Overview
The Holistic Program Design (HPD) Approach to Curricular-Based Engagement (CBE) is an organizational framework for faculty members and administrators to plan, implement, and evaluate community engagement experiences within the academic curriculum. The framework consists of operational definitions, a set of theoretical and philosophical principles, and a conceptual model that defines six conceptual areas with potential evaluation metrics. According to the framework, CBE experiences are venues for interaction and communication that foster the emergence of community between the university and local social fields. HPD enables users to design holistic experiences that target a range of student and community development outcomes. Participants achieve these outcomes by participating in a coordinated series of progressively more involved and interactive experiences tied to the curriculum of an academic program. The HPD approach promotes responsible university-community engagement by designing CBE experiences that foster more long-term relationships and balance a range of student and community development outcomes.
Approach Explained
The Holistic Program Design (HPD) Approach to Curricular-Based Engagement (CBE) is an organizational framework that post-secondary educators, administrators, and community practitioners can use to embed community engagement experiences within the formal academic curriculum. HPD is holistic because it seeks to address a range of conceptual outcomes (areas) and it coordinates a series of progressively more involved and interactive CBE experiences. HPD focuses on the program level to support the goals of academic (major or minor) curricula. HPD uses a “middle-out” strategy to bridge the gap between larger institutional themes (top-down) and one-off/stand-alone projects or courses (bottom-up). HPD supports the design of CBE experiences through a set of guiding operational definitions, theoretical and philosophical principles, and a conceptual model.
Operational Definitions
University-community engagement is operationally defined as the process by which members of the university and local public communicate and interact in order to apply their respective knowledge, skills, abilities, and resources to enhance local well-being and meet common, general needs within the locality. CBE is operationally defined as university-community engagement that occurs as part of a formal academic course or as a required component of an academic degree program.
Interactional Field Theory
HPD adopts an interactional field theory perspective of community development. From this perspective, community is a social phenomenon that emerges when individuals within a physical locality collectively act across different social fields to address common, general, place-relevant matters (Bridger, Brennan & Luloff, 2011; Kaufman, 1959; Wilkinson, 1970, 1972, & 1991). Relevant concepts of this theory include social fields, social ties, interaction, community agency, and collective action. Social fields are groups of people united by a common interest (Kaufman, 1959). Social ties are relationships that form when people interact and communicate with one another. Weak social ties represent new or distant relationships, while strong social ties represent old or close relationships (Granovetter, 1973). An individual’s social network can consist of both strong and weak ties, but both types help increase individual and collective agency or the ability and willingness to act in some way. The essential logic is that venues or opportunities for interaction among people help build and strengthen social ties within and across social fields. These social ties help keep people and social fields informed of issues that may positively or negatively affect them or local life. Once informed, individuals, groups, and social fields can mobilize resources to support or oppose the issue at hand. The process of mobilizing resources and building capacity to act is known as community agency. A tipping point occurs when agency turns into action. As more diverse individuals and social fields join together to address mutual, place-relevant matters, they begin to form a new central social field – a phenomenon known as community emergence. The underlying philosophy of HPD is that community engagement (CBE specifically) can lead to community emergence between the university and local public.
Philosophy of Community Emergence
HPD’s central philosophy views CBE experiences as venues for social interaction between members of the university and members of local social fields. The university as a social field is united by and committed to the advancement of knowledge and scholarship. The university is driven by its core interest in scholarship and a mission of public service and outreach. CBE experiences represent the mechanisms through which the university field (i.e. students and faculty members) interacts with local social fields (i.e. local partners and groups) to enhance local conditions and well-being by addressing common, place-based issues. CBE experiences can take place in any locality, even beyond the area in which the campus resides, so long as the university focuses its scholarly knowledge, skills, abilities, and resources on the common, general needs of the locality and its people. When members of the university interact with local people through specific CBE projects and programs, they have the potential to achieve a range of conceptual outcomes. These outcomes are detailed and explained by HPD’s conceptual model.
Conceptual Model and Domains
The model in Figure 3 shows how engagement, when facilitated through the academic curriculum, can target multiple interrelated outcomes of student learning, community development, and scholarship. The model combines three conceptual domains of Process, Knowledge, and Product to relate and define six conceptual areas, from which outcomes and assessment measures can be described. The CBE experience lies at the center as the venue for interaction between students, faculty, and local people.
