Talking Techquity:
URBAN RESEARCH

URBAN RESEARCH

Recommendations and Examples

As at Ohio State’s STEAM Factory, establish a permanent location as a key venue for faculty and local professionals to participate in sustained community outreach and research. The location should support "mingling" to encourage creative collaboration and new researcher-practitioner pairings. In addition, it should be off-campus in a neutral location that provides an open, relaxed, and easily accessible co-working space with free parking.

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Establish an independent clearinghouse for creating and maintaining vetted research-practitioner partnerships. The clearinghouse must act as a financial intermediary, with reporting obligations to both the community practitioner and the research institution. Through the clearinghouse, the trusted intermediary must explore and evaluate new metrics for assessing the effectiveness of community- engaged research partnerships from a variety of different perspectives.

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Using funds earmarked for broader impact and engagement, establish a permanent year-round, safe space as a dedicated site for data-driven investigation of social justice and humanitarian grand challenges (health, energy, environment, food). As for the engineering grand challenges, support culturally responsive STEM curriculum development, service learning, teacher training, and an on-line learning network to support replication and sharing of best practices.

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Use broader impact funds and the CS Department CISE platform to support a digital infrastructure that make updates rapidly available nationwide, including a distributed online community hub for information on grand challenge curricula, training, feedback, questions, and research.