Working for Cake: Completing the Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement
University of Northern Colorado’s celebratory Carnegie Cake.
Spring semester has wrapped up, and I’m reflecting on what we accomplished last term. There have been reviews of grant applications, and workshops and consultations, presentations and graduate student graduations. But much of my focus was spent on the Carnegie Foundation elective classification for community-engagement. I curated and conversated about what evidence to include to demonstrate Cornell’s commitment to community-engagement. I spoke with colleagues from Institutional Research and Planning and the Office of Faculty Development and Diversity. I reached out to faculty from Latino/a Studies, Natural Resources and Development Sociology. I cajoled my work-mates to leverage their networks. And I did my own share of writing and researching.
And we got it submitted. On time!
I’m excited about what I’ve learned and the story that we tell with our Carnegie application. Since we are re-classifying, we have had ten years to consider the ways that community-engagement is baked into Cornell’s culture and explore the places that it could be better supported. We knew starting the application that we had taken tremendous strides in creating systems to track and measure curricular community engagement: we have a way to tag community-engaged learning courses, we have a dashboard with metrics tracking students and faculty involvement, we have new platforms like Explore and Experience that collect data. We now have institutionalized collaborations with Institutional Research and Planning and the Registrar’s Office so data requests are normalized and expected. And with a groundbreaking investment in scaling up community-engaged learning through the Engaged Cornell experiment, we have five years of projects that we’ve funded by faculty, staff and students doing amazing projects.
It has been exciting to step back and consider how we have used this data: to focus on diversity topics in our course design institute, to better understand gaps in engaged course sequencing and to adapt our Certificate in Engaged Leadership to better support students on their pathways to engagement. We also reflected on how we are effective in advancing the mission of Engaged Cornell when we serve as a catalyst, with capacity building and institutional transformation as the goal.
Examples of success in this regard include working through the existing communications offices in colleges to build their capacity for producing high-quality stories and reporting of community engagement. Not only does this increase capacity, it recognizes community engagement in a public way and encourages interest.
In addition, curriculum grants build capacity among the faculty by bringing faculty teams into curricular development. We are not building the curricula; the faculty are doing this, but we are setting up conditions for their success. Law faculty are now working with business faculty to provide tax services for low-income immigrants; a new interdisciplinary Crime, Prisons, Education and Justice minor connects students with local incarcerated experts; Cornell students have developed materials science and engineering curriculum for high school students. In 2017–18 alone, 24 curriculum grants supported 106 faculty and staff at Cornell, 63 partners and more than 500 students. If we continue to prioritize our role as catalyst, success will follow.
However, gaps and growth edges exist. We can be more systematic in tracking partnerships and in assessing impact of both process and outcomes related to community-campus partnerships. In an effort to learn from our programs and partners, we sometimes face a conflict between requesting too much information from our grantees versus accessing the information needed to continuously improve the strategy and programs we support. We must continue to streamline and sharpen requests of our collaborators in order to optimize learning. Changing tenure and promotion policy remains outside the purview of professionalized staff, so building a strategic alliance of faculty to work on transparency and support of engaged scholarship is a key strategy moving forward. Lastly, we can continue to bring together colleagues from across campus to better coordinate and evaluate community engagement together.
Next up, I want to visualize some of the data we collected for the Classification framework. And I want to celebrate the accomplishment of successfully turning in the application. Maybe there will be cake!