Figure 3. HPD conceptual model
Knowledge-Oriented Domain – CBE experiences have a knowledge-oriented focus because they pursue understanding about local issued and needs through Boyer’s (1990) four forms of scholarship (discovery, integration, application, and teaching). CBE participants have the potential to advance scholarship through new insights, application, and experimentation.
Process-Oriented Domain – CBE experiences contribute to the emergence of community through processes of communication and social interaction. When viewed as a process, CBE is understood to develop and change over time. Individuals who remain committed to the process over time in the face of changing priorities or transient university and local populations are vital.
Product-Oriented Domain – CBE experiences are purposeful and have an end result in mind. CBE experiences can produce tangible products (e.g. physical infrastructure) and intangible products (e.g. infrastructure assessment or plan) to address the common, general needs shared by residents within the locality of engagement (where a CBE experience takes place).
Conceptual Areas and Potential Sources of Outcomes and Metrics
Student Development – CBE uses course instruction and experiential learning to produce desired cognitive and/or psychological changes in students. Cognitive changes include different degrees of intellectual growth around university, practitioner, and/or indigenous (local) knowledge. Psychological changes include the understanding and adoption of new or different attitudes, beliefs, and values.
Specific outcomes and assessment measures for Student Development are likely to be discipline/field-specific, but some general outcomes could be sourced from the 6 Cs of Positive Youth Development (Lerner, Almerigi, Theokas, & Lerner, 2005), the Three-Phased Model for Service-Learning (Howe et al., 2014), or Character Strengths (Park & Peterson, 2006).
Development in Community – CBE is focused on producing locality-based results or deliverables that enhance local conditions and people’s well-being in some way. Development in community represents the solutions proposed, interventions enacted, and/or products created from CBE experiences. These results can be viewed as the creation/enhancement of different types of capital such as physical (e.g. infrastructure), intellectual (e.g. proposed plans), financial (e.g. fundraising), social (e.g. partnerships or alliances), and human (e.g. training volunteers).
Specific outcomes and assessment measures for Development in Community are likely to be discipline/field-specific because development can take many different forms. As a starting point, some outcomes and metrics could be sourced from the STAR Community Rating System (STAR Communities, 2015) or the community development performance measure and evaluation tools used by Neighbor Works America (Madan, 2007; Neighbor Works America, 2006).
Development of Community – CBE uses social interaction to enhance interpersonal connections and builds community capacity. Purposeful interaction and communication between people leads to the development of weak and strong (social) ties within and across social fields (groups). Social ties help people share information, gather resources, and organize action. Development of community represents the creation and strengthening of relationships and social networks for present and future action.
Specific outcomes and assessment measures for Development of Community could be sourced from capacity assessment tools used by Neighbor Works America (2006) or the five stages/phases of community action proposed by Kaufman (1959) and Wilkinson (1991).
University-Community Relations – CBE is made sustainable by maintaining the relationships among university and local participants, both within and across their larger social fields. Participants’ perceptions of goodwill, trust, reciprocity, and sense of commitment to a relationship are likely to determine whether or not they collaborate again in the future. Ultimately, participants’ perceptions about the process and product(s) could be positive, negative, or mixed. Individuals’ perceptions and evaluations may vary, but logically, positive feelings about working with others and project success should result in a greater willingness to engage in the future.
Specific outcomes and assessment measures for University-Community Relations could be sourced from the SOFAR framework (Bringle, Clayton, & Price, 2009), the Transformational Relationship Evaluation Scale (Clayton, Bringle, Senor, Huq, & Morrison, 2010), and the Venn level of closeness assessment (Mashek, Cannaday, & Tangey, 2007).
Civic Learning & Citizenship – CBE exposes faculty and students to local people who have contextual knowledge and lived experiences around civic involvement, decision-making, and governance. This conceptual area reinforces citizenship when students can see firsthand how local people navigate channels of power and governance to garner support and initiate action around a local topic. Here, CBE experiences aim to promote civic competency (knowledge and skills) and civic engagement (motivations, values, and participation) among students to act as citizens in their own local areas. Students can also bring renewed energy and new perspectives to local action.
