Foundational indicators
● Is community engagement defined and planned for in the strategic plan of the institution?
● Does the community have a “voice” or role for input into institutional or departmental planning
for community engagement?
● Does the institution invest its financial resources in the community and/or community
partnerships for purposes of community engagement and community development?
● Does the institution have search/recruitment policies or practices designed specifically to
encourage the hiring of faculty in any employment status and staff with expertise in and commitment to community engagement?
● Are there institutional-level policies for faculty promotion (and tenure at tenure-granting
campuses) that specifically reward faculty scholarly work that uses community-engaged approaches and methods? If there are separate policies for tenured/tenure track, full time non-tenure track, and part time faculty, please describe them as well.
Curricular Engagement
● Does the institution have a definition, standard components, and a process for identifying
community-engaged courses?
● Are institutional (campus-wide) learning outcomes for students’ curricular engagement with
community systematically assessed?
● Has community engagement been integrated with curriculum on an institution-wide level?
Co-curricular Engagement
● Do students have access to a co-curricular engagement tracking system that can serve
as a co-curricular transcript or record of community engagement?
● Does co-curricular programming provide students with clear developmental pathways
through which they can progress to increasingly complex forms of community engagement over time?
Professional Activity and Scholarship
● Are there examples of faculty scholarship, including faculty of any employment status
associated with their curricular engagement achievements (scholarship of teaching and learning such as research studies, conference presentations, pedagogy workshops, publications, etc.)?
● Are there examples of faculty scholarship and/or professional activities of staff
associated with the scholarship of engagement (i.e., focused on community impact and with community partners) and community engagement activities (technical reports, curriculum, research reports, policy reports, publications, other scholarly artifacts, etc.)? Community Engagement and Other Institutional Initiatives
● Does community engagement directly contribute to (or is it aligned with) the institution’s
diversity and inclusion goals (for students and faculty)?
● Does the campus institutional review board (IRB) or some part of the community
engagement infrastructure provide specific guidance for researchers regarding human subjects protections for community-engaged research?
● Does the institution encourage and measure student voter registration and voting?
Outreach and Partnerships
● Which institutional resources are provided as outreach to the community?
● Does the institution or departments take specific actions to ensure mutuality and reciprocity in
partnerships?
● Describe representative examples of partnerships (both institutional and departmental) that were
in place during the most recent.
Examples of using the approach
This tool is used at the institutional level, not by academic departments or other campus units and not by systems or campus coalitions. As of the 2015 cycle, 361 campuses are classified. Elective Community Engagement Classification from the Carnegie Foundation, 83 of them for the first time and 157 of them re-classified. As an example of who is using this approach, in the 2015 cycle, 47 campuses were public institutions and 36 were private not-for-profit institutions. The set included baccalaureate and associate’s colleges, masters colleges and universities, doctoral/research universities, and special focus institutions (e.g., medical schools).
Some campuses use the classification framework as a planning tool, whether or not they also intend to submit an application for review. Others who are classified use it as a self-study tool at the halfway point of the ten-year cycle, gauging their progress toward goals they established form themselves when they previously submitted the application.
Campuses complete the application in a wide variety of ways, some with a single point person who reaches out across campus for data (an approach that is not recommended as it essentially negates use of the tool to support dialogue and planning), some with a single unit taking responsibility, and some (arguably the most effective approach) with multi-stakeholder/multi-unit committees or Task Forces who work as team. Some campuses join multi-institutional communities of practice, supporting one another and sharing ideas; others work with consultants to help them apply the process in ways that are customized to their particular contexts. Some campuses complete it merely as an application process, while others, more in line with the underlying purpose of the classification, undertake it as an opportunity to critically examine their own practices and policies, surface and discuss varying versions of community engagement, and make concrete plans for ongoing refinement of campus culture.
Several studies have been undertaken using the applications as data sets. As one example, New Directions for Higher Education dedicated an issue (Sandmann, Thornton, & Jaeger, eds., 2011) to
analysis of the first cohort of classified campuses; articles speak to such issues as promotion and tenure, leadership, benchmarking, and ways to improve community engaged learning as well as partnerships. More recently, Marshall Welch (2016) drew on research he and John Saltmarsh had conducted using the applications to examine infrastructure (e.g., centers) on campus to support engagement and published Engaging Higher Education: Purpose, Platforms, and Programs for Community Engagement; the book shares many examples of infrastructure from classified campuses. In The Elective Carnegie Community Engagement Classification, Saltmarsh and Johnson (2018) share examples of how campuses have used the application process to advance community engagement, including, for example, seeking funding, establishing new forms of recognition, and revising promotion and tenure guidelines.
