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Higher Education Community Engagement Quality Practices

For a variety of reasons, the question of quality practice in higher education has not been approached through the development of field-wide standards. That said, there is a strong body of knowledge in the field about what supports and sustains successful service-learning and community engagement at both the individual and institutional levels. Evaluations of service-learning programs have explored the factors that are most commonly associated with successful community-campus partnerships. These factors included joint planning, a genuine sense of reciprocity, clear definitions of roles and activities, a comprehensive student orientation and preparation process, and consistent communication with a primary point of contact on each side. The evaluations have also found that in order for higher educational institutions to build institutional capacity around service-learning, they need to clearly define their mission and goals, generate multi-level support, invest in faculty development, nurture long-term community partnerships, and integrate service-learning into the administrative structures and policies of the institution as well as the broader curriculum. For service-learning to really work for community partners, community partners needed to ensure that service-learning was closely aligned with their organizational goals as well as complementary to their overall mission. Furthermore, community partners needed to develop internal structures to support their involvement in service-learning as well as adopt the perspective that the students involved in service-learning had valuable skills and expertise to contribute.

Several measurement tools and guidelines have been developed to help individual faculty members and entire institutions develop and evaluate the quality and success of their practices.

  • Andrew Furco’s Self-Assessment Rubric for the Institutionalization of Service-Learning in Higher Education (2002) is designed to assist members of the higher education community in gauging the progress of their campus’s service-learning institutionalization efforts. Furco proposes to gauge institutionalization across five dimensions:
    • Philosophy and mission of service-learning
    • Faculty support for and involvement in service-learning
    • Student support for and involvement in service-learning
    • Community participation and partnerships
    • Institutional support for service-learning
  • The Carnegie Community Engagement Elective Classification is an elective classification within the Carnegie Classifications of institutions of higher education that "describes the collaboration between institutions of higher education and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity." In 2006 and 2008, universities could attain this classification with one of two of the elements below, but for 2010, both elements must be present for a higher education institution to qualify for this classification.
    • Curricular Engagement includes institutions where teaching, learning and cholarship engage faculty, students, and community in mutually beneficial and respectful collaboration. Their interactions address community-identified needs, deepen students’ civic and academic learning, enhance community well-being, and enrich the scholarship of the institution.
    • Outreach & Partnerships includes institutions that provided compelling evidence of one or both of two approaches to community engagement. Outreach focuses on the application and provision of institutional resources for community use with benefits to both campus and community. Partnerships focuses on collaborative interactions with community and related scholarship for the mutually beneficial exchange, exploration, and application of knowledge, information, and resources (research, capacity building, economic development, etc.).
  • In 2004, leaders and scholars of service-learning in higher education met at a Wingspread meeting and together created Calling the Question: Is Higher Education Really Ready to Commit to Community Engagement?: A Wingspread Statement, in which they described six promising practices to address the institutionalization of university engagement and answer their call to commitment. According to the authors, institutions that answer the call will:
    • Integrate engagement into mission
    • Forge partnerships as the overarching framework for engagement
    • Renew and redefine discovery and scholarship
    • Integrate engagement into teaching and learning
    • Recruit and support new champions
    • Create radical institutional change

While each of these foundational discussions of the theory, research, and best practice in higher education service-learning comes from a different direction, several common themes emerge that can, taken together, be considered some common denominators for best practice for individual faculty and programs and for community-engaged institutions as a whole. These include: meaningful and reciprocal community/campus partnerships, institutional support structures, rigorous evaluation practices, and community-engaged scholarship.

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