9

Inclusive Assessment:  
Toward a Socially-Just  

Methodology for Measuring 
Institution-Wide Engagement

Guiseppe Getto and Dennis McCunney
 

Abstract
Institutions are increasingly being called upon to collect large amounts of data to 
demonstrate community impact. At institutions with strong and wide-reaching public 
engagement/service missions, this expectation is even greater – both for quality 
improvement and for demonstrating regional transformation. Despite these 
expectations, the decentralized culture of many campuses and lack of external 
incentives for individual faculty and departments can present significant barriers to 
telling a complete, representative, institutional story of engagement. This article 
explores the efforts of one campus to develop an inclusive assessment methodology in 
order to meet multifaceted institutional needs and navigate challenges. We take into 
account the particular dynamics of a specific campus culture to develop a process that 
is unique to the needs and particularities of our institution. At the same time, we hope 
that this methodology will demonstrate transferability to other institutions.
 
Public universities are under increasing pressure to justify outreach and engagement 
efforts through measurable, definable community impacts. At the same time, this call 
for easily-understood impacts can short-change efforts that involve qualitative, 
gradual, and harder-to-define outcomes. These qualitative impacts can include the 
perceptions different community partners have of the institution, the often messy 
process of partnership building, and the process of brainstorming issues that are of 
mutual import to both the institution and community members. At best, rushing to 
create measurable, institution-wide impacts on communities, risks sabotaging long-
term, sustainable, reciprocal program development. At worst, it risks alienating 
community members from engaging in partnerships at all.
 
Engaged scholars and administrators cannot ignore the culture of austerity that is 
pervasive within public universities, however. We are expected to do more with less. 
We are expected to justify our efforts in all realms, not just those related to outreach 
and engagement. So, measurable, definable community impacts must be collected and 
reported in a timely manner. In other to meet both these needs – the need for slower, 
more qualitative assessments of community impacts and the need for quicker, more 
easily defined impacts – we introduce a methodology we call “inclusive assessment” 
that seeks to mesh qualitative and quantitative data collection within the same 
assessment effort in order to ensure inclusivity.
 



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In order to fully explore this methodology, its limitations, and the opportunities it 
presents for new research into institution-wide engagement efforts, we reflect on our 
own experiences utilizing inclusive assessment at an engaged university with strong ties 
to its local community, a university that is also feeling the crunch of austerity. We 
begin with a literature review of assessment scholarship to identify trends around the 
development of more flexible, mixed-methods approaches to assessment. Through these 
trends, we identify key precedents to the methodology of inclusive assessment. We then 
explicate this methodology and its key tenets. Finally, we demonstrate the viability of 
this methodology by drawing on our experiences deploying it at our own institution. 
Our ultimate goal is to provide other scholars and practitioners with best practices for 
meeting programmatic needs while continuing to thrive in difficult economic times.
 

Inclusive Assessment: Towards a New Methodology
More and more institutions are being expected to champion a “culture of evidence” 
around their community engagement efforts. With statewide governing boards and 
legislative bodies charged with making funding decisions according to campus 
performance, external pressures that demand accountability are felt on nearly every 
campus. These pressures seem particularly poignant in statewide systems, as one-size-fits-
all models of accountability and performance often create friction when applied to local 
contexts and campuses (Douglass, Thomson, and Zhao 2012). The evidence being called 
for can range from impacts on local community health indexes to quantitative measures 
of student engagement to numbers of community-engaged courses. In “A Scholar-
Practitioner Model of Assessment,” Erwin and Wise (2002, 68) note that “assessment 
results are increasingly ‘counting’ toward institutional funding, state appropriations for 
higher education, governance, and reputation. In this high stakes environment, the quality 
and credibility of learning outcome data are becoming more sophisticated and complex.”
 
