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Civic Engagement
Equicentric Approach
Meaning Making and Contextual Analysis
Collaboration with Diverse Teams
What is Community-Engaged Learning?   /    Student Learning Outcomes
Student Learning Outcomes
Student Learning Outcomes

The Einhorn Center focuses on 14 student learning outcomes (SLOs) across our programs and ones that receive our grants. Tracking and measuring these SLOs helps 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 our programs.

In short, it means better results for students and for community partners.

Civic Engagement
Ethical Practice

This outcome deals with the ethical issues and practices specific to the partnership and the community-identified topic that is being addressed. These include issues of equity among partners, the ways that partners are compensated for their work and understanding of positionality between partners.

Initial
Students are aware of and can define the ethical issues in the partnership.
Emerging
Students commit to abiding by ethical principles.
Developed
Students take into account both the community partner and other stakeholders’ practices and principles.
Democratic Engagement and Community Orientation

This outcome investigates citizenship and service. What does it mean to be a member of a community? How do we uphold democratic principles and values in our activities and programs, and in our partnerships? Does the program have intentional and explicit democratic dimensions?

Initial
Students are well intentioned about actions, but not well educated about role within community.
Emerging
Students are concerned with discovering root causes and start to ask why things are the way they are; begin to connect the dots between systems.
Developed
Students make community a priority in values and life choices; allow community to lead the charge; understand the root causes and see the interconnectedness between issues.
Safety & Risk Management

This outcome focuses on program management and best practices, with a commitment to Cornell and partner policies and procedures.

Initial
Students are aware of and abide by policies and procedures.
Emerging
Students understand why policies and procedures exist for personal safety and larger community accountability (e.g., with partner, faculty, community being served, etc.).
Developed
Students are actively implementing and enforcing policies and procedures. Students can handle the “gray spaces” in an appropriate way.
Partnership Practices

The outcome signifies a commitment to practices which support community partners as co-educators and significant collaborators in the program. The program sets up opportunities to work with and learn from partners or those being served. Invites community partners to name the problem to be addressed and to be part of management from the beginning.

Initial
Students see the partner as the locus of activity and recognize and value partner expertise.
Emerging
Students create mutually agreed upon programs or projects with their partners.
Developed
Students build interdependent (reciprocal) systems to address the issue; leadership and decision-making is shared.
Equicentric Approach

Equity and anti-oppression models are at the core of community-engaged learning, public good and public engagement. This concept acknowledges the felt sense and lived experience of all stakeholders and focuses on positively impacting cultures of equity to produce systemic change.

Anti-Oppression Practices

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, class, etc). Importantly, student learning in this element needs to be done in collaboration with community partners, as their expertise on these issues should be forefronted.

Initial
Students can identify and name narratives of power that are relevant to the issues being addressed.
Emerging
Students demonstrate dialogical skills that enable them to ask complex questions and use root cause analysis to determine solutions.
Developed
Students are empowered to challenge models and processes that aren’t working and can identify alternative restorative justice models appropriate to the issue.
Intercultural Competence

This outcome speaks to skills, attitudes and behaviors needed to improve interactions across difference. It centers on fostering respect and openness needed to engage with people different than you. This is about understanding others in relation to self.

Initial
Students show awareness of the complexity of other cultures in relation to history, politics, communication styles, economy or values, beliefs and practices.
Emerging
Students utilize more than one worldview in decision-making and interactions.
Developed
Students actively integrate multiple worldviews in facilitation and programming.
Cultural Humility

This outcome acknowledges that we all carry multiple identities that manifest in various ways. We all find ourselves in situations of power and privilege, as well as times when we are marginalized, and this requires curiosity, humility and openness to adapt. This is about understanding self in relation to others.

Initial
Students understand their own identity and privilege and acknowledge that it can change with positionality and context.
Emerging
Students are able to adapt to various cultural situations and are respectful of others’ experiences and identities.
Developed
Students can facilitate experiences that maintain humility and respect for multiple identities.
Meaning Making and Contextual Analysis
Integrative Learning

This outcome blends both abstract concepts and real-life applications. It speaks to learning about ourselves and our communities and bringing those together in action, as well as the process of synthesizing and analyzing community experience and educational content.

