Editorial

The three articles in this issue related to training, those by Sprague Martinez et al.,¹ Rubin et al.,² and James et al.,³ offer a novel viewpoint on the utility and impact of community-based participatory research (CBPR). We typically think of CBPR as an approach to forming the relationships within a research endeavor aimed at enhancing community health outcomes. CBPR in the health disciplines is “a collaborative approach to research that equitably involves all partners in the research process and recognizes the unique strengths that each brings. CBPR begins with a research topic of importance to the community with the aim of combining knowledge and action for social change to improve community health and eliminate health disparities.”⁴ However, in the three articles in this section, CBPR is also seen as a vital component of training and training is seen as an important step toward enhancing community health outcomes. Differences among the three articles in who receives training and for what purposes offer the opportunity to briefly examine the evolution of the role of CBPR within education and training programs.

For the last couple of decades, CBPR has played an increasingly important role within undergraduate education, particularly in service learning courses.⁵ In such courses, CBPR student projects (typically of limited scope and duration) complement course content, deepening student learning while providing a service to a community organization. As the practice has matured, new twists have emerged that strengthen both the impact on students and on the community.

In this issue, Sprague Martinez and colleagues report on one such advance. Set in the context of a year-long undergraduate research seminar, a health survey of the Sommerville, MA immigrant community was designed and implemented by a collaboration of local community residents, faculty, service providers, and students. The course used a model in which CBPR was implemented as the pedagogical approach to the course, not simply the focus of a student project in an otherwise more traditional research seminar. Also as a unique innovation, undergraduates and community residents participated together in this seminar as students. The authors note that community residents in the classroom provided unique insights that enhanced the research process, integrated community residents into the university and helped undergraduate students to develop relationships outside of the university and to understand contextual and ecological factors that influence health and wellbeing. This co-learning and CBPR-embedded approach built capacity in undergraduates, community organizations and community residents to address health issues in the immigrant community of Sommerville. Sprague and colleagues also identify important challenges imposed by traditional academic systems to integrating community members and CBPR into undergraduate education.

Trainings specifically for community members to prepare to engage in CBPR, either as researchers within their communities or as community partners to academic researchers, are a more recent development (see ^6,7 as examples). In this issue, Rubin and colleagues describe a course for community partners to build community capacity to partner in translational research. The approach to the course, named “community-engaged pedagogy,” aimed to make learning relevant by drawing from adult learning theory and CBPR. In fact, the course was developed in an organic way using continuous input from participants to develop course sessions. Both adult learning theory and CBPR suggest that learners must be part of the learning process as actors, not as passive recipients of information delivered by instructors. The authors suggest that in adopting this approach, adult education becomes a transformative process that contributes to community empowerment and provides the opportunity to use education to promote social action to improve health.

In the context of significant underrepresentation of students and faculty of color in higher education,^8,9 CBPR has been recognized as an approach that might appeal, in particular, to these individuals as it respects the knowledge inherent in their communities and is intended to provide direct community benefit. The hope is that higher education institutions that support a culture that facilitates community-engaged scholarship will better attract and retain these individuals thereby increasing the diversity of the academic community.^10,11 Training of minority graduate students has been seen as a way to increase minority participation...