Community College Classrooms and Community Action Research: Democracy’s Colleges and Hope

Author: Katherine Rowell, Sinclair Community College

My journey into community colleges began in the fall of 1996 when I started a tenure-track position as a sociology faculty member in Dayton, Ohio. Having earned my doctorate in sociology at Ohio State University, I found myself rooted in Dayton due to family circumstances. Despite my limited knowledge about the community college mission, my personal experiences as a first-generation Appalachian college student and an undergraduate student–parent gave me a deep understanding of the challenges that diverse community college students face.

While my college offered some support, I discovered that the American Sociological Association provided little support for community college faculty members (Rowell, “North Central Sociological Association Presidential Address”). For many faculty members, the lack of disciplinary interest in and support from community colleges, the heavy teaching loads, and workplace service requirements are barriers to research participation. Research within my discipline indicates that many community college faculty members (including adjuncts) would like opportunities to participate in research and scholarship but often lack the support (Brown et al.; Curtis et al.; Kapitulik et al; ASA Task Force). While I found ways to connect my teaching to publish in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) field, I could not overcome barriers to maintain any “traditional” scholarship in my concentration areas of poverty, homelessness, and eviction. The Mellon/ACLS fellowship was the first opportunity to apply for significant funds for scholarship.

It is worthwhile to fund and support all forms of research and scholarship at community colleges. Undergraduate research is recognized as a high-impact pedagogical practice (Rowell and Smith; Hensel; Kuh). Increasingly, community college students engage in undergraduate research, and even the National Science Foundation supports and encourages student research (Patton and Hause).

Community colleges, as the embodiment of democracy, are uniquely positioned to champion the community action research (CAR) method. There are different types of CAR, but for this reflection CAR refers to research in which researchers, students, and the community work together in the research process to address local issues of concern. Unlike traditional undergraduate research, CAR engages those most affected by the research. This method, which enhances student learning and outcomes, has the power to dismantle structural barriers in communities, such as housing insecurity, that hinder many community college students’ academic success. The possibilities of CAR for student learning and community transformation underscore the significance of this research method.

CAR can be a powerful pedagogical tool and a catalyst for promoting social change and justice for community college students and their communities, a method for increased public scholarship among community college faculty members, and a path toward increased diversity within academic disciplines. Student participation in CAR within classes not only hones important workforce skills but also demonstrates the power of civic engagement in effecting community change. It is a bridge that connects course outcomes to students’ daily lives, fostering a sense of empowerment and motivation. Increasing hope among our students is a key to student success (Wells et al. 1). Higher education becomes more than a paycheck; it becomes hope for stronger communities and a better world.

Community Action Research as Democracy’s Pedagogy

Increasingly, there is recognition that community college students, like all higher education students, should have opportunities for undergraduate research (Rowell and Smith; Patton et al.; Hensel). While community college faculty members still need support to use CAR as a method, the method often aligns more with the mission of community colleges than other forms of scholarship do. While CAR benefits any student, it is almost always the case that students enrolled in courses at community colleges are from the same community and plan to work and live there upon graduation. Since community college students are the community, they often have more of a vested interest in participating (Hensel).

In 2022, Campus Compact produced a critical edited volume that challenged the often-false workplace-versus-civic-engagement narrative and called for democracy’s colleges to support helping students both develop essential workplace skills and become engaged, active citizens (Robinson and Hurd). Andrew Seligsohn states this well in the foreword:

It is hard to miss, though, that these efforts at improving community college student success have proceeded on the basis of a specific vision of the kind of education community college students need. The student is assumed to be a person whose primary need is for a credential that will enable them to earn a middle class wage. In light of the economic realities faced by community college students, it is undoubtedly important that colleges provide students with a pathway to financial stability for themselves and their families. However, if that is as far as a community college education goes, it will fall short of meeting the demands of democracy and of justice.

The policies and practices that create the economic and racial inequality facing so many community college students will not be changed by helping some of them make it into the middle class. . . .

Community colleges must provide their students with an education that enables them to claim their public voice at the local and national level. That is what students at selective four-year institutions expect from their college educations; we should expect no less for community college students. (vi–vii)

When education is overly focused on workforce development, students often lose sight of the importance of the humanities and social sciences. However, community-driven research, which engages faculty members, students, and the communities they serve, bridges workforce preparation and democratic engagement.

