Background The Transdisciplinary Research Consortium for Gulf Resilience on Women’s Health (GROWH) addresses reproductive health disparities in the Gulf Coast by linking communities and scientists through community-engaged research. Funded by the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences, GROWH’s Community Outreach and Dissemination Core (CODC) seeks to utilize community-based participatory research (CBPR) and other community-centered outreach strategies to strengthen resilience in vulnerable Gulf Coast populations. The CODC is an academic-community partnership comprised of Tulane University, Mary Queen of Vietnam Community Development Corporation, Bayou Interfaith Shared Community Organizing, and the Louisiana Public Health Institute (LPHI). Methods Alongside its CODC partners, LPHI collaboratively developed, piloted and evaluated an innovative CBPR curriculum. In addition to helping with curriculum design, the CODC’s community and academic partners participated in the pilot. The curriculum was designed to impart applied, practical knowledge to community-based organizations and academic researchers on the successful formulation, execution and sustaining of CBPR projects and partnerships within the context of environmental health research. Results The curriculum resulted in increased knowledge about CBPR methods among both community and academic partners as well as improved relationships within the GROWH CODC partnership. Conclusion The efforts of the GROWH partnership and curriculum were successful. This curriculum may serve as an anchor for future GROWH efforts including: competency development, translation of the curriculum into education and training products, community development of a CBPR curriculum for academic partners, community practice of CBPR, and future environmental health work.

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What appeared decades ago as solely a European model-Thatcherism-is now a global trend with no apparent end in sight. Neoliberalism in the public sector, and within the educational sphere particularly, pervades within a larger pattern of hegemonic ideologies. In sum, market forces and global capitalism make it quite difficult for public education, both nationally and internationally, to retain its democratic ethos, the historical aim of common schools. Is there an antidote to corporate, global capitalism ideologies undermining the democratic aims and the common good in public education? In this article the authors assert that, indeed, there are discursive spaces where scholars and citizens can turn. One space is the arts, especially jazz. In jazz the discursive, social practices of improvisation, call and response and the tradition of 'standing on the shoulders of those who came before you' (honoring elders) facilitate deep democracy.This article borrows both from the metaphors and discursive practices of jazz, including improvisation and the habits of mind fostering deep listening and hearing one's fellow combo members. The authors argue that as in jazz, education can embrace and return to its democratic impulses. In so doing the consumers of public education-students, families, and local communities, can systematically resist the destructive consequences of neoliberalism. Moreover by embracing the aesthetic of jazz in public education, consumers can exploit the concomitant the more constructive opportunities of the ideologies of neoliberalism, namely innovation, creative autonomy, and individual liberty. In the end civility in public discourse is rendered possible by such an aesthetic move. The authors welcome dialogue and debate on their arguments.

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