Experiential Learning

Town+Gown develops experiential learning research projects.  We have worked with formal experiential learning programs and individual experiential learning engagements.  We have also worked with graduate and undergraduate classes.

These are “in-kind” exchanges where students provide their skills and practitioners provide real problems with real data and other information for the project.  Experiential learning projects provide benefits to both students and practitioners and are a vital component of the Town+Gown program.

Town+Gown supports these projects by connecting the research team with practitioner experts, many of them City agency staff, publicly available data sets, providing general city government knowledge for project context, and setting up meetings, including mid-project and final presentations. In exchange, Town+Gown will require final deliverables from the research team to enable Town+Gown to abstract the project in Building Ideas and use as a foundation for future Symposium events.

Please watch our video to learn about the impact of a series of experiential learning engagements from both academic and practitioner perspectives.

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How to Engage with Town+Gown for Experiential Learning Research

If you are at an agency or at an academic institution (experiential learning program administrator, professor, researcher or student at the graduate school level) and have an idea or ideas for experiential learning research projects, please contact Terri Matthews, Director, at matthewste@ddc.nyc.gov, and we can discuss your idea(s) so that Town+Gown can begin its “matchmaking” function.

You may use the Research Question Worksheet if you find that helpful, but it is not necessary to use the worksheet to initiate the conversation.

Town+Gown will continue its regular outreach for research project “matchmaking” to agencies and experiential learning programs.

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Agency + Academic Research Exchange

Town+Gown hosted its inaugural Agency + Academic Research Exchange (R/EX) event on September 24, 2024 for DEP and DOT. At this R/EX event, academic researchers and agency researchers presented what they are working on, all using the 2 minute/slide “Pitchfest” model, to exchange knowledge and research ideas, with the goal of finding commonalities for them to consider collaborative approaches. There were 60 presentations split between DEP and DOT sessions, and there were close to 100 participants. The academic researchers spanned 10 institutions -- CUNY/CCNY, CUNY/John Jay, Columbia, Cornell, Drexel, Fordham, NYU, Pratt, SUNY/Buffalo and SUNY/Stony Brook. Conversations among researchers in the last session will continue going forward. Town+Gown plans to conduct similar R/EX events with other city agencies in the future.

Check out the agenda as well as slides from the event.

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Recent Projects

Click here to see examples of recent projects.

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