Student-Faculty Collaborative Research

Since 2018, Dr. Tay Keong tan have begun work on two projects that could help to advance the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals as well as Radford University’s Strategic Plan’s Goal to “increase faculty and student-faculty collaborative research, scholarship and creative activities that are externally validated through peer review and supported by grants.” This work was supported by funding from the College for Humanities and Behavioral Sciences, Political Science Department, Center for Global Education and Engagement, Office of Undergraduate Research and Scholarship, and the Working Groups of scholar at the UN PRME (www.unprme.org/).

The first is an Anti-Poverty Toolkit to strengthen the teaching and research in poverty-related topics around the world to advance the Global Goal of eradicating extreme poverty by 2030 - the first of the 17 SDGs. A research team led by me with four top students (Rachel Sharrett, Emily Jenkins, Haley Nunez and Gabriel Bennett) created the toolkit with open educational resources for use and promulgation by the UN Anti-Poverty Working Group - consisting of some 202 members from 163 institutions in 59 countries. This toolkit is the first of its kind, an online portal of online educational resources (e.g. case studies, syllabi, teaching exercises, journal articles, organizational reports) for scholars around the world to access, share, and update to facilitate their work of teaching and research in the field of anti-poverty. The Toolkit can now be accessed at the website domain: www.povertytoolkit.org (https://jenkinew.wixsite.com/anti-povertytk). It has some 502 artifacts, all of which researched and synopsized by the RU research team, to help educators prepare the next generation of leaders to fight poverty, hunger and inequality. The PRME Working Group members are now organizing themselves to contribute their own educational resources to the toolkit and publish it worldwide to promote the teaching and research in the field of poverty alleviation. All our RU students received an award from the UN Anti-Poverty Working Group for “Excellence in Research for the Anti-Poverty Toolkit to Facilitate Teaching and Research in Poverty Alleviation around the Globe” in October 2019. See sample photograph of the award ceremony at the University of Jonkoping in Sweden on October 1, 2019 on left.

The Anti-Poverty Toolkit’s success resulted in another request in January 2020 for another RU faculty-student research team to develop a new toolkit on Sustainability Mindset in 2020. The UN Sustainability Mindset Repository is an open, universally accessible, online repository of teaching and research resources for scholars of Sustainability. This request came from the UN PRME Working Group on Sustainability Mindset, consisting of some 143 scholars in 132 universities in 43 countries.

The convener of this group, Dr. Isabel Romanoczy, has been working with Dr. Tan and Political Science Major Anna Ogan to develop an initial database of about a hundred resources (a nucleus) for the portal. They have designed and created a new website for the Repository: www.sustainabilitymindset.net (https://taykeong.wixsite.com/sustainabilitymindse), and synopsized some 116 artifacts relating to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (see picture depicting the Global Goals below), and they are now being used by members of the UN PRME Working Group on Sustainability Mindset.

Presentation at the Sixth International Responsible Management Education Research Conference (University of Jonkoping, Sweden, October 2019):  “Struggles and Successes in the Creation of an Anti-Poverty Toolkit” [PDF].

Presentation to the United Nations PRME Sustainability Mindset Working Group Global LEAP Retreat and Virtual Conference (August 2020):  “The Sustainability Mindset Repository” [PDF].