DRAFT: Do not quote or reproduce without author permission 1 Towards the Recognition and Integration of

Deliberative democracy is an approach to social change that puts citizen deliberation at the heart of policy-making. It is a process that involves sustained and intense discussion about critical social issues among a broad range of stakeholders. The assumption is that these kinds of discussions lead to new ways of understanding and conceptualizing social issues. Out of these new understandings, creative policy ideas emerge. Action Research (AR) and other forms of engaged scholarship are research methodologies that can be used in many different disciplines to advance deliberative democracy. As an explicitly action-oriented research methodology, AR is built upon deliberative democratic processes and provides a research framework with positive social change as a goal. This paper provides an overview of action research, its connections to deliberative democracy and its overlaps with other forms of engaged scholarship, ending with a call for embedding engaged scholarship in the academy as a recognized and valued form of scholarship. What is Action Research? While there have been a variety of ways of describing and defining AR, there are a few basic elements that are at the core of this methodology. According Greenwood and Levin, “A