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[Expositions 10.1 (2016) 40–51]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 
 

Framing Student Appropriation of Catholic Social Teachings and Tradition 

 

HEATHER MACK 

Heather Mack Consulting LLC 

 

 

In its attempt to enhance the role of Catholic Social Teachings and Tradition (CST) in American 

Catholic colleges and universities, the Catholic Social Teaching Learning and Research Initiative 

has developed a rubric entitled “Student Appropriation of Catholic Social Teachings and 

Tradition.”1 The rubric offers a starting point for articulating the expectations a CST program 

might have for its students. Several steps are still to follow in the rubric’s development; the most 

critical is piloting the rubric to learn what aspects of it resonate, along with what aspects miss the 

mark.2 This article reviews the development of the rubric, discusses its structure and rationale, and 

indicates some limitations to its use. The aim is to lay the groundwork for further systematic 

inquiry into CST-based learning outcomes in higher education. 

 

Background 

 

The Catholic Social Teaching Learning and Research Initiative seeks to enhance college students’ 

appropriation of CST, particularly through high-quality CST programming. The focus is on how 

students at Catholic colleges and universities—whether they are Catholic or not—learn about and 

appropriate CST. Early on, the Initiative loosely defined “appropriation” as sustained identification 

with, and display of, any paradigm’s interdependent components, including but not limited to 

knowledge, attitudes, and values; actions, decisions, and behaviors; and skills. 

Of the many potential approaches to enhancing CST programming, the Initiative took an early 

interest in assessment. The Initiative accordingly sought additional experienced members in 

institutional research and assessment to complement its cadre of dedicated CST practitioners, 

instructors, and scholars. 

The Initiative met in April 2014 to welcome new members and to identify priority areas of 

investigation. The chief objective emerging from discussion was to demonstrate and improve the 

effectiveness of curricular and co-curricular CST programming for students. 



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The Initiative set about identifying successful CST programs, intending to begin by collecting 

the best practices of successful CST programming, and then to communicate these results for the 

benefit and improvement of CST programming elsewhere. Initial research quickly indicated, 

however, that no criteria could be identified in the scholarship to measure CST programming 

effectiveness. This lacuna led the members of the Initiative to assume responsibility for generating 

an assessment framework, which could serve as an essential starting point. Thus, the creation of a 

CST rubric became one of the Initiative’s key projects. 

The objective of the rubric team was to design and validate a framework distinguishing levels 

of CST appropriation. The task at hand appeared to be simple. In order to ask what CST programs 

could learn from other successful programs, it was necessary to ask which CST programs merited 

designation as “successful.” This required a common definition of “high achieving.” 

In academic programming terms, the achievement sought is termed the “student learning 

outcome” (SLO), or in this case CST SLO. With no readily available CST student learning 

outcomes in the literature, the Initiative identified “student appropriation of CST” as a way of 

connoting a student’s grasp of CST principles, the adoption of values informed by CST principles, 

and the influence of CST principles both in short- and long-term choices and behaviors. 

In addition to defining success, the Initiative needed some way to evaluate the degree to which 

that success had been achieved. However, appropriation is a process that happens over time in fits 

and starts, and an institution’s intended degree of CST appropriation by its second-semester 

freshmen is likely to vary significantly from the intentions it has for its graduates. For instance, 

one program may intend to bring a student from complete ignorance of CST to a point of openness 

toward the potential legitimacy of a range of social justice principles, while a different program 

may intend to facilitate a student’s integration of CST principles exclusively into decisions about 

career track.  

  



Framing Student Appropriation of Catholic Social Teaching 42 
 

	

 



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Rubric Structure 

 

Intended scope 

By “appropriation,” the Initiative seeks to address (1) the integration of beliefs and values, (2) the 

adoption of corresponding behaviors, actions, and decisions, and (3) comprehension of the content, 

tradition, and context of CST principles. 

The rubric’s scope targets undergraduates enrolled at Catholic higher education institutions who 

have been exposed to at least some formal CST programming delivered by that institution. 

Students with no exposure to CST programming do not figure in the rubric. 

However, the rubric’s scope may be said to inadvertently target an even narrower pool of 

students. The targeted students enjoy life circumstances which allow them to access and attend 

post-secondary school. Accordingly, the targeted students for this rubric possess at least some 

degree of affluence or privilege. Furthermore, the rubric will perhaps apply best—if not 

exclusively—to American undergraduates, as all contributors to date have been contributors to the 

American Catholic higher education landscape. 