Specific outcomes and assessment measures for Civic Learning & Citizenship could be sourced from the Youth Engagement Continuum (Shaw, Brady, McGrath, Brennan & Dolan, 2014), the Civic Minded Graduate Scale (Steinberg, Hatcher, & Bringle, 2011), or the comprehensive meta-analysis report on assessing civic competency and engagement (Torney-Purta, Cabrera, Roohr, Liu, & Rios, 2015).
Collective Reflection & Scholarship – CBE adopts a constructivist view toward knowledge and emphasizes the intersection of university, practitioner, and indigenous knowledge. Collectively, these sources of knowledge can enhance the intellectual development of all participants, but such knowledge can also benefit a wider audience. Purposeful reflection can help reinforce learning, encourage continued development, and build upon past successes. Communication about the CBE experience and products helps expand the knowledge base and inform future action.
The scholarship that results from a CBE experience will depend upon the discipline, subject matter, participants, and resources available. The venue, format, or process by which collective scholarship is communicated will also vary according to the preferences and decisions of participants. Individuals can maintain academic rigor by using Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff’s (1997) scholarly standards (clear goals; adequate preparation; adequate methods; significant results; effective presentation; and reflective critique) to assess their own scholarship.
Organizing Progressive CBE Experiences
HPD encourages program faculty members to coordinate and sequence CBE experiences around similar, if not the same, topics, partners, and localities. Each CBE experience should build upon the previous one and should promote progressively more in-depth work, more challenging learning outcomes, greater interaction among participants, and stronger relationships over time. Anticipated benefits of this approach include shared ownership and support by faculty members, students who apply and reinforce previous knowledge in increasingly complex ways, and local participants who develop greater familiarity and longer-term relationships with students and faculty members. One way to organize progressive CBE experiences would be to sequence them according to introductory, mid-level, and senior/capstone courses. Another way would be to design CBE experiences that move from simple service activities (volunteering labor) to more intellectually applied activities (active problem solving and decision-making). There are two other models of university-community engagement that support this logic and encourage progressive, multi-phase CBE experiences. These models are shown in Appendices C and D. The HPD model differs from these other examples by focusing on a broader range of outcomes related to student learning and community development.
Anticipated Benefits
The HPD Approach can benefit Penn State as an institution by:
- Upholding four of the Kellogg Commission’s seven principles of engagement:
- Responsiveness – HPD enables faculty members to respond to stakeholders’ perceptions and priorities (identified by the CARES Survey) through CBE experiences that are tailored to their preferences
- Respect for partners – HPD emphasizes conceptual outcomes of University-Community Relations, Collective Reflection and Scholarship, and acknowledges practitioner/indigenous knowledge as contributing to Student Development
- Integration – HPD integrates six conceptual areas and outcomes by showing the intersections of knowledge-, process-, and product-oriented domains.
- Coordination – HPD encourages faculty to collaborate and design a progressive sequence of CBE experiences at the program or college level
- Addressing five of the Carnegie Foundation’s recommendations for the Community Engagement classification:
- Establish a clear definition and process for fostering engagement within the curriculum – HPD operationally defines university-community engagement and grounds it in program curricula through a coordinated series of CBE experiences
- Identify and assess impacts on students, faculty, and communities – the conceptual model identifies six outcome areas related to scholarship, student learning, and community development, from which assessment metrics can be developed
- Establish long-term community partnerships – HPD encourages the same students, faculty members, and local participants to work on multiple CBE projects as part of a coordinated program curriculum
- Coordinate smaller projects and initiatives into larger engagement efforts – HPD sequences smaller CBE projects in a program to focus greater attention, labor, and resources on a central issue or initiative, thereby increasing local impact
- Develop, support, and reward faculty engagement – once fully operationalized and validated, the HPD approach could be developed into a faculty training program with workshops, support materials, and ready-made assessment tools
The HPD Approach will benefit Penn State Extension by:
- Enabling more students and faculty members to address local priorities through CBE projects, thereby engaging more clients and reducing the burden on Extension personnel
- Providing Client Relationship Managers, educators, and staff to evaluate program impact using select outcome areas and assessment metrics from the model
- Enable faculty members with Extension and teaching appointments to better integrate their two responsibilities and forms of scholarship
The HPD Approach will help the Penn State Student Engagement Network by:
- Providing a framework to plan, implement, evaluate CBE experiences for students
- Enabling administrators to compare CBE outcomes across the university
- Providing a basis for training faculty members, staff, and students