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For instructors engaged in teaching evaluation, bridging the gap between the content of formal educational experiences and what we want future evaluators to be able to do in practice remains a challenge. Studying the format and quality of university courses focused on program evaluation is one mechanism through which we might begin to narrow this gap. This article describes a community-engaged, project-based evaluation course that was taught during five semesters, and uses qualitative data to explore student experiences within the course along three dimensions: experiential education, interdisciplinary collaboration, and community partnerships. In particular, we highlight the productive yet uncomfortable role that challenge and ambiguity play in animating evaluation learning. We suggest implications for teaching evaluation based on our findings.

Effectively addressing both cognitive and affective dimensions of learning is one of the greatest obstacles to teaching race and racial justice in higher education. In this article, we first explore the need to integrate attention to cognitive and affective development, along with evidence-based strategies for doing so. We then provide a case study of an undergraduate sociology course on environmental justice in which the instructor intentionally adopted holistic pedagogical principles of teaching race. Analyzing student responses from a pre- and post- course survey, course assignments, and instructor observations of student participation, we find that both white students and students of color experienced significant growth in their cognitive and affective understanding of the complexities of race and work toward racial justice. However, results also show how challenging it can be to create the conditions for productive multiracial dialogues that produce extensive affective development, particularly interpersonal skills of racial reconciliation. Reflecting on the limitations of the case, we conclude that more holistic teaching approaches are necessary to develop both students' cognitive and affective abilities to navigate race and work against racism, and we make suggestions for faculty development and administrative support.

Globally, conventional food systems are failing to produce enough high quality, nutritious food for the world's population. For those in the helping professions, the most typical entry point into this crisis is emergency food assistance services. However, current food systems are also threaded through with legacies of racialized violence, ongoing exploitation of land and labor, the effects of pollution and climate change, the crisis of hunger, and the desire of peoples across the globe to choose how to nourish their communities. As such, social work education must pay greater attention to the complexity of food systems to prepare future practitioners to effectively intervene in this arena. This paper introduces a conceptual model that distinguishes between food security, food justice, and food sovereignty—examining the model's utility to social work education and practice. To explore opportunities to integrate course content and practice in food systems, we offer a case study of a community-engaged project to advance food sovereignty efforts in Oregon, tracing contributions to student learning as well as to the community partner. We conclude with implications for social work education so that future practitioners can intervene more effectively and intentionally in food systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the burgeoning literature related to reparative planning, with an emphasis on housing policy. After exploring the state of theorizing related to reparative planning, this paper describes its three central dimensions: public recognition, material redistribution, and social/spatial transformation. The authors use these dimensions to evaluate a housing policy designed to repair harms to Black residents in Portland, Oregon. This in-depth analysis draws on survey, interview, and focus group data to explore the degree to which residents' experiences of the policy reflect these three dimensions. The paper concludes with implications for other municipalities considering reparative housing policies, namely the need to explicitly name the harm(s) the policy is designed to repair, for robust accountability measures to guide policy implementation and for holistic community development strategies that attend to multiple dimensions of racial reparation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: In response to historic and ongoing devaluation of certain people, and concurrently, the places they live, many communities are grappling with how to respond to place-based harms. This has produced a wide range of responses, such as calls for "Land Back," reparations programs, arts-based neighborhood regeneration, and local history initiatives. This paper explores the potential roles community practitioners can play in these contested places. Drawing on a review of the literature, this paper offers an emerging typology for responding to place-based harms. Findings: The proposed typology includes six place-based approaches: Reparation, Remembrance, Regeneration, Resistance, Harm-Reduction, and Repatriation/Rematriation. The authors distinguish each approach by its target and temporal focus, common strategies, primary change agents, and vulnerabilities. While drawing on transdisciplinary scholarship, authors also describe social work's engagement with each approach. Applications: This emerging typology may assist social work practitioners, scholars, and students as they study and employ strategies for intervening in contested spaces. It also suggests areas for future research in conjunction with responses to place-based harms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This autoethnographic case study explores teaching community-engaged courses during the onset of COVID-19. As educators who teach applied program evaluation courses at two universities, we consider how principles of feminist community engagement--relationality, border crossing, reflexivity, and disruptive pedagogy (Iverson & James, 2014)--ground our courses. Drawing from instructor reflections, interviews with community