To complicate things further, there is an ever-widening range of definitions in the field 
of community engagement. Scholars and historians in the field note that practitioners – 
both early career and seasoned professionals—must navigate a “sea of definitions” 
when first engaging in this work (Ikeda, Sandy, and Donahue 2010). While one 
institution may talk of service-learning and equate it with community-engaged 
learning, other institutions may talk of civic engagement and the democratic learning 
outcomes achieved by their students. This lengthy set of terms – understandably 
dependent on and arising from particular campus cultures – does little to provide a 
clear path for institutions to tell their own narratives of community impact. Member 
institutions of the University of North Carolina have engaged in recent dialogue about 
this challenge. A community and economic engagement report published by the UNC 
system (University of North Carolina, Office of International, Community, and 
Economic Engagement 2015) notes that “ongoing conversations continue...about what 
criteria campuses should use to assess and quantify their ability to engage the 
community. And while community and public service is now one of the five elements 
of institutional effectiveness in reaffirmation reports submitted to the Southern 
Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) (Standard 3.3.1.5), there is no agreement 
on how to define, measure, or improve university engagement” (p. 5).



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This push for accountability measures has been presented from a quality improvement 
perspective. The availability of accurate data and accompanying analysis would, naturally, 
allow institutions to fill gaps in their overall community engagement strategy. As a result 
of this external call for accountability, many institutions have worked to develop common 
measures. This has led to some streamlining and efficiency. At the same time, it has 
encouraged institutions to engage in internal conversations about their own systematic 
collection of engagement data and the resources they put toward that effort. In 2013, 
University of North Carolina President Tom Ross challenged campuses to remember their 
overarching commitment to the people of the state, saying, “Community engagement and 
economic development are two critically important and closely interconnected strategies 
through which UNC students, faculty, staff, and alumni contribute to the promotion of 
vibrant, healthy, sustainable, and safe communities in North Carolina” (University of 
North Carolina, Office of International, Community, and Economic Engagement 2013, 2).
 
In order to meet the demands for an increasingly varied and metric-driven reporting 
system, we introduce a methodology we are calling “inclusive assessment” that seeks 
to counteract a focus on pure numbers with the use of qualitative engagement data. 
This informed use of qualitative data can further enable institutions to collaborate with 
community members. Listening, as scholars in community-engaged research methods 
know, is a critical foundation for this work, and ensures the inclusion of “issues of 
identity and difference as a way of helping [engagement participants to] alter their 
personal and worldviews” (Chesler and Scalera 2000, 19). At the same time, as the 
Creating Impact in North Carolina…UNC Engagement Report (University of North 
Carolina, Office of International, Community, and Economic Engagement 2015) 
recently suggested, “there is no agreement on how to define, measure, or improve 
university engagement.” Inclusive assessment thus seeks to present a new model for 
defining the assessment of university-based engagement around three goals:
 
1. Assessment Goal 1: Formulating Cross-Disciplinary Teams for Assessment
2. Assessment Goal 2: Measuring Activities versus Impacts
3.  Assessment Goal 3: Formulating Data Collection Processes in Decentralized 

Environments
 
We explore each of these goals extensively below. They were articulated both through 
our own internal conversations working in a large, public university with deep community 
roots and through our growing understanding of the needs of scholars at other universities 
who seek more flexible, adaptable methodologies for conducting assessment.

Though this methodology was developed in the context of creating assessment goals at 
our own institution, we view these goals as benchmarks for an incipient methodology. 
By this we mean to indicate that after developing these assessment goals, we realized 
that meeting them would require a new methodology for assessment community 
engagement data. As we worked to meet these goals, we thus began to develop 
inclusive assessment as a means of understanding whether or not we had reached these 
goals. Having met several of these goals, we now hope that inclusive assessment can 
be of use to engaged scholars at other universities trying to meet similar goals.



