Instructor Jamie McPike (standing) chats with students before their final presentations.
Students of PLCY 1802: Engaged Research/Engaged Publics present their final policy narratives to the public.
ENGAGED POLICY RESEARCH LAB at BROWN UNIVERSITY
"Engaged Research/Engaged Publics" is an innovative, undergraduate course at Brown University that brings together applied policy research and creative storytelling.
In collaboration with Diana Graizbord (Sociology, University of Georgia), we designed this class as a policy research methods course where students conduct research driven by a policy problem. In doing so, students became familiar with the methods and practices used by policy analysts, designers, consultants, and applied researchers.
We partnered with the City of Providence Department of Innovation to investigate a pressing public policy issue facing city residents. Students worked in teams to conduct iterative research and analysis of this issue and crafted compelling, multi-media (op-doc, podcast, etc.) narratives of this issue to be shared with stakeholders.
The course was offered in Spring 2016. The syllabus can be found here. The course website, which I designed, can be found here.
This work has been featured by the Sunlight Foundation as a model for city-university partnerships. The collaborators have drafted a series of articles for the Huffington Post on our process, which can be found here, here, and here (coming soon!).
Photo credit: Isabel DeBre