Catherine M. Jordan

Community-Engaged Scholarship: Is Faculty Work in Communities a True Academic Enterprise?

Since Ernest Boyers landmark 1990 report, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, leaders in higher education, including academic medicine, have advocated that faculty members apply their expertise in new and creative ways in partnership with communities. Such community engagement can take many forms, including community-based teaching, research, clinical care, and service. There continues to be a gap, however, between the rhetoric of this idea and the reality of how promotion and tenure actually work in health professions schools. The Commission on Community-Engaged Scholarship in the Health Professions was established in October 2003 with funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to take a leadership role in creating a more supportive culture and reward system for community-engaged faculty in the nations health professions schools. The authors prepared this article to inform the commissions deliberations and to stimulate discussion among educators in the health professions. The authors define the work that faculty engage in with communities, consider whether all work by faculty in community-based settings is actually scholarship, and propose a framework for documenting and assessing community-engaged scholarship for promotion and tenure decisions. They conclude with recommendations for change in academic health centers and health professions schools.

THE COLOR OBJECT ASSOCIATION TEST (COAT): THE DEVELOPMENT OF A NEW MEASURE OF DECLARATIVE MEMORY FOR 18- TO 36-MONTH-OLD TODDLERS

Few methods exist to measure declarative (explicit) memory in children during the toddler and preschool stages of development. We report the development and psychometric properties of a new measure of declarative memory for this age group, the Color Object Association Test (COAT). In pilot testing and large scale application of the test, the COAT was demonstrated to be a reliable and a valid measure of declarative memory for healthy children ages 18–36 months, living in a disadvantaged community. The test shows a linear developmental trajectory, which allows longitudinal examination of the development of declarative memory in children.

Community-Engaged Scholarship in the Academy: An Action Agenda

Change • July/August 2013 O ver the past decade or more, national commissions, professional associations, and accrediting and funding agencies have identified community engagement as a core mission of higher education. Students, faculty, and community partners all benefit from moving the classroom to the community (and back again). Community-engaged research has also gained recognition as a legitimate approach to producing and mobilizing knowledge. Yet as changes to curricula and research within programs or institutions (and in some cases across disciplines By Sherril B. Gelmon, Catherine Jordan and Sarena D. Seifer Community-Engaged Scholarship in the Academy

Memory deficits and industrial toxicant exposure: A comparative study of hard metal, solvent and asbestos workers

Memory functioning was examined in ex-factory workers with hard metal disease, resulting from exposure to alloys utilizing cobalt. Since these workers are also exposed to organic solvents and may suffer from chronic hypoxia as a result of their pulmonary disorder, solvent and asbestos workers, as well as an unexposed matched sample, served as controls. Results demonstrated deficits in the allocation of attentional resources and in short-term verbal memory. A pattern of findings across several tests suggested that repetition or delay is important for adequate memory performance in individuals exposed to hard metal, implicating a deficit in encoding or slowed consolidation.

Measuring developmental outcomes of lead exposure in an urban neighborhood: the challenges of community-based research.

The Developmental Research on Attention and Memory Skills (DREAMS) Project measures developmental outcomes of approximately 330 children at risk for lead exposure within an ethnically diverse, inner-city neighborhood. This study is one project of the Phillips Neighborhood Healthy Housing Collaborative, a 6-year-old collaboration between residents of the Phillips community in Minneapolis, university researchers, and representatives of various public and private agencies. Our experience carrying out this research is used to highlight both the benefits of, and the challenges to, measuring exposure outcomes in inner-city children using a community-based research approach. Challenges to working within a community collaborative, to studying an ethnically diverse and economically disadvantaged neighborhood, and to utilizing neighborhood residents as project staff are discussed. The strategies used to address these issues are presented to offer ideas for surmounting the challenges inherent in community-based research. The investigation of community environmental health problems through a community-based research approach can result in improved methodology, enhanced quality of data collected, and increased effectiveness of data dissemination. In addition, it can lead to important findings that inform the scientific community and create positive community changes. It is paramount, however, that potential obstacles be anticipated and planned for, or else be detected early and promptly responded to in a manner that preserves scientific rigor while respecting community needs and values.

Recommendations from Lead Poisoning Prevention Program Participants: Best Practices

We present a program evaluation of the Phillips Lead Project, a 5-year study of the effectiveness of culture-specific, peer education in maintaining low blood lead levels of children in an inner-city neighborhood. We conducted focus groups to understand how project participants felt about the various strategies employed by the Lead Project. The purpose of this article is to describe their reactions to the project and make recommendations concerning appropriate educational strategies for lead poisoning prevention projects being undertaken in similar communities. Although this project was a research study, many of its methods, and participants’ reactions to those methods, are relevant to non-research prevention programs and may be generalizable to other health issues besides lead poisoning.

CES4Health.info: An Online Tool for Peer Reviewed Publication and Dissemination of Diverse Products of Community-Engaged Scholarship

Community-engaged scholarship (CES)—research, teaching, programmatic and other scholarly activities conducted through partnerships between academic and community partners—may result in innovative applied products such as manuals, policy briefs, curricula, videos, toolkits, and websites. Without accepted mechanisms for peer-reviewed publication and dissemination, these products often do not “count” toward faculty promotion and tenure (P&T) and have limited opportunities for broad impact. This paper reports on CES4Health.info, a unique online tool for peerreviewed publication and dissemination of products of CES in forms other than journal articles. In its first year, CES4Health.info has published 24 products and documented the satisfaction of users, authors, and reviewers.

Messages From Moms: Barriers to and Facilitators of Behavior Change in a Lead Poisoning Preventive Education Project

Qualitative focus group data from participants of an intensive, culture-specific, lead poisoning preventive education research project were analyzed to assess success of communication strategies, and, specifically, to identify barriers to and facilitators of adopting behavior changes encouraged in the project. Effectiveness of education in preventing lead poisoning is addressed elsewhere. Education focused on housecleaning, hygiene, water, and nutrition. Ninety-five participants (89% of 107 eligible) of six ethnicities agreed to participate in focus groups. Seventy-eight (82%) actually attended. Barriers to behavior change included the effort required or unpleasantness of a prevention strategy, presentation of familiar information, denial of the problem, busyness, perceived lack of control, lack of social support, cultural traditions, and misunderstandings. Requiring one-time behavior changes; teaching simple, easy strategies; making less appealing tasks fun; demonstrating concepts; and presenting novel material that piques interest were features of the education that facilitated behavior change. Factors internal to the participant, such as love of the child or cultural practices, also served to motivate the participant to change behavior or to facilitate adoption of a prevention strategy. We offer recommendations to assist others in designing effective health education and risk communication prevention or intervention programs.

Toward culturally sensitive housing – Eliminating health disparities by accounting for health

Abstract Refugees, immigrants and people of color experience disproportionate poor health outcomes. Cultural differences in how families cook, eat, and, in general, live in their homes can be partly responsible for some of these health disparities. Understanding and responding to cultural differences through housing that supports various ways of living i.e., culturally sensitive housing can facilitate healthy lifestyles and help improve the health and well-being of diverse communities. Interviews with 21 Minnesota practitioners (designers, affordable housing providers, developers,junders, and policy makers) point to the need for a multi-disciplinary approach to housing studies, one that includes the public health perspective. Although health, and in turn health disparities, were part of the discussion in all four steps of the process for working toward culturally sensitive housing there is room to further infuse health into these conversations. The current definition of healthy housing should be broadened to account for diverse ways of living and for solutions that range from the micro to the macro scale and from interior finishes to neighborhood amenities. Such a reconceptualization of healthy housing can chart new directions for education, policy, and practice.