Promoting Hope and Student Success

Over the years, I have witnessed how engaging students in community research can improve their academic success. Receiving this fellowship gave me the time and support to fully engage in CAR. I continue to see the ripples in my community from this fellowship.

In 2018, the City of Dayton was named the twenty-sixth worst city in the United States for the rate of eviction filings (“Top Evicting Large Cities”). My students completed a report on this issue, which led to the formation of a citywide eviction task force. However, the pandemic hit a year later, and the research was not continued. I witness students’ struggles with housing insecurity daily. A 2023 survey found that over forty-eight percent of college students were housing insecure, and the problem is often worse for students of color and community college students (Hope Center for Basic Student Needs). Numerous community college initiatives like Achieving the Dream, Completion to Design, and Unlocking Opportunity have made their way to college campuses to increase student success rates, particularly for students of color. While some of these programs have had some small successes, it is evident that there is a need for community colleges to address the community’s structural barriers that make it difficult for students to succeed in college. Housing insecurity is one of the more important factors affecting student success and economic mobility for many. Housing affordability may be one of the most critical factors, given that it remains one of the highest costs to most families and dramatically affects the ability to afford college.

During this fellowship is the first time I have genuinely been able to work with students and the community to increase awareness and support groups and organizations. With minimal funds and release time, the fellowship resulted in a community storytelling project, a book, a conference, a play, museum exhibits, and a short documentary. The success of this fellowship was partly due to community collaboration and organizational and university partnerships, which enabled me to leverage the fellowship dollars for additional project support from the community. Two of the community projects resulted in over two thousand students and community participants.

Facing Eviction and Housing Insecurity Community Storytelling Project

Approximately twenty-five percent of the fellowship funds enabled me to work with the Facing Project out of Indiana (facingproject.com/facing-eviction-and-housing-insecurity/). This organization’s mission is community storytelling. The organization provided the training to collect lived experiences, published a book, supported a play (written and produced by me), and developed a podcast that aired on NPR (npr.org/podcasts/647018582/the-facing-project). Students, faculty members, and the community worked together on this project. Students served as writers and storytellers, and some as actors in the play. Over one hundred people were trained for this project, and fifty stories about housing insecurity, including homelessness and eviction, were included.

The book Facing Eviction and Housing Insecurity is now used across Ohio for prison education in Social Problems classes and a local university’s poverty class (Rowell, Facing). The work and research were recently featured in an episode of a local NPR series entitled Brick by Brick: “Tenants, Landlords, Evictions and Right to Counsel.”

National Building Museum Eviction Exhibit and Student and Community Engagement

One of the first activities of the eviction task force was a community book read focusing on the book Evicted (Desmond). I had planned to visit the National Building Museum exhibit based on this book in Washington, DC, but the pandemic happened. Another twenty-five percent of the fellowship funds covered bringing this national exhibit to Dayton. Unexpectedly, I learned that receiving a competitive fellowship can help foster partnerships with other organizations. Since the National Exhibit on Eviction was coming to Dayton, the University of Dayton adopted a housing justice theme for the annual community justice symposium. The exhibit opened during the same week as the conference, and over eight hundred attendees representing organizations, governments, community activities, students, and faculty members attended the event and were able to visit the exhibit that week. The University of Dayton contributed significant funding and staff support to the public conversation on housing justice.

This fellowship reminded me of the importance of two-year and four-year partnerships. My college promoted that I received this fellowship widely. The University of Dayton and several organizations contacted me to offer further financial support and serve as project advisors. It was one of the only times that a four-year institution contacted me first about how they could collaborate and support my work. Looking at my publication record over the years, most of my publications have been due to coauthors’ support from four-year institutions. More support and encouragement are needed for collaboration between two-year- and four-year-institution faculty members. These synergistic partnerships proved invaluable to the success of the fellowship.

