CBAIR – the Community-Based Applied Interdisciplinary Research course – strengthens partnerships with our community as it addresses real-world problems. At the same time, it provides training and experience that is directly applicable to students’ scholarship and future careers while raising the profile of Vancouver Island University.
Since the first cohort of students took on their initial projects in the fall of 2014, CBAIR has been the product of collaboration between instructors in VIU's departments of Anthropology, Criminology, Management, Marketing, Media Studies and Sociology. The course provides students with the opportunity to learn and apply research skills in a community-based setting. CBAIR has continued to successfully partner undergraduate students (from the Social Sciences and from Arts and Humanities) with Master of Business Administration candidates as teams working to address real-world problems in the mid-Vancouver Island area.
This course is unlike any other students will experience in university in that it involves original team-based research in service of carefully selected community organizations. There are 12 students in the course, broken up into three teams of 4 students, and each group partners with a community organization on a research project. Although the three faculty members involved in CBAIR collectively provide guidance, feedback and support to all students and act as supervisors for one of the three teams, the course is completely student-led: the research projects are designed and carried out by the students.
