Community Engagement Lane

Connection to our guiding values:

Advancing Knowledge through community-engaged research and sharing of knowledge with communities.

Playfulness that encompasses creative approaches to involving communities in RSCA and pedagogy, as well as exploring unexpected ways to engage the community in programming.

Ethical Imagination that expands our understanding of which communities matter in the work of the institute and how to engage those communities, and that builds our capacity for world-sharing.

Courage in our openness to hearing and learning from unexpected responses from the communities we engage, and in thinking hard about which communities are harder to engage.

Sustainability through robust communities of practice and support structures and by explicit valuing of collaboration, works in progress, and “small” outputs that have high impact for communities beyond academia.

Mentor(s) for Community Engagement lane

Dean Shannon Miller and Associate Dean Mary Anderson 

Portfolio for the ai-et Fellow in the Community Engagement Lane

Capturing what’s already there (relevant existing work and people in H&A at SJSU):

• Construct a list of community engaged and public-facing work on ethical technologies by H&A faculty.
  
  
• Construct a directory of H&A faculty with experience undertaking community engaged or public-facing work on ethical technologies to post on ai-et website.
  
  
• Work with practitioners to describe this existing work and how it matters (e.g., for ai-et Annual Report, pieces for SJSU Magazine, etc.).

Building structures to support new Community Engagement projects and communities of practice:

• Support the ai-et Speaker Series through promotion, advertising, and supporting the organization of the events in connection with the Dean’s Office.
  
  
• Maintain a calendar of public-facing H&A events centered on ethical technologies.
  
  
• Collaborate with other events occurring on campus that can draw in community and community partners.
  
  
• Convene a showcase of public-facing and/or community-engaged projects centered on ethical technologies.
  
  
• Organize a session to share/brainstorm concrete strategies to document ai-et community engaged RSCA projects and/or pedagogical projects and their impacts for RTP.
  
  
• Convene sessions to connect people interested in learning how to mount public-facing and/or community-engaged projects centered on ethical technologies.
  
  
• Convene sessions to connect people interested in finding community partners for their community-engaged projects.
  
  
• Foster a network of H&A faculty practitioners engaged in community-engaged ai-et-related work.
  
  
• Work with ai-et support staff to organize lane-relevant information to be posted on the ai-et website and to develop a strategy to keep posted information current.

Exploring overlaps/connections/synergies with the other ai-et lanes:

Grants

• Work with Grants Fellow to identify potential sources of funding for public-facing and/or community-engaged projects centered on ethical technologies.
  
  
• Help construct descriptions of local ai-et related community-engaged RSCA and pedagogical accomplishments to support grant proposals (especially to answer the questions “why you? why here?”).
  
  
• Work with Grants Fellow to flag grant opportunities that require a component of community engagement.

Pedagogy

• Work with Pedagogy Fellow to build capacity for community-engaged pedagogical work (e.g., through service learning, field trips, etc.).
  
  
• Curate local public-facing events as resources to support ai-et related teaching.
  
  
• Work with Pedagogy Fellow to identify opportunities for classes engaged with questions about ethical technologies to showcase student work for the campus community and the broader community.
  
  
• Work with Pedagogy Fellow to identify ai-et related pedagogical projects that might be suitable for sharing with local K-12 classrooms.

RSCA

• Work with RSCA Fellow to build capacity for community-engaged ai-et-related RSCA projects (e.g., how to work with the IRB, how to partner with communities rather than engaging with them in extractive ways, etc.).
  
  
• Work with RSCA Fellow to identify scholarly venues (conferences, journals, etc.) for sharing impacts of and lessons learned from community-engaged ai-et-related RSCA projects.

All four Fellows will help produce:

• A working mission statement for ai-et, to be posted on the ai-et website, on which the Institute will continue to iterate over time.
  
  
• Text for a Fall 2027 Annual Report.