The Hope: Our Students and Our Communities

One of the highlights of this fellowship was the opportunity to use funds to hire student research assistants. The five students employed as research assistants represented the diversity of our college, including two Latina students, two students who identified as white and nonbinary, and one student who identified as Black. All the students were employed (two had more than one job) and attending college simultaneously. Three of the students were sociology majors. One student was majoring in social work, and one in education. Students had opportunities to learn about CAR and participate in story collecting and writing, make conference presentations, work as docents for the eviction exhibit, and participate in community meetings. Four students have a professional publication from the book, and one was named as an assistant in the documentary credits. In exit experience surveys, they all noted the importance of this project in their professional development and educational goals.

One student wrote, When I started taking sociology courses, I realized that many of the issues I had already been thinking about are solvable, especially housing. As a Dayton native, I daily see unhoused families, people asking for help, and dilapidated housing. I have always had a deep desire to help whenever possible and learn as much as possible. When we began to learn about poverty, homelessness, eviction, and housing in class, I immediately drew connections to what I see in my community every day. This project allowed me to not only learn about these issues in a more personal and in-depth way but also to help take action against them.

Another student talked about the importance of learning to do “fieldwork.” They noted, I developed strong and personal relationships with my professors and classmates, which made attending school enjoyable. I was given many opportunities for fieldwork in my community, which benefited my learning. I believe that community research is one of the most beneficial learning methods. It is one thing to read about an issue; it is another to see it firsthand and have it emotionally impact you. I learned more from this project than in most classes. It was a driving force to complete my schooling and to move on to higher education.

As noted earlier in this essay, higher education institutions also engage students in CAR, and some of those students in their classes come from justice-impacted backgrounds. In the article “Critical Engagement: Deepening Partnerships for Justice,” Steven McKay shares a powerful example of how housing-challenged students at the University of Santa Cruz used CAR for political action. I acknowledge that CAR is a powerful, engaging research method across the higher education spectrum, especially at minority-serving institutions and community colleges. Given the diversity of community colleges and the number of students attending them, I argue that CAR at a community college is intrinsically essential to student success and the college’s mission. This was also noted in the exit surveys I conducted with community partners. Through CAR, community colleges and their students are more fully invested in their communities:

“The community college students that collaborated were eager to learn and explore their options for future endeavors and employment. University students have not expressed this level of collaboration with social service agencies, which I have witnessed.”

“Through working with students on this project, I observed the genuine desire to be provoked to a different level of thought. The extent of engagement with community members compared to university students in the past was a deeper commitment to community change and advocacy.”

Engaging with the community on this fellowship also provided a different view of higher education for those in the community. Community college students were pivotal in encouraging community members to consider taking classes. A few community members registered to attend college for the first time, and a community advocate (who had once been incarcerated) is now teaching at our college.

Increasing Public Scholarship Opportunities for Community College Faculty Members

In his American Sociological Association (ASA) presidential address in 2004, Michael Burawoy called for a public sociology. I remember being moved by his address, especially when he noted teaching as a form of public sociology. He said, “We must recognize that so much local public sociology is already taking place in our state systems of education, where faculty bear the burden of substantial teaching loads. If they can squeeze time beyond teaching, they take their public sociology out of the classroom and into the community. We do not know about these extra-curricular public sociologies because their practitioners rarely have time to write them up” (Burawoy 20). Community college faculty members have important stories to share. Like their students, they are uniquely positioned to interact with the community and engage in “public” scholarship.

Although many community college faculty members are engaged in community research, publishing remains challenging. Since 1995, the ASA has awarded 146 small CAR grants to encourage and support sociologists. Unfortunately, only two have been awarded to community college faculty members (“Community Action Research Initiative Grants”). The winter 2022 publication of Footnotes included twelve articles on CAR and the potential of community-engaged scholarship. The articles are a valuable and engaging resource on CAR in the discipline, and, disappointingly, no articles about community colleges or by community college faculty members were included. Like many community college faculty members, I have found making time to publish research challenging, but receiving this fellowship enabled me to publish my research on children as part of the Facing Eviction and Housing Insecurity community book project (“Listening to Children,” Rowell, Facing, pp. 51–62).