The scope of the rubric is intentionally broad when it comes to faith orientations, in that it 

purposely does not include a category addressing students’ religiosity. Rigorous instruments to 

measure and interpret students’ faith levels, religious beliefs, and engagement are currently 

available. The rubric team focused on topics less-represented in the literature rather than 

duplicating existing contributions. 

 

Scale 

The scale describes a student’s degree of appropriating CST or achieving CST SLOs. The scale 

does not necessarily correlate to the frequency of a student’s exposure to CST programming. Any 

inclination to presume a student’s level of CST appropriation, based primarily on the quantity or 

frequency of a student’s exposure to CST programming, should be avoided. 

 

 

 

 

 



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Categories 

The rubric includes seven categories. 

Category Category addresses student… 

Description of CST Framework comprehension of CST’s religious and intellectual contexts 

Recognition of CST Principles comprehension of CST content 

Knowledge of History of CST comprehension of CST’s historical context 

Social Context/Perspectives comprehension of the consequences of oppression 

Decision-Making Approach application of CST as a personal and civic value 

Acting for Justice behavior in response to the consequences of oppression 

Vocational Implications application of CST as a professional value 

 

Intended Users and Uses 

The rubric was designed with two primary users and one secondary user in mind. The primary 

users are faculty and staff who work with CST programming. Two uses are intended for this 

population. The first is to assist CST programs in designing or improving program assessment, so 

that the assessment better serves the success of the program. The second is for CST programs to 

consider the rubric in defining, or clarifying, their program objectives and CST SLOs. 

The secondary intended users are scholars. The intended uses for scholars are to aid them in 

exploring new systematic inquiries into CST appropriation and to prod the continued refinement 

of a common CST appropriation framework across scholarly and practical pursuits. 

 

Rubric Development 

 

The Initiative formed a voluntary team to design the rubric. The rubric team was chaired by a 

member with experience designing rubrics. The chair’s role was to provide and facilitate a process 

to transfer the expertise of the rubric team members into a coherent rubric. 

Work on the rubric began in January 2015 with a review of content-relevant rubrics as well as 

a review of rubric design practices. The AAC&U’s VALUE Rubrics served as helpful models.3 

The next step was to identify the scale, which was originally envisioned as encompassing three 

levels. The terms “Discovering,” “Developing,” and “Flourishing” were chosen as labels for these 

levels. 



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The rubric team focused on describing the Flourishing level of appropriation. Input about 

topics, categories, and components were solicited from (1) the rubric team, (2) all members of the 

Initiative, and (3) attendees of the rubric team’s presentation during a February 2015 CST 

conference at the University of Notre Dame. Conference attendees participated in small group 

discussion, completed a written questionnaire on-site, and received requests for input via e-mail 

after the session. Many of these proposed improvements were incorporated in the developing draft. 

One rubric team member took the lead drafting the Discovering level components. This level 

was initially crafted without attempting to align each item to the Flourishing level. The early 

Discovery level draft was circulated among the rubric team members for revisions. The team 

members began fitting the Discovering and Flourishing level components together only after 

completing independent drafts of both. 

At one point, the rubric team intended to create a middle level, but eventually the team decided, 

non-unanimously, to shift to a model of four levels with two middle levels unarticulated. A four-

level model, it was thought, better reflects students’ encounters with CST. For instance, a student’s 

experience appropriating CST might challenge her preconceptions and long-held beliefs regarding 

social privilege and marginalization. She might toggle between embracing and rejecting aspects 

of CST—in some ways falling closer to Flourishing, in other ways closer to Discovering. Further 

research is necessary to articulate the supposed “arc” of CST appropriation, calling for the 

expertise of researchers concerned with young adults’ cognitive and value development. 

Finally, a plenary session at the Initiative’s June 2015 meeting was dedicated to a review and 

discussion of the rubric draft. Multiple rounds of revisions followed. 

 

Expert Input 

 

Participation in the rubric development was open to anyone willing to contribute; national external 

input was solicited twice. The first solicitation was made at a February 2015 CST conference at 

Notre Dame led by several members of the Initiative. The second formal request for feedback was 

emailed through professional networks in October 2015. Rubric team members targeted CST 

experts in faculty, staff, and practitioner roles. 

Responses were received from faculty and staff at eleven institutions. Significant themes 

reverberating through the feedback included the lack of recognition of privilege of the student 



Framing Student Appropriation of Catholic Social Teaching 46 
 

	

subject; the omission of issues related to the environment, workers’ rights, and gender; an 

unbalanced emphasis on CST knowledge over values and action; and undue favoring of individual 

action over participation in group action. Additionally, several wording and editing 

recommendations were offered. These insights were embraced by the rubric team and efforts to 

integrate them began in November 2015. 