Examination of the approach per the core values of DEA
Value Analysis
Full
participation
Strengths
● The initial development of the tool included representatives of multiple institution
types. Shortcomings
● Community partners and students were not part of developing the tool and, on
many campuses, are not involved in its use despite having significant stakes in the results.
● There is no inherent requirement that the application be made available to
members of the campus community and its constituents (although some campuses do choose to post their completed applications online). Co-creation Strengths
● Representatives of multiple institution types piloted the first version of the tool
and provided feedback to refine it before the classification launched.
● Ongoing refinement of the tool for each cycle draws on input from campus
variety of roles; additional mechanisms are being developed to make the process
of refinement open to anyone who wishes to provide input.
Shortcomings
● The tool does not inherently require a broad-based team approach or even input
from all partners or stakeholders; however, the institution can build such contributions into the process.
Rigor Strengths
● The tool was developed from an extensive body of research on and practice of
community engagement through an iterative revision process using lessons from use at a variety of institutions over more than a decade.
● It requires extensive and thorough documentation of institutional culture,
practices, and policies in a way that invites discussions of internal differences that can lead to greater conceptual clarity.
● Because the applcation encourages campuses to tell their own unique story,
there is some alignment of a common process with campus-specific contexts. Shortcomings
● The tool does not incorporate multiple methods or ways of knowing and
privileges western academic approaches to learning and scholarly work.
● The 10-year re-application cycle may provide insufficient external accountability
to ensure catalytic validity (i.e., that results are acted upon).
● Minimal guidance is provided to help campuses consider the potential risks and
harms associated with how they determine what information to include. Generativity Strengths
● The comprehensiveness of the set of questions almost guarantees that those
responsibility for gathering information will find information previously unknown to them.
● Questions speak to the leading edge of what institutional transformation is
understood to consist of, thus calling campuses toward possibilities they might not otherwise consider or value.
● The tool provides information that can lead to change and growth at every level
of the institution and in terms of all three domains: process, relationships, and results.
Shortcomings
● Context is mostly limited to understanding the culture and practices of the
academic institution and gives little attention to larger community or societal concerns; institutional transformation is the focus, not (also) community transformation.
● Increasingly the tool is couched in neoliberal terms (e.g., a market has arisen
around providing support to campuses to complete it; on many campuses conversations tend to focus more on receiving and marketing the recognition than on leveraging it to confront difficult questions and to drive changes to the status quo.
Practicability Strengths
● The tool enables a robust self-study that identifies institutional assets and makes
potential growth goals fairly obvious.
● Receiving the classification contributes to an institution’s reputation, which for
many justifies the costs. Completing the application and not receiving the classification still generates highly useful information to guide future work.
● Guidance for answering each question is provided, to help clarify their meaning
and intent. Shortcomings
● Although answers are by definition contextualized to the campus, the tool is not
● The extensive documentation process the tool requires can present an
administrative burden for the institution. Resilience Strengths
● The tool focuses attention on systems, policies, and processes that are
understood by the field to support the flourishing of community engagement
● It calls attention to inequities in resource allocations, in faculty reward policies
across campus, in support for students and faculty, etc.
● The decennial renewal process is useful for long-term strategic planning.
● Re-applicants are required to explain changes during the previous ten year
period; critically reflecting on the causes and consequences of setbacks can lead to learning that can be applied to similar current and future challenges Shortcomings
● Although some campuses do use the tool proactively, in most cases the external
review cycle and its associated calls for applications drive a reactive process.
● The tool does not focus on building capacities of community partners
Potential for improvement
Enacting these values more fully could be achieved by a thoughtful analysis of ways in which the institution involves students, community members, and/or other (e.g., board members) in the process of completing the application (e.g., inviting these stakeholders to contribute narratives or illustrative examples, to serve on the committee tasked with the process).
While the framework guides the institution through an extensive accounting of practices, much depends on how the self-study process is designed and implemented. An analysis of the Carnegie Elective Community Engagement Classification in the context of the phases of assessment is presented in Part II.