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