The CST experts also offered recommendations for potential uses of the rubric. A majority 

suggested using it both to establish a baseline prior to students’ participation in CST programming 

or CST courses and to assess achievement of student appropriation after such participation. This 

suggestion matched the Initiative’s original intentions for the rubric. Another common 

recommendation was to provide the rubric to faculty members as a resource to aid effective 

integration of CST into existing courses. Other notable recommendations included (1) sharing the 

rubric with students, such as those in a first-year seminar, to make clear the goals of the course of 

study they were embarked upon; (2) introducing the rubric as a guide at the onset of a partnership 

with parties whose objectives do not include CST SLOs as a way to open discussion of intended 

partnership outcomes; and, finally, (3) applying the rubric to frame the analysis of existing 

qualitative data previously collected from students in CST programming. 

 

Lessons from similar disciplines 

 

The CST rubric team benefited from assessment work in the fields of community engagement and 

service learning. On its face, the practice of course-based service learning may appear to be 

inherently beneficial to all stakeholders. However, research on service leaning community partner 

agencies reveals that unintended consequences and costs to service learning community partners 

can be so significant that these consequences outweigh the benefits agencies receive from the 

partnership.4 Unintended consequences can include the overburdening of an agency with more 

students than it can accommodate, which agencies sometimes allow when they fear that the 

erection of boundaries might either damage their relationship with the higher education institution 

in question, or decrease the likelihood of accessing future benefits from it. Costs can include the 

amount of time agency staff spend orienting, training, supervising, and evaluating students rather 

than attending to the agency’s priorities. Another common cost to community partners can be the 



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need to pay overtime to staff to be on-site after hours, beyond the standard workday or workweek, 

in order to accommodate students’ availability. 

The Community Engagement (CE) Community Partnership Rubric was designed as a user’s 

guide to CE partnerships, aimed at higher education practitioners with the best of intentions but 

without the opportunity to absorb the literature in the field about partnerships.5 Essentially, the CE 

rubric allows practitioners to reflect on and gauge the quality of their partnerships with community 

agencies, illustrating improvements that might be prioritized. With the lessons of the CE rubric in 

mind, the CST rubric was designed to offer goalposts to CST programs, to use not only for 

assessing CST SLOs, but for reflecting on what the SLOs should be. 

 

Limitations 

 

Motivations 

The CST rubric does not maintain that students must self-identify primarily with CST in order to 

be considered “flourishing,” and self-identification with CST criteria is not a criterion for 

measuring a student’s level of CST appropriation. As was discussed in constructing the rubric, 

CST shares common values with other thought and belief systems. Only the knowledge-related 

rubric characteristics distinguish between student appropriation of CST and other thought and 

belief systems. The rubric team repeatedly attempted to interject CST-specific qualifiers onto the 

observable actions and values, and was repeatedly humbled by the challenge. Proponents of 

different systems may reach similar conclusions or pursue similar actions, leaving on-lookers 

unaware of differences in motivations and reasoning. 

The CST rubric includes components that users might feasibly directly measure. The rubric 

addresses knowledge, attitudes and values, and actions and decisions because all three are essential 

components of appropriation. Arguably, the rubric emphasizes observable behavior and 

knowledge over attitudes and values. This observation, made by some respondents, points to a 

tension among rubric team members about the importance of motivation, intention, and self-

awareness in defining CST appropriation. 

 

 

 



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Structure 

The decision not to articulate the levels between Discovering and Flourishing, for better or worse, 

leaves a great deal of room for interpretation and the harboring of conflicting assumptions about 

how to identify a student’s location on the scale. For instance, a student who expresses skepticism 

about CST may be considered by some to be in or below the Discovering phase, while, depending 

on the context, others might see that student as nearing the Flourishing stage. Interpretations will 

likely depend on the user’s (1) experiences with students appropriating CST; (2) academic or 

professional discipline; and (3) personal familiarity with theories of development, conversion, etc. 

A future step for the development of the rubric could be articulation of Levels Two and Three in 

the light of scholarly theories of development and the like. 

