Integrating socially meaningful research into university teaching: A new toolkit
ZÜRI URBAN, the teaching-research initiative of the Social Geography and Urban Studies group, published a comprehensive toolkit to support social science educators in integrating collaborative research into university curricula.
Knowledge is increasingly co-developed across academia, industry, and civil society. Nevertheless, traditional roles and teaching formats persist in university curricula. As a result, we are faced with numerous practical, financial, and ethical challenges and questions:
- How to identify relevant partners and fairly compensate their engagement?
- How to establish non-extractive collaborations and partnership relations, considering the historic role of academic institutions in epistemic injustice?
- How to acknowledge and integrate diverse knowledges within research and teaching processes?
Addressing these challenges, the Social Geography and Urban Studies group has published a toolkit that provides an overview of challenges, practical tools, examples, and resources and supports educators in breaking down boundaries between traditional education formats and real-world impact.
| Co-authored by Ifigeneia Dimitrakou, Hanna Hilbrandt, and Julie Ren, the toolkit draws inspiration from the course GEO422 “Urban Geography: Research and Methods“. A research-based learning project that involved the collaboration between students, the Sans-Papiers contact point in Zurich (SPAZ) and the teaching team and focused on investigating the precarious living conditions of undocumented migrants in the city. The publication is part of the project “KoLab: Kollaborative Lehrforschung in der Stadt”, which was funded by the 2022 open_innovation Teaching Fund of the University of Zurich, supporting initiatives for teaching innovations in the UZH Curriculum. Publication «Research-based collaboration: A toolkit for teaching and learning» KoLab: Kollaborative Lehrforschung in der Stadt ZÜRI URBAN UZH Curriculum |
Related blog post
Ifigeneia Dimitrakou, Social Geography and Urban Studies