Jigsaw Research Communities: Coordinating Research and Service across Multiple Courses to Serve a Single Community Partner

This article describes a public scholarship project in which two faculty members worked together to integrate service-learning and research into multiple courses to benefit a single community partner. The project linked undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty in a broad-based research endeavor that contributed to the survival and growth of a nonprofit court monitoring organization and ultimately improved the delivery of justice. The authors provide an overview of the project, treating it as a case study in the development of multi-course mass research projects, drawing inspiration from the jigsaw classroom method. The approach developed uses elements from a number of high-impact educational practices. Guided by faculty expertise and directed by active coordination, students engaged in research and service tasks that had been divided into manageable pieces and distributed across multiple courses to complete an original, collaborative, and groundbreaking piece of public scholarship for the community partner. Simultaneously, students pursued varied learning outcomes related to the project in courses involving criminal justice practice, nonprofit management, diversity awareness, and community involvement.