 

Rubric team composition 

The volunteers participating in the Initiative were identified through the networks of those who 

received the initial grant to begin a study on CST in higher education. They personally represent a 

dominant social perspective, and while their institutions’ student bodies include a variety of points 

along socio-economic and other social spectra, they are primarily white institutions. The Initiative 

members’ disciplines span across the humanities and social sciences, including Women’s Studies 

and Peace Studies. As of January 2016, the only well-represented marginalized group to contribute 

to the framework’s development is women. Accordingly, it is fair to say that the rubric largely has 

been composed from a dominant cultural perspective. It does not directly address the perspective 

of non-dominant cultures, though it has been modified more than once in an attempt to reduce the 

exclusion of non-dominant perspectives. A current step in the rubric’s development is the 

intentional recruitment of Initiative members with non-dominant perspectives as well as 

solicitation of input from experts with non-dominant perspectives. 

It should also be acknowledged that the rubric represents the perspectives of higher education 

CST experts and practitioners. To date, design and validation of the tool have not included testing 

with students. This step is planned to begin in spring 2016. 

 

Tensions and Unintended Consequences 

Finally, a few CST experts noted sincere concern, bordering on distress, to see CST student 

appropriation parsed into a rubric. They worried that any framework, not just this one, carries the 



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risk of oversimplifying or reducing CST appropriation to the sum of its parts, which they consider 

to be wholly contrary to the heart of CST. Such a negative, unintended consequence could 

inadvertently undermine the intended impact of the rubric, so it warrants consideration. As it is 

stated, the concern assumes that the rubric will replace current sensibilities and knowledge of CST 

efforts in higher education, and that it will stand alone, rather than alongside, existing and 

developing canon on the topic. 

In response, one point to note is that the definition of “appropriation” and the inclusion of 

multiple components are meant to suggest that the components are interdependent. An interesting 

question here is whether appropriation of some of the components, but not all, would be better or 

worse than appropriation of none at all. In any event, the rubric team took to heart the concern that 

the spirit of CST might be stymied from entering the hearts of students once the letter had been 

“bound” into a table. This concern invites a caution: the rubric is not a substitute for transformative 

experiences. In the end, the answer to the question of whether this rubric inspires more and better 

proliferation of CST programming rests in the hands of dedicated faculty, staff, and students. 

 

Conclusion 

 

The CST rubric was designed to begin filling a gap in the literature that prevented the systematic 

investigation of the quality of CST programming for higher education students. Systematic 

investigation depends on a recognized framework. By offering a framework to the field, the 

Initiative’s intention is both to contribute to the improvement and proliferation of CST 

programming and to spur a variety of inquiries into existing and future CST SLOs. 

As it happens, the creation of the rubric has already achieved one of its goals. The very act of 

designing the rubric and inviting feedback has elevated discussion regarding the effectiveness and 

quality of CST programming and student learning outcomes. It is the rubric team’s hope that the 

public release of its work will fire the further development of this discussion in years to come. 

 

 

 

 

 



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Notes 

 

1. The “rubric team” consisted principally of Heather Mack, now of Heather Mack Consulting 

LLC, formerly of Loyola University New Orleans; Bernard Prusak of King’s College (PA); 

Jennifer Reed-Bouley of the College of Saint Mary (NE); Margarita Rose likewise of 

King’s College; and Kathleen Maas Weigert of Loyola University Chicago. A full list of 

the collaborators in the Catholic Social Teaching Learning and Research Initiative is 

available at http://blogs.nd.edu/cstresearch/collaborators/. 

2. It is expected the rubric will be finalized at the June 2016 meeting of the CST Learning 

and Research Initiative. Check http://blogs.nd.edu/cstresearch/ for updates. 

3. See https://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics. 

4. See Littlepage et al. 2012; Mack 2013; and Sandy and Holland 2006. 

5. See Brotzman et al. 2014. 

 

 

Works Cited 

 

Brotzman, Kelly, Joseph Deegan, and Heather Mack. 2014. “Community Partnerships 

Rubric.” Paper presenrted at the meeting of the International Association for Research on 

Service Learning and Community Engagement, Tulane University, New Orleans, 

Louisiana, September 28, 2014. 

Littlepage, L., B. Gazley, and T.A. Bennett. 2012. “Service Learning from the Supply Side: 

Community Capacity to Engage Students.” Nonprofit Management and Leadership 22.3: 

305–320. 

Mack, Heather. 2013. “Exploring Assumptions: Impact of Single-Event Service Events on 

Communities and Students.” Paper presented at the AJCU National Conference on Justice 

in Higher Education, Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska, August 3, 2013. 



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Sandy, M., and B.A. Holland. 2006. “Different Worlds and Common Ground: Community 

Partner Perspectives on Campus-Community Partnerships.” Michigan Journal of 

Community Service Learning 13.1: 30–43. 


