From Ivory Tower to Urban Street: Using the Classroom as a Community Research and Development Tool

Abstract

Radical democrat John Dewey ([1916] 1966) believed that education could be a powerful tool for developing citizens' character and drawing them into political engagement. He also argued that science could inform public debate and contribute to problem solving in the community (Dewey [1935] 1980, [1939] 1989). Here, we describe and evaluate our attempt to realize these twin ideals in a semester-long course at Chapman University during spring 1999. In this course, students were active learners holding partial control over their educational experience and democratic citizens attempting to make a contribution to their community.