Assessing Engagement
I've just returned from the 20th Anniversary meeting of Campus Compact in Chicago. It's stimulating to be with so many people talking and thinking about how to advance engagement in higher education, with an opportunity for broader-range thinking that we have regrettably little time for at our home institutions.
I participated in a roundtable examining the question "What kinds of evidence of the impact of engagement on faculty, students, and communities would be convincing to key external constituencies (e.g., policy-makers, funders, media)?" Some of the points that were made:
- There are many different kinds of projects and audiences, each with a different appropriate metric.
- Desirable outcomes should be defined with our collaborators and partners.
- Outcomes should be aligned with the needs of decision-makers.
- We need both quantitative and qualitative measures. Without measurable outcomes, we can be readily dismissed; but once we've gotten a hearing, stories are more effective than numbers.
- Service-learning or other community engagement activities can produce, as learning outcomes, the "public skills" of interest to business communities.