Carnegie Community Engagement Classification
This elective Community Engagement Classification offered by the Carnegie Foundation offers ECU the opportunity to be recognized for our engagement with our communities. According to the Foundation, “Community Engagement 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.”
Carnegie identified the following benefits for attainment of the classification:
- Public recognition and visibility
- Accountability
- Catalyst for change
- Institutional Identity
- Self-assessment and self-study
Our application is due September 1, 2008. After review by a team of Carnegie personnel, the designation will be awarded to successful institutions in December 2008. Plans are underway for re-classification to occur every 6-8 years. Our Carnegie Team is composed of faculty, staff, members of the Faculty Senate, and administrators from across campus. The application has three parts; the first section provides documentation of entry or foundational indicators, Institutional Identity and Culture and Institutional Commitment. The second part of the application requires the provision of data and descriptions of engagement activities, with examples, under two categories: Curricular Engagement and Outreach & Partnerships.
As a team, we developed definitions for key terms and phrases to guide us as we developed the application.
Working Definitions
- Community engagement is a reciprocal partnership between a university and a community(ies) established to respond to issues and opportunities in a mutually beneficial way.
- A community is any group of people connected over time by common interests. Communities may or may not be bound by place.
- Service-learning is a method of instruction that has the benefit of meeting academic course objectives and helping students develop a sense of engagement and social responsibility. All volunteer hours and service hours are not service learning. Service learning courses should meet the following broad guidelines:
- Service learning is structured within a course and has a formal, academic curriculum that is rooted in the discipline in which the course if being offered;
- The course contains a set of organized community-based learning activities through which students directly service a constituency as a means to address an identified community need;
- The course provides structured opportunities for students to formally connect their service activities to the course curriculum and to broader social issues through reflective methods.
- Faculty scholarship associated with curricular engagement is scholarly activity that faculty produce in connection with their service learning or community-based courses or internships. The scholarship products are professional presentations and publications along with curriculum development, assessment of student learning in community, action research conducted in a course that are disseminated by means of reports, curriculum materials, and/or faculty development workshops,.
- Faculty scholarship associated with outreach and partnerships is scholarly activity that faculty produce in connection with their partnership development and participation or their outreach activities. The scholarship products are professional presentations and publications along with research studies of partnerships, documentation of community response to outreach programs, and other forms of assessment that have been disseminated by means of reports and policies.
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