Assessment related to faculty as a category of interest within community engagement has not been ignored but also has not been well developed. Most of this work has focused on faculty motivations, the challenges they face in integrating community engagement into their teaching and research roles, the benefits they experience, their levels of satisfaction with their community-engaged activities, the associated scholarship they generate, and how their work can best be evaluated in promotion and tenure processes (e.g., Chism, Palmer, & Price, 2013; Clayton, Hess, Jaeger, Jameson, & McGuire, 2013; White, Cruz, Cruz, Ellern, Ford, & Moss, 2012; Doberneck & Fitzgerald, 2008; Ellison & Eatman, 2008; Foster, 2010; Janke et al., 2017; Jordan, 2007; O’Meara, 2001; O’Meara, 2013; Seifer, Blanchard, Jordan, Gelmon, & McGinley, 2012). Part 3 of Volume 2A of the edited volume Research on Service Learning: Conceptual Frameworks and Assessment (Clayton, Bringle, & Hatcher, 2013) provides an overview of assessment related to faculty in service-learning and community engagement, with topics including faculty development, faculty motivation, and faculty learning. For the purposes of thinking about assessment here, the first and third of these topics are the most relevant.
When it comes to faculty development (see Chism, Palmer, & Price, 2013) most assessment is focused on participation numbers and satisfaction levels, some inquiries into subsequent changes in practice (e.g., instruction, publication, grant writing, partnering, mentoring) or levels of confidence in making such changes, and little investigates impacts on students, communities, or institutions. Methods used include interviews, surveys, pre-post self-evaluation, counting (e.g., attendance, follow-up activities, publications, future professional development), and review of faculty-generated artifacts (e.g., proposals, syllabi, narratives).
Assessment of faculty learning (see Clayton, Hess, Jaeger, Jameson, & McGuire, 2013) should perhaps be an obvious area of focus given the foundational commitment of service-learning that everyone
involved — not only students — are learners, but strong norms in the academy reinforce the identity of faculty as experts, knowledge producers, and teachers, all of which are generally thought to be contrary to their identities as learners. The result has been little focus on assessing faculty learning, neither their learning processes nor their learning outcomes. This said, research on faculty competencies, practices, and artifacts has been significant: scales have been used to assess faculty competencies for community engaged scholarship; classroom observations have been used to assess community-engaged teaching practices; content analysis on faculty communication with students (e.g., through feedback on written products) has been conducted; faculty artifacts such as syllabi and assignment prompts and rubrics have been examined; focus groups have been held; reflection products have been examined;
autoethnographies have been produced, and individual and collective self-studies have been undertaken; and lastly, rubrics aligned with particular faculty learning goals have been developed. This assessment research tends to reveal that faculty grow more skilled and satisfied with their work, while developing new research agendas and productive collaborations with students, community partners, and academic peers. However, without assistance in evaluating engaged scholarship, many institutions may not value (in promotion and tenure processes) contributions to public scholarship, community development, or even disciplinary traditions of community engagement. A variety of
frameworks have informed criteria, metrics, and methods of assessing faculty community engagement, particularly for the purposes of reappointment, promotion, and tenure. These include Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered (1990), Kerry Ann O’Meara’s Scholarship Unbound (2001), and Julie Ellison’s and Tim Eatman’s Scholarship in Public for Imagining America (2008). Additional resources include: Points of Distinction: A Guide for Planning and Evaluating Quality Outreach (Michigan State University, 1996, 2000), Community-Engaged Scholarship Review, Promotion, & Tenure Package (Jordan, 2007), “Service-Learning Quality Assessment Tool” (SLQAT) (Furco et al., 2017) and “Holistic Framework for Educational Professional Development” (Welch & Plaxton-Moore, in Berkey, Meixner, Green, & Eddins, 2018)
We examine here a protocol for assessing faculty learning around community engaged scholarship (CES) that was developed as part of the Education and Discovery Grounded in Engaged Scholarship (EDGES) initiative at North Carolina State University, a “12-month cohort-based learning community designed to support faculty in developing and implementing curricular- or research-based CES projects during key transition points (or edges) in their career paths” (Jameson, Clayton, Jaeger, & Bringle, 2012, p. 41). This protocol has two parts: (a) a scale to be completed in accordance with a pre-post-then design (which adds to the usual pre-post design a retrospective pre-test that helps to account for response shift bias, the tendency to overestimate competence before an intervention) and (b) three sets of reflection prompts to be completed at the beginning, middle, and end of a process designed to generate faculty learning. The scale and prompts are aligned with such learning goals as understanding the foundational concepts of CES, analyzing partnership dynamics in CES, comparing and contrasting multiple
frameworks for CES, developing capacities to co-create with students and community partners and to publish CES, and developing skills to communicate about CES. The protocol can support inquiry not only into what faculty are learning but also how they think they are learning.
Application of the questions in Table 3 indicate that this protocol both does and does not align with the values of DEA. The incorporation of critical reflection activities before, during, and after the program encourages generativity by providing opportunities for deepening learning; although, more probing questions about outcomes would better inform changes to practice and inquiry. The approach has rigor
in its use of well-researched competencies and in its adherence to multiple forms of validity (process, outcome, catalytic, dialogic, and democratic), but it relies largely (not exclusively) on self-report and would be stronger if it collected other evidence of faculty learning (e.g., syllabi, publications, project summaries). It is generally practicable in that it offers a modest survey with a clean pre-post-then procedure, although the reflection process takes time if done well. In terms of co-creation, the understanding of community engaged scholarship (which includes the central role of co-creation) embodied in the protocol emerged from years of collaborative practice and scholarship that integrated insights from undergraduates, graduate students, community members, professional staff, and faculty across multiple disciplines. Full participation of faculty members in a professional development program can be achieved; but student, community partner, and other stakeholder perspectives are not included. Resilience is possible due to the fact the method is adaptable to multiple contexts and constraints and since it can foster programs that engage in sustained learning and growth.