partners, students' written reflections, and course evaluations, we explore how these principles informed our pedagogical response to teaching through the tumultuous spring of 2020, and the degree to which these practices enabled the continued participation of students and community partners. We close with implications for community-engaged teaching in these--and all--times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The injustice of gentrification is often reduced to residential displacement and the loss of affordable housing. Yet, in addition to physical displacement of residents, gentrification also displaces community histories, social ties, and spaces of cultural gathering and civic action. The Neighborhood Story Project is a participatory action research intervention designed to engage residents of gentrifying neighborhoods in addressing more than the material effects of gentrification. This multi-case study of three Neighborhood Story Projects finds that participants experienced gains in (1) place knowledge and attachments, (2) social relationships, and (3) self and collective efficacy. Findings from this multi-case study suggest a broad practice model for group-level interventions to advance justice in gentrifying neighborhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Gentrification is changing the landscape of many cities worldwide, exacerbating economic and racial inequality. Despite its relevance to social work, the field has been conspicuously absent from scholarship related to gentrification. This paper introduces the dominant view of gentrification (a political economic lens), highlighting its contributions and vulnerabilities, then introduces four case studies that illuminate the distinct contributions of social work to broaden the ways in which gentrification is theorized and responded to within communities. Findings: When gentrification is analyzed exclusively through a political economy lens, researchers, policy makers, and practitioners are likely to focus on changes in land and home values, reducing the adverse effects of gentrification to a loss of affordable housing. A singular focus on affordable housing risks paying insufficient attention to racial struggle, perpetuating damage-based views of poor people and neighborhoods, and obfuscating political, social, and cultural displacements. Social work practice—including social action group work, community organizing, community development, and participatory research and planning—offers a holistic approach to understanding, resisting, and responding to gentrification and advance equitable development in the city. Applications: By exploring social work practice that amplifies residents' and change makers' efforts, advances existing community organizing, produces new insights, builds inter-neighborhood and interdisciplinary collaborations, and facilitates social action and policy change, this paper helps community practitioners to reimagine the role of social work research and practice in gentrifying neighborhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policies affecting those living in poverty are often created without the direct and meaningful participation of the people meant to be served. This has been especially the case with public housing. To contextualize the need for alternative approaches to inquiry, we begin by examining the history of public housing through the lens of oppression and present critical Participatory Action Research as an alternative approach to research and policy-making. We provide a case study of a critical Participatory Action Research project sited in a public housing project slated for redevelopment. We conclude that engaging "resident experts" in the research process heightened the validity and credibility of the findings, amplified residents' self-determination, and provided greater congruence between the researchers' social justice values and our research methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although cultural humility is frequently emphasized in social work education as a lifelong commitment to reflection and action, there are few examples of what this looks like in practice--particularly outside the scope of clinical health settings. This paper situates the need for practitioner reflections on cultural humility and offers an autoethnographic case study of efforts to cultivate cultural humility in myself and among participants in a neighborhood-based action research project. I consider cultural humility from three relational positions: holding oneself accountable, creating conditions for cultural humility within groups, and acknowledging how group members co-create conditions for cultural humility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mixed-income development is the latest in a long line of policy interventions to improve outcomes in distressed urban neighbourhoods, particularly as an alternative to large scale public housing projects. Such developments are inherently integrationist, and have profound effects on the social lives and well-being of residents. After situating mixed-income developments within current residential demographic trends with regard to race and income, this article provides a comprehensive review of the 22 empirical studies addressing social integration in mixed-income developments in the United States, focusing on understanding the effects of spatial integration on social well-being. We discuss policy and practice implications to optimise the social well-being of residents, as well as strategies to improve scholarship in these settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the core competencies of macro practitioners are the skills to design, implement and evaluate conflict resolution processes. Drawing upon theories of deliberative democracy, restorative justice and the Just Practice framework, this paper explores a process of deliberation which engaged 200 community members in the controversial siting of a homeless shelter. This case study is both descriptive and reflective: by offering an in-depth description of the process and a reflection on the guiding values, this paper provides critical insight into best practices in - and limitations of - using deliberation to resolve divisive community issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]