Building Inclusive Partnerships through Democratically Engaged Assessment Practices

Abstract: Democratically Engaged Assessment (DEA) is an approach to inquiry that redefines research to promote access and inclusion by including all stakeholders as partners in the inquiry. The framework emphasizes co-creation and shared inquiry among all partners in community engagement initiatives, and thereby helps us to live out its foundational commitments to everyone involved being co-educators, co-learners, and co-generators of knowledge.
On both of our campuses, this approach to assessment has resulted in deeper understanding and trust across stakeholders, collaborative strategic planning, shared commitment to concrete goals, and greater insight in the interpretation of findings. For us, DEA has been a meaningful, effective, and authentic way to engage with others in assessment. It is a process that results in not just findings and data, but has the potential to deepen our relationships, build trust, and drive access and inclusion. In fact, we have found that all stakeholders are actually energized and empowered by the assessment process.
While DEA articulates values for inclusion that we can all get behind, it isn’t always immediately clear how to implement them in the context of our unique campuses and civic engagement centers. This lightning talk will briefly overview the Democratically Engaged Assessment framework and illustrate its implementation by civic engagement centers on two campuses.

Narrative: Democratically Engaged Assessment (DEA) is an approach to inquiry that redefines research to promote access and inclusion by including all stakeholders as partners in the inquiry. The framework emphasizes co-creation and shared inquiry among all partners in community engagement initiatives, and thereby helps us to live out its foundational commitments to everyone involved being co-educators, co-learners, and co-generators of knowledge.

On both of our campuses, this approach to assessment has resulted in deeper understanding and trust across stakeholders, collaborative strategic planning, shared commitment to concrete goals, and greater insight in the interpretation of findings. For us, DEA has been a meaningful, effective, and authentic way to engage with others in assessment. It is a process that results in not just findings and data, but has the potential to deepen our relationships, build trust, and drive access and inclusion. In fact, we have found that all stakeholders are actually energized and empowered by the assessment process.

Access and inclusion are central values to the DEA framework. Building from Saltmarsh, Hartley, and Clayton’s (2009) seminal piece on democratic civic engagement, Bandy et al. (2018) noted the ways a DEA orientation “draws on the knowledge, expertise, experience, and perspectives of everyone involved in any particular partnership—community members, students, faculty, staff—and insists that all have a voice” (p. 18). While DEA articulates values for inclusion that we can all get behind, it isn’t always immediately clear how to implement them in the context of our unique campuses and civic engagement centers. This lightning talk will briefly overview the Democratically Engaged Assessment framework and illustrate its center-wide implementation on two campuses.

The Center for Civic Engagement staff at the University of Richmond identified nine civic learning goals, including for example, civic identity development, skill in systems critique, and capacity to co-create authentic relationships. Each of the four teams into which CCE is structured (Community Relationships, Faculty Engagement, Student Engagement, and Operations) developed an inquiry focused on learning about 1-2 of these civic learning goals, as either outcome, process, or relationship variables in their work. In spring 2022, each of these teams piloted an assessment project. Each team co-designed and co-implemented the assessment projects with their community, faculty, staff, and student partners positioned as co-inquirers, developing tools to help them do this along the way. The culminating activity of this set of DEA projects was a data lab in which each team shared the details of its process and results of preliminary co-analysis and collaborated across the Center to generate implications both for program enhancement and for our ongoing efforts to integrate DEA commitments and practices into our day to day work.

The Honey W. Nashman Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service at George Washington University implemented a series of “Deepening Partnerships” dialogues that gather community partners, campus administrators, faculty, and students for collaborative assessment and strategic planning using appreciative inquiry methods. Using quantitative data from student and faculty community engagement reports via Givepulse, the Nashman Center selected a few central themes, such as youth development, human services, administrative capacity-building, or health equity, and identified the key stakeholders in on-going campus-community partnerships around each theme. These stakeholder meetings involve storytelling, perspective sharing, collective analysis and meaning-making of findings, and ultimately a shared commitment across all stakeholder groups to concrete goals for the coming year. The feedback on the experience has been overwhelmingly positive, has facilitated new relationships, deepened existing ones, and has generated buy-in and support for the goal of assessment in general as well as for the collectively identified goals that emerged from the process. It can’t be emphasized enough, stakeholders actually enjoy attending these conversations, the opportunity to know each other better, and the sense that our goals are shared.

In this brief talk, with examples from our own contexts, we will invite session participants to consider how the DEA framework can help facilitate more equitable and inclusive campus-community partnerships on their own campus. We will aim to convince our audience that assessment can provide not just findings and data but can be a process that facilitates deeper relationships and more inclusive practices.