Project Incubation: Training Undergraduates in Collaborative Research Ethics

Oberlin College, Oberlin OH

Investigators

Abstract

This incubation award supports a team of researchers from diverse disciplines at a liberal arts college and Historically Black Colleges and Universities who will work with community partners in Alabama to develop curricular materials and a pilot workshop on the ethics of research. The project’s aim is to develop a network of researchers to respond to community directions rooted in best practices to facilitate justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in environmental research. Inclusion of community partners as knowledge keepers and mentors – and as co-creators of the project’s goals – offers a unique opportunity to develop ethical and responsible methods of collaborative research design and practice and to model such partnerships, with the goal of empowering communities. The project team will recruit and train a diverse group of students in best practices for collaboration to create actionable guidelines for environmental justice communities, ethics boards, and educational institutions. The project will enable faculty, undergraduates, and community partners to learn from one another, with the shared intention of benefiting communities in Alabama and training students on research ethics and environmental justice. The team will use a three-phase process to develop and validate a new framework for training students in the ethics of community-engaged research. The remote planning phase will create the framework by utilizing community-engaged approaches to center the voices of local community members and organizers to develop ethical and responsible methods of collaborative research design. In the synergy phase, researchers, students, and community leaders will work together to refine and disseminate the initial framework through collaborative coursework. At the workshop phase, students will learn best practices for collaboration with environmental justice communities as well as methods of geospatial data, environmental pollutant sampling, and oral narrative data collection using software tools. The project will pilot a curriculum and methodology for training a diverse cohort of undergraduates in ethical research with environmental justice communities, its synergy with environmental change and climate mitigation and adaptation, and best practices for facilitating institutional commitment to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. Outcomes of the project will be assessed and refined through an iterative online process with community members, organizers, and partners. This project is funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences and managed by the ER2 Program of the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.