raise awareness and inspire change on a national level.
“The School of Education has a shared commitment to democracy, diversity, equity and justice. To live this out, we absolutely need to be doing community-engaged scholarship,” said Polman.