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Existing methodologies for assessment within universities are often underpinned by 
problematic assumptions regarding the relationship between campuses and their local 
communities and thus warrant the development of new methodologies. Weerts and 
Sandmann (2008, 74), for instance, tracked the ways in which universities often use a 
“one-way” model of knowledge creation when engaging communities, a model in 
which communities are seen as empty vessels to be filled with university-based 
knowledge. Similarly, D’Arlach, Sánchez, and Feuer (2009, 5) warn that when 
universities set out to assess their engagement efforts based on university-conceived 
goals, “community engagement becomes an end for the university and not a mutually 
agreed upon goal.” In a somewhat radical critique of using “scientific measures of 
success” to benchmark university-based community engagement, Mathieu (2005, xiv) 
has argued that such approaches assume the “university [as] the controlling institution 
determining movements and interactions.”

In the wake of such strong critiques of university efforts to measure the success of 
community engagement based on their own scale, inclusive assessment draws heavily 
on several established methodologies for empirical research that lend themselves to an 
inclusive, socially-just approach to data collection. Focused ethnography, for instance, 
attempts to account for the “pluralization [sic] of life-worlds and the enormous 
specialization [sic] of professional activities [which] demands ever detailed 
descriptions of people’s ways of life and their increasingly specialized [sic] and 
fragmented activities” (Knoblauch, 2005). An ethnographic approach incorporates 
“detailed accounts of the concrete experience of life within a particular culture and of 
the beliefs and social rules that are used as resources within it” (Hammersley and 
Atkinson 1995, 10). Focused ethnography, as differentiated from traditional 
ethnography, is characterized by the use of “relatively short-term field visits” as 
opposed to the full immersion common to other varieties of ethnography (Knoblauch 
2005). Similarly, inclusive assessment is developed on the premise that total 
immersion within the contexts being assessed is not always possible, especially at 
larger universities. Rather than engage in long-term field visits, inclusive assessment 
seeks to collect contextualized data whenever possible in short-term visits to contexts 
that are neglected by large-scale assessment approaches.

In this way, another important precedent for inclusive assessment is mixed-methods 
research, particularly what Creswell (2014, 15) called “convergent parallel mixed 
methods” research. For Creswell, this is “a form of mixed methods design in which the 
researcher converges or merges quantitative and qualitative data in order to provide a 
comprehensive analysis of the research problem.” Similarly, inclusive assessment 
seeks to gain a more holistic picture of community outcomes by focusing on team-
building across departments, the measuring of specific activities rather than impacts, 
and the collection of data in environments that don’t naturally connect with one 
another (i.e., university needs for accountability vs. community needs for activities that 
solve problems). In other words, rather than attempting to adapt our own institutional 
contexts to the needs of existing research and assessment methodologies, we attempted 
to adapt existing methodologies to the needs of our context by combining them into a 
holistic framework.



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Finally, this turn from a larger-scale view to a micro-view that attempts to capture the 
relationship between key engagement metrics (i.e., total hours of engagement, numbers 
of partnerships, numbers of projects, etc.) and more qualitative means of assessment 
(i.e., specific outcomes as articulated by both community partners and scholars, 
student perceptions of engaged teaching, etc.), also draws on qualitative case study 
methodology (Miles and Huberman 1994; Stake 1995, 2000; Yin 2009). Inclusive 
assessment seeks to capture and describe a cross-sectional view of assessment data that 
includes numerical data that meets administrator needs, qualitative data that takes into 
account community needs, and a focus on the specific context from which all this data 
arises. By bundling this data into one multi-faceted case, powerful new insights are 
gleaned without sacrificing rigor and institutional outcomes. Below we present our 
own institutional context to demonstrate the need for such a methodology and to 
provide a limited case for the development of this methodology.
 

Institutional Context
Our campus has a long history of serving and engaging with the local community. 
Originally a teacher-training school in North Carolina, the institution grew up out of 
its local community and has striven to not forget its roots. Indeed, the school touts its 
commitment to public service and regional transformation at almost every turn – in 
strategic planning documents, in mission statements, and in official university 
communications. There is also significant evidence that this commitment goes beyond 
talk, however. Many faculty engage in community-based research projects. Students 
regularly serve the local community through co-curricular volunteer activities, often 
contributing more than one hundred thousand hours to the community per year. And 
community outreach activities – from summer camps to literacy programs to nutrition 
education programs – fill university calendars.
 