CAR has opened possibilities for scholarship while I juggle a heavy teaching load. I do not think I am alone in this predicament. Douglas Hartmann notes that during his leadership of the Midwest Sociological Society,

Action-oriented, community-based research was perhaps the most common and most meaningful kind of scholarship in which many of my colleagues at regional universities, liberal arts institutions, and community colleges were engaged. These are academic sociologists who do a lot of teaching, yet are also committed to both scholarly research and giving back to their communities. In a world where time and energy are limited, community-engaged work provides an avenue to make good on all the goals, demands, and rewards of being an academic, organically and simultaneously. (5)

I appreciated the opportunity to publish some of my work, but, as for many community college sociologists, the social justice mission remains the strongest motivating force in my work (Brown et al.).

Increasing Diversity within Disciplinary Associations

Ultimately, supporting undergraduate research (in all its forms) is an equity issue. Given the diverse students served by community colleges, there is growing recognition for increased support for these colleges’ faculty members and students to increase numbers and diversity within disciplines (McMurtrie; Rowell et al. 2021; Rowell and Maier 2022). In 2021, Mark Maier, Heather Macdonald, and I coedited a special issue entitled Community College Faculty Engagement with Disciplinary Societies (Maier et al.11-12). In the foreword, Mary Huber summarizes this well:

But instructors who are more fully integrated into the larger disciplinary community and its resources—and thus more aware of current trends and findings—can better present the field on their campuses. In turn, community college students would be better prepared to continue study in that field after transferring to a four-year college, potentially increasing the number and diversity of majors, not to mention other students who can bring that discipline’s insights into their future endeavors, thus strengthening public awareness and appreciation of the field. This is no small matter!

Student participation in any form of undergraduate research increases student success outcomes at the community college and beyond. Students become better transfer students, and ultimately many pursue graduate degrees and research opportunities (“Community Colleges”).

Fellowship Ripples and Concluding Thoughts

For me, as a teacher-scholar-activist at a community college, the work continues. Many students participating in the fellowship activities registered for an in-person CAR course on housing justice in Spring 2024 and 2025. Students engaged in eviction-court research and worked with the newly formed Dayton Tenant Union to host a tenant fair for students and our community. University collaborations continue. Seventeen students from three higher education institutions in the Dayton area (community college and university students) collaborated with me to create a museum exhibit on childhood housing insecurity hosted by a local museum from November 2024 to January 2025, thanks to additional fellowship dollars.

Engaging in CAR extends beyond one classroom experience; I also continue to be involved in activism in my community, including supporting the new Dayton Tenant Union, the Right to Counsel movement, and the Homeless Bill of Rights movement; and co-produced a documentary on children and eviction with Presbyterian Disaster Assistance and Counter Stories Productions (initial funds to cover some of the costs for filming the documentary came from the ACLS fellowship). The film premiered in Dayton, Ohio, in March 2025. Information about the film and the trailer can be found on the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance website: (https://pcusa.org/evicting-american-dream).

College education must be more than “work-focused,” especially for community college students already in the workforce. While community college students hope education will help them find a job with better pay and benefits, they also seek opportunities to learn about the world and how to be engaged citizens in our democracy. Increasing support for community college faculty members and their students in all forms of research offers hope. Gail Mellow states this well:

Detractors of community colleges often point to their lower graduation rates as evidence of their tarnished reputation without regard for either the radically unequal funding or the realities of how poverty affects their students. It is plausible that the radically unequal funding is evidence that these results are exactly what the tiered system of colleges are intended to produce. It is by peeling back the veil of the unconscious bias that this book reveals the truer nature of what is happening at community colleges across the United States, where faculty commitment to providing experience in doing scientific research for their diverse student body forms part of the solution to addressing inequity. (viii)

CAR at community colleges helps prepare students for the workforce and helps students understand and change the inequities that often led them to attend a community college. Increased support for community college faculty members to engage in scholarship from organizations like ACLS, the American Association of Community Colleges, and disciplinary associations would encourage more participation. Since many community college students transfer to four-year institutions, partnerships between four-year-college and community college faculty members can help foster student success and community change. Finally, community colleges should support all faculty-member scholarship, especially CAR. It is time to reclaim the notion of “community” and recognize that community colleges can be a conduit for both workplace preparation and civic engagement. The affordability and accessibility of a community college education continue to offer hope for a better life and community for many undergraduate students in the United States.

Works Cited

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———. “Listening to Children.” Rowell, Facing, pp. 51–62.

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