Initial
Students describe connections between personal experience, community-engaged experiences and educational theories, concepts and ideas. They recognize and define interrelationships among different fields of study.
Emerging
Students can infer differences as well as similarities that acknowledge perspectives, knowledge and experiences other than their own. They may incorporate diverse methodologies comparing community-engaged experiences and educational content or compare and contrast differing experiences and perspectives while balancing and acknowledging multiple truths and honoring lived experiences.
Developed
Students synthesize multiple perspectives among community-engaged and educational content in order to deepen their understanding of fields of study and broaden their own point of view.
Analytical Thinking

This outcome focuses on perspective taking: understanding your own place and bias as a starting point to understand complex issues by evaluating a wide array of perspectives, knowledge and experiences. This concept figures out how to approach wicked problems.

Initial
Students recognize, surface and examine their own and others’ taken-for-granted assumptions.
Emerging
Students apply reflective skills to consider from their own and other perspectives to make connections among community-engaged experiences, knowledge, values and emotions
Developed
Students 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.
Critical Reflection

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.

Initial
Students identify and describe the importance of constructing knowledge out of community-engaged experiences through reflective practices before, during and after the experience. Display minimal use of reflective strategies.
Emerging
Students demonstrate skills and habits of reflection that include writing, asking questions, observing, analyzing, listening and engaging with others in supportive discourse. Identify a specific reflection practice or model that they apply in community-engagement settings.
Developed
Students utilize skills in metacognition using diverse reflective modes from multiple vantage points.
Collaboration with Diverse Teams

This concept is all about the practices of being a good human and the skills of interacting and working with all the others towards a shared goal.

Teamwork

Community engagement requires people working at their best, and there are skills and behaviors that enable students to work together to solve problems and create solutions. This outcome speaks to skills that support career-readiness. Concerned with diversity in the broadest sense, this outcome enables students to work with others who are different from them in regard to diversity of personality, learning styles, beliefs and perspectives, rural/urban, class and opinion, among others. Teamwork is also about collaborating both locally and globally.

Initial
Students understand the team members, their backgrounds, strengths and areas of growth; share the project goals and objectives; realize that there are methods for approaching collaborative learning
Emerging
Students match people’s strengths with the project tasks; may use ground rules, icebreakers or self and peer assessments to better understand the team.
Developed
Students facilitate a high-performing team with empathy, gratitude, self-care and optimism.
Synergy

This outcome is about how the collective is stronger than the sums of the individual. The focus is on integration in order to create something new, and also about connecting to new and different viewpoints and not holding on to “my way is the right way.”

Initial
Students work together to achieve a goal, drawing upon their specific knowledge and skill sets.
Emerging
Students integrate new approaches and recognize that there are multiple ways to solve problems, reach solutions and ensure success.
Developed
Students weave perspectives together into a new whole, reaching effective synthesis through effective compromise and negotiation of their perspectives with others.
Conflict Management

It’s true that group work can lead to conflict, but leading a network or coalition requires skills to move through conflict safely and with integrity.

Initial
Students identify and understand the multiple perspectives involved in a conflict.
Emerging
Students manage conflict collaboratively by creating a system for dealing with the most common problems that create conflict.
Developed
Students utilize boundaries to avoid personalizing conflict and are able to reconcile the situation to successfully move the project forward.
Facilitation

Leadership takes various forms, both formal and informal, within social groups and around social and environmental causes. Students should be able to facilitate these conversations for maximum impact on the issue.

Initial
Students are able to identify an opportunity that requires a facilitated, organized response.
Emerging
Students are able to plan and implement a one-time event, meeting or action related to a social or environmental cause.
Developed
Students are able to strategically think about and communicate the long-term plan of meetings, events and actions related to a social or environmental cause.
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If you have a disability and are having trouble accessing information on this website or need materials in an alternate format, contact einhorncenter@cornell.edu for assistance.