The Einhorn Center has five student learning outcomes (SLOs) for center-run programs and programs that receive funding from us. Tracking and measuring these SLOs help to ensure that community-engaged learning at Cornell is impactful – not just well intentioned – and that we’re able to make evidence-based decisions to improve the university’s CEL programs.
In short, it means better results for students and for community partners.
Civic Engagement
Civic engagement is “working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values and motivation to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes.” (Excerpted from Civic Responsibility and Higher Education, edited by Thomas Ehrlich, published by Oryx Press, 2000, Preface, page vi.)
In addition, civic engagement encompasses actions wherein individuals participate in activities of personal and public concern that are both individually life-enriching and socially beneficial to the community. (Association of American Colleges and Universities. VALUE Rubrics. AAC&U, 2009.)
Levels of Achievement
Identify the relevance of knowledge (facts, theories, etc.) from academic study within the areas of civic life, politics and government, and experience working within and learning from diverse communities and cultures.
Use tools that allow them to connect and extend academic knowledge to civic life, politics and government. Reflect on and analyze their attitudes and beliefs through engaged actions with diverse communities and cultures.
Demonstrate independence and leadership in connecting and extending knowledge from academic study to civic life, politics and government within diverse communities and cultures. Analyze and reflect on the aims and accomplishments of engaged actions.
Cultural Humility
The three core dimensions of cultural humility:
- To engage in self-reflection on one’s identity and positionality as it relates to others
- To adapt and communicate effectively in diverse cultural and community contexts
- To cultivate the knowledge, skills and attitudes to recognize and challenge unequal relations of power and to enact cultural humility in different spaces and places on different levels — individually, interpersonally, institutionally and as part of larger systems
Global Engagement Survey definition of cultural humility: A commitment to critical self-reflection and lifelong re-evaluation of assumptions, increasing one’s capacities for appropriate behaviors and actions in varying cultural contexts. This capacity for appropriate, culturally relevant action is coupled with awareness of one’s positionality within systems of power and aligned in service of collaboratively re-considering and re-constructing assumptions and systems to enact a deeper and broader embrace of shared dignity, redressing historic inequities.
Levels of Achievement
This outcome deals with naming and changing systems of power that continue to oppress and marginalize groups of people (includes, but not limited to, race, gender, sexual identity and class). Importantly, student learning in this outcome needs to be done in collaboration with community partners, as their expertise on these issues should be forefronted.
Identify and explain more deeply their own and others’ assumptions, feelings, modes of communication and worldviews. Examine and question stereotypes and practice culturally appropriate behavior. Demonstrate and apply intercultural skills and knowledge within diverse communities. Displays capacity for appropriate, culturally relevant action in a community context coupled with awareness of one’s positionality within systems of power.
Interpret cultural experiences from the perspectives of more than one worldview and demonstrate the ability to act in a supportive and sensitive manner that recognizes the feelings of another cultural group or community. Collaboratively reconsidering and reconstructing assumptions and systems to enact a deeper and broader embrace of shared dignity, redressing historic inequities.
Integrative Learning
Integrative learning is an understanding and a disposition that a student builds across the curriculum and cocurriculum, from making simple connections among ideas and experiences to synthesizing and
transferring learning to new, complex situations within and beyond the campus. Association of American Colleges & Universities.
Levels of Achievement
Describe connections between personal experience, community-engaged experiences, and academic theories, concepts, and ideas. Recognize interrelationships among different fields of study
Incorporate diverse methodologies comparing community-engaged experiences and academic knowledge; infer differences as well as similarities that acknowledge perspectives and experiences other than their own.
Critical reflection is both a process and an outcome. It focuses on using critical lenses (e.g., anti-racist, anti-oppression) to make sense of the community-engaged experience. Critical reflection is a skill and a practice, with concrete models and activities.
Critical Reflection
Critical reflection is a learning process that entails “a person’s intentional and systematic consideration of an experience, along with how that person and others are connected to that experience framed in terms of particular course content and learning objectives” (Collier & Williams, 2005, p. 84). Critical reflection “requires an explicit set of questions that prompt students to examine relations of power, hegemony, ideology and trenchant historical norms, structures and existing institutional arrangements that marginalize and oppress” (Kiely, 2015, para 19).
Levels of Achievement
Identify and describe the importance of constructing knowledge out of community-engaged experiences through reflective practices before, during, and after the experience. Recognize, surface and examine their own and others’ taken-for-granted assumptions. Display minimal use of reflective strategies. Acknowledge diverse viewpoints and sources of information.
Demonstrate skills and habits of reflection that include writing, asking questions, observing, analyzing, listening and engaging with others in supportive discourse. Apply these reflective skills to consider their own and others’ perspectives to make connections among community-engaged experiences, knowledge, values and emotions.
Demonstrate skills in metacognition using diverse reflective modes from multiple vantage points. Demonstrate critical and systematic approaches in examining their own and others’ assumptions. Analyze, interpret and articulate learning to others that considers context. Examine sources and solutions to community problems and make substantive connections among community-engaged experiences and contextual factors such as knowledge, values and emotions.
Supporting Materials
Ethical Practice
Ethical practice is the ongoing, reflective process of recognizing and analyzing ethical issues within their social and community contexts, examining one’s own values and assumptions, applying relevant ethical perspectives and making and enacting decisions that consider the implications for others and the broader common good. (Based on the ethical reasoning VALUE Rubric, Association of American Colleges and Universities. VALUE Rubrics. AAC&U, 2009.)
Levels of Achievement
Recognize institutional cultural and moral standards relevant to the community context or project and begin to reflect on their own core moral and ethical beliefs, values and practices. Describe ethical issues and state a position straightforwardly.
Participate in a reflective process of judgment, decision-making and action that integrates personal, academic, professional and civic experiences and begins to act on ethical decisions within a community context. Describe and examine ethical issues and state a position that is complex and contextual.
Examine and communicate the connection between one’s actions and beliefs and the well-being of communities and society independently. Assess ethical issues and present the implications of different actions. Articulate and enact a set of ethical principles and practices in diverse community contexts.
Additional Materials
Additional supporting materials and links to our online CEL Courses in partnership with eCornell can be found below.