“How do we understand the value of what we’re doing if we’re not thinking critically about it?” asks Danielle Lake, Director of Elon University’s Center for Design Thinking and a two-time Periclean Faculty Leader. For Lake, scholarship is a key part of the answer and creates a virtuous cycle: community-engaged teaching grows stronger when faculty study what happens in the work and publish what they learn, which in turn sharpens the teaching.
Two scholars in the Periclean network have built their careers on this conviction: Lake, and Metropolitan State University professor and former Carleton College Periclean Program Director Adrienne Falcón. Both turn the work of connecting students with their communities into research that the field values.
This is work Project Pericles has supported for twenty-five years. Beginning with Civic Engagement in the Classroom (2009) and The Periclean Diamond (2012), we distilled lessons from our faculty programs to a broader audience. Our white paper Creating Cohesive Paths to Civic Engagement (2017), alongside articles in three academic journals, documented how campuses institutionalize the work. Lake and Falcón demonstrate the ongoing power and potential of this work.
Danielle Lake: Scaling in a Different Way
Lake leads the Power and Place Collaborative, a place-based community-centered storytelling initiative at Elon that partners students with local Alamance County organizations. They capture oral histories to build new regional narratives. Supported by Project Pericles in this work, she has brought both her philosophy background and her commitment to community partnership to bear in her research.
She came to Elon to advance innovative praxis-oriented research and teaching. In a 2022 article titled “The Power and Place Collaborative: Participatory Strategies for Scaling,” Lake and her co-authors David J. Marshall, Rozana Carducci, and Tracey Thurnes contended that scholars needed to think beyond “scaling up.”
Drawing their analysis from the Power and Place Collaborative, they argued that change can happen on more than one axis: scale can also mean deeper, more complex relationships within a community.
For someone who knows Lake’s research, that doesn’t come as a surprise. Community partnership has always been at the center of her work. Shortly after she joined Elon University, Lake released a cross-disciplinary literature review on “Practical, Epistemological, and Ethical Challenges of Participatory Action Research” in conjunction with Joel Wendland-Liu, examining the ecological ethical models of Participatory Action Research (PAR). These ethical models serve as an alternative to “parachuting” models that frame learning and collaboration as “one-way.”
This kind of partnership grounds Lake’s work. Well beyond any grant period, her relationships flourish and the work produced in collaboration with community partners leaves ripple effects.
Roger Moore, for example, was one community partner who extended his intergenerational mentoring with a $10,000 grant, long after the grant period ended. Meanwhile, then-Elon student Lucy Garcia participated in the Power and Place Collaborative, partnering with a city planner. That work later morphed into an honors research project centered around the lost histories of Black-owned businesses displaced around the county. Garcia now serves as a city planner in the region.
Naturally, this type of “scaling” leads to research that represents the co-creation she writes about. Lake’s publications often list collaborators as first authors. A Design Research Society journal has accepted an upcoming article with co-authors including a Manager of the African American Culture and History Center. The publication will also list a first-year student Berenice Sanchez-Rosaldo, who already serves as a student leader in the Power and Place Collaborative; she began her engagement with the collaborative when she was in 10th grade at a local high school and was inspired to continue her work with Lake.
Lake is clear about the powerful pairing of R & R: research and relationships. She attributes her scholarly agenda to the importance of connection. “What I’m trying to do is point to how our work has created relationships across divisions,” she says, “shifting power and giving voice to untold stories for many, many others.”
Adrienne Falcón: Bringing a Global Perspective
“My father’s Cuban,” says Metro State University Professor Adrienne Falcón. “I’ve always been attuned to beyond the United States and what that means.” This sparked Falcón’s long standing desire to understand civic learning from a global perspective.
Having studied and worked on building youth programs while attaining her PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago, Falcón sees herself as a “place-based scholar” while being intrigued that “there are places all around the world doing this kind of work.” Her white paper co-authored with Project Pericles on the institutionalization of civic learning, “Creating Cohesive Paths to Civic Engagement: Five Approaches to Institutionalizing Civic Engagement,” focused on college campuses within the United States.
But she simultaneously had a global itch: at the same time that she was serving as Carleton College’s inaugural Project Pericles Program Director, which led to the creation of over fifty community-engaged learning courses, she was also looking for opportunities to understand what was happening abroad.
In 2015, a Fulbright grant opened the door for her. She had spent time in Ecuador as an undergraduate student, and wanted to see what higher education community engagement looked like there.
“It’s super cool,” she says. “They have written it into their constitution.” Every university is required to engage its students and faculty in some community engagement work that advances the development priorities of the school, city, or region.
“I wanted to go understand what that actually looked like on the ground.” She was immersed in their program, titled the “vinculación con la sociedad,” or “involvement with society.” There, she had the opportunity to see how coursework and research were mandated to address local community challenges. “I’m an ethnographer by training, so I was learning by going, doing, and seeing.”
When she returned to the United States, and shortly after obtaining her “dream job” as a professor and Director of the Master of Advocacy and Political Leadership at Metro State, she wanted to work on a new project.
With Randy Stoecker at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Falcón edited the Handbook on Participatory Action Research and Community Development: an anthology for “carefully considering the possibilities and challenges of strategically integrating participatory research and community development.” But what made the book distinctive was where the ideas drew from: she wanted to produce something that was truly global in nature.
They sent out an open call for submissions, hearing back from her friends from Ecuador, academics from Cuba, and a former student living in Tunisia: “I said, ‘what are you thinking about as you try to do this work there’?” Meanwhile, her co-editor Stoecker approached other leading practitioners in Asia.
Ultimately, their book encompassed chapters from authors who represented five continents. The articles range from how volunteerism can serve as a vehicle for civil society development in Ukraine to a case study of how building a community of practice in Québec has contributed to community development.
The reaction has been positive. “It’s sold a lot of copies,” Falcón says. “And now we’re exploring doing a second edition of the book with the publisher’s encouragement.”
While Falcón remains excited about her research agenda, she credits Project Pericles for the connections it offered in her early years as a faculty member. “As I began to do the work, it was the connections with the other Periclean Faculty Program Directors at the time that were unbelievably helpful,” she says.
“Some of the people who I deeply admire and appreciate as humans I met through Project Pericles. There was this sense of, ‘this is the space where there are others doing the work like I am trying to do.’”
This article is part of our Impact25 Series, commemorating individuals and civic learning advancements connected to Project Pericles over the past twenty-five years. You can read about our impact on students in our previous installment.