Bronx Community College’s Education and Reading Department’s Catalytic Research Programs

Authors

Joan Wilson, CUNY Bronx Community CollegeFollow
Edward Lehner, CUNY Bronx Community CollegeFollow

Document Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

Winter 2-2016

Abstract

Faculty driven research is central to the intellectual integrity and financial viability of any college community. Greenwood and Levin (2005) highlight how colleges and universities have increasingly professionalized and commodified investigative practices in such a way that they no longer benefit the communities that they were created to serve. Bronx Community College's (BCC) Education and Reading Research Program is designed to question and interrupt research tendencies which propel self-fulfilling education and learning paradigms to produce and reify inter-generationally lived-realities and socio-economic reproduction of the least-advantaged communities. It is anticipated that the research efforts will also break the continuity of unintended effects of biased social policies, which evolve from socially-distant research careerism, by inaugurating a robust approach to action research. Our faculty action research program centers on the three pillars of investigative practices 1) qualitative inquiry 2) quantitative research and 3) action research centered on community development. Similar to Lincoln and Guba's (1989) authenticity criteria, our faculty research programs center on a notion that all research should primarily benefit the lives of those researched. The proposal that follows is a concise summary of our research programs and their central aims. Additionally, this paper provides the epistemological, theoretical, and methodological underpinnings, which inform each approach. Lastly, this research summary outlines the community beneficence goals that each group of faculty researchers share; and it proposes how these research efforts will be financially self-sustaining.

Comments

This position paper was presented to Dr. Thomas A. Isekenegbe, President of Bronx Community College, to formally outline the research agenda of the Department.