The success of an RSL project or class depends upon the relationships between each of the individuals or groups involved: the student, the faculty mentor or instructor, and the community partner. For each step in the development of a project, we have created a table to help you consider how the partnership can be useful to you. Before going on, please read our explanations carefully. This guide is intended to strengthen your awareness of the different perspectives, knowledge, goals, and interests that each individual or group brings to the RSL partnership.

RSL courses are designed to provide a service to an organization or individual and to teach about research in this applied context. Therefore, the most successful RSL course is one that actively involves the community partner and the faculty member in determining how the service of the course will be developed and delivered. With RSL courses, the service and course content are connected through reflection and the research component of the class, a pedagogical mix that can have powerful results.

RSL projects are developed and implemented in an applied context. These projects will (1) provide a service to the community partner, (2) serve the academic interests and skills of the faculty mentor, and (3) offer the student an invaluable learning experience. The success of these projects depends on the involvement of students, faculty, and community partners at every step of the way. The Student RSL Handbook has details on how this collaboration can work at every phase of a project.

In the summer of 2003, Scholarship with a Civic Mission funded its first group of student RSL projects. One such project clearly captures the roles that each individual or group must play for a successful RSL relationship. In this case, the student, a young woman, developed a research idea in conjunction with a community organization where she had spent significant time over the last two years in a service capacity. She discussed her ideas with her research mentor and revised and focused them to be a manageable research project. Once she became immersed in the organization in this new role, however, it was clear that her project needed to be revised, so with a series of new conversations, she worked out a related, yet slightly different, project that would provide information that was immediately relevant (and much needed) to the organization. This scenario demonstrates the flexibilty that all member of this partnership must have in order for these difficult projects to work, as well as the necessity for effective communication among all parties.

Students might be interested in RSL at Duke because of a class that exposed them to provocative new ideas, or their own experiences with service and/or research that have prompted them to pursue deeper, more substantial involvement. Students can pursue RSL through coursework that’s been developed by a faculty/community partnership, or through independent research. For the latter, students can find interested faculty mentors by contacting project personnel for suggestions or by reading about faculty research interests on department websites. Students can approach a potential faculty mentor with an idea for a project that comes from her or his service experience, or a student can become involved in an ongoing faculty research project that has an RSL component. RSL projects are complex in that they involve so many interested individuals, so students who are flexible and open-minded about what project to pursue and how to pursue it are likely to be successful. In the scenario above, the student was willing to revise her interests to develop a project that was more immediately relevant to the organization.

The Faculty member will participate in every aspect of RSL courses and research projects. Thoughtful faculty involvement is essential for the successful integration of course content, service, and research through guided reflection and feedback for students. For RSL projects, faculty members have extensive experience with how to navigate the university’s requirement and how to produce substantive research, and faculty will work in conjunction with students and community partners to design and conduct studies of mutual interest. For example, the faculty mentor can provide information on:

• the type of research question to pursue
• methods with which to answer research questions
• current research literature
• data management, analysis, and interpretation

In addition, faculty mentors may find themselves in a debriefing role with their mentees, guiding them through the insights and disappointments that can accompany RSL. In the above scenario, this faculty mentor played a true mentoring role in his willingness to help the student process and come to terms with the new knowledge she gained through working with this organization and her disillusionment about these types of organizations in general. Although she had worked with this group for years, her role in research revealed ineffective processes she learned were common for this type of organization; the mentor was instrumental in helping her move forward with her work with a more educated perspective.

A community partner can be an individual who is part of Duke University (e.g., a living group, or an office, like the Office of Institutional Equity), or an organization in the Durham area (e.g., the Durham Public Schools, a non-profit organization) or outside Durham and even outside the United States. The RSL partnership is dependent on the many contributions these groups and individuals make to the collaborative efforts.

The key to a successful RSL course or project is that it will not be "dropped into" the community; it will be developed and conducted along with the community. RSL courses and studies must be designed to meet a community need that is articulated by the community (not assumed by the student or faculty member), may be conducted in a community setting, and should provide information or a product of immediate relevance for the community partner. For example, the first group of student projects funded by this program worked with these partners: Lutheran Family Services of Raleigh; La Fundacion Comunitaria del Bajio, a grassroots community organization based in Irapuato, Mexico, that strives to build coalitions between the private, public, and non-governmental sectors to promote development and eliminate poverty in the state of Guanajuato; and Egerton University in Kenya.

Quite often, community-based organizations, particularly non-profits, are overburdened and understaffed, and need help with data analysis, or program evaluation, or a report of recent research findings. It is important for the student and faculty to work with the community partner to identify how research can serve the group’s needs and what form the research should take. The community partner is the expert on the context in which the student will be working and should have input into how the study is enacted, how data are collected, what form the final product will take, etc.