High Impact Practices, such as Service Learning or Community-Based Learning, often require an instructor to develop and cultivate community relationships, sites, and/or partners with whom students might be able to work with. But how do you find a community partner? How do you effectively and respectfully work with them? How do you cultivate lasting partnerships? To answer these questions, this poster draws on experiences with two projects with community partner foci: (1) a graduate-level course on public engagement with science, and (2) an interdisciplinary workshop on public engagement with science. This poster (a) discusses the role of community partners in these two projects, in order to (b) detail “Top Strategies and Tips” for cultivating community partnerships.

(1) A cross-listed Philosophy/Humanities/Natural Sciences course at our university: Public Engagement with Science. In this course students work in multidisciplinary teams (humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, science education, etc.) to develop a community outreach project for implementation. These multidisciplinary teamwork helps students think across disciplines while making practical use of their disciplinary skills. Teams partner with a local institution with fitting aims to connect their project with local audiences. Course content provides students with relevant background and concrete skills needed to effectively apply the best practices in science outreach. This course also meaningfully contributes to students’ preparation for a variety of careers, encourage them to see connections among their disciplines, and develop and explore the broader impacts of their own work. Course content was drawn from disciplinary expertise in philosophy of science, communication, education, art, design, and digital humanities that bears on how to make public engagement with science more meaningful and productive. The course gave special emphasis to philosophy of science’s techniques for public engagement, as well as research on scientific practices and the relationship science bears to society.

(2) Extending lessons from recent workshop on public engagement with science to a new domain. One component to a recent workshop focused on public engagement with science looked at scientific research work with communities, (for example, citizen science and community-based research). Based on workshop discussion we adapt and extend best practices of (academic) scientific work with communities to the use of community partnerships in philosophy courses interested in High Impact Practices.

Top Strategies: Our top strategies and tips address three stages of partnership development and its implementation in philosophy courses: (1) Establishing & cultivating community partnerships for your course, (2) Implementation of the community partnership in the course itself, (3) Post course evaluation & follow-up.

Representing pluralistic perspectives, poster authors include the graduate course instructors, philosophy graduate student who took the course, and philosophy postdoc involved with component of the workshop that focused on scientific work with communities. Work will be presented by graduate students.