Going Beyond Rubrics: The Impact of Community Engagement on Our Campuses

As part of Campus Compact for Southern New England’s four-part series on Civic & Community Engagement, this workshop, hosted at MCPHS, will focus on strategies for evaluating the impact of civic engagement initiatives on your institution including policies, practices, and institutional mission and culture. The workshop has the following overall goals:

• to examine the ways in which we define and measure institutional impacts related to civic engagement efforts: What institutional impacts are important to us? To our institutional leadership? To others?
• to strengthen our understanding/awareness of current tools and strategies for assessing institutional engagement and examine their strengths and shortcomings in assessing institutional impacts
• to consider alternative strategies for assessing institutional impacts: What questions should we be asking? What kinds of information should we be collecting? What methodologies make sense?
• to share current campus level tools/strategies
• to continue to build a network of scholars and practitioners
• to identify potential collaborative work

The workshop will include presentations, breakout groups, and a mix of small and large group discussion. In this session we’ll provide information on qualitative and quantitative methods for examining these outcomes, and avenues for meaningful involvement by faculty, staff, administrators and others at your institution.

Learning from each other’s experience will be critical to the day. We’ll ask participants to share tools and approaches that they have used successfully (or unsuccessfully). There will also be time for “beginner” and “advanced” level discussions so that our individual work can be accelerated regardless of our individual starting points.