This culture of community engagement centers around the notion of “servire,” the 
university’s long-standing term to describe its mission which translates as “to serve.” 
Official publications describe this commitment to public service as “ECU faculty, 
staff, and students working to improve communities in North Carolina and beyond. 
Our students, faculty, staff, and senior leaders all are integral parts of our community, 
and our community is an integral part of who we are at ECU” (East Carolina 
University n.d.). This notion of campus and community being inextricably linked – 
and being integral to one another – creates a unique environment on campus. As such, 
the institution – by definition – cannot do its work if it is not engaged with and 
listening to its community. While there are inherent power differences between a large 
institution and a small, rural community, both institutional efforts to stay true to its 
mission and community pride help maintain a healthy partnership.

Much of our work on campus also involves a deep awareness of place and historical 
context. According to Wilkinson (1990, 75), “our species thrives on the subtle, 
intangible, but soul-deep mix of landscape, smells, sounds, history, neighbors, and 
friends that constitute a place. An ethic of place respects equally the people of a region 
and the land, animals, vegetation, water and air.” In rural areas in particular, or in any 



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community where the power differential between campus and community is 
pronounced, community engagement mandates that university administrators, faculty, 
and students recognize the importance of place to community stakeholders. At our 
institution, we have explored ways to use the concept of place to collaborate with our 
local rural community in a variety of ways.
 
This place-based awareness stems from two sources in our view. First, because the 
university speaks regularly of striving to live out its mission of service, that mission 
becomes less of an externally imposed mandate and more of an intrinsic identifier for 
the campus community. As the university chancellor states often in passing, 
“Community engagement and service are in our DNA on this campus.” When 
describing the culture and overall feel of the campus, many make mention of its 
connection to the community and region. Second, the location of the university in a 
historically poor and marginalized region of the state makes the overall need for 
intentional sharing of university resources much greater.
 
Specifically, because our institution’s place-based service happens in a largely rural 
setting, relationships between faculty, students, administration, and community 
partners are fostered and nourished with this context in mind. The twenty-six counties 
in Eastern North Carolina have historically been some of the poorest counties in the 
entire state. Thus, the need for strong, sustained partnerships that have identifiable 
outcomes and impacts in the community is a necessity. The university is the largest 
institution of higher learning in the region. Thus, there is the recognition that not only 
is community engagement built into the fabric of the institution, but there are limited 
resources already coming into the community. Greater responsibility is placed on the 
institution to be responsive to the community and its needs.
 

Assessment Goal 1: Formulating  
Cross-Disciplinary Teams for Assessment
Much can be said for institutions that figure out how to work across so-called “silos,” 
particularly when it comes to institution-wide assessment. Being able to articulate a 
campus’ engagement narrative based on a seamless and efficient data collection system 
and subsequent analysis can be a daunting challenge. But many campuses take up this 
challenge with the hope of achieving this goal. A key part of this challenge seems to be 
the overall level of receptivity to collaboration and partnership with participants. That 
is, campus stakeholders must be able to see how their assessment work not only benefits 
their individual units, but also the institution as a whole. Seeking and articulating shared 
purpose and common goals are significant challenges and opportunities. This means 
that when assessment is done in an atmosphere of support and mutual encouragement, 
individuals can approach the work as a team. Noted assessment scholar and author 
Trudy Banta praises this kind of approach, saying “Assessment is most effective when 
undertaken in an environment that is receptive, supportive, and enabling” (Banta 2002, 
62). Our team-building efforts tried to keep this in mind as we built a cross-disciplinary 
team for assessing community engagement efforts. Our institution undertook the 
challenge to build an assessment team based on both accountability and support.



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At the invitation of our statewide Campus Compact office, a group of engagement 
leaders on our campus convened to attempt to develop this team. Campus Compact 
served as the initiating body for this work, having invited groups of institutional teams 
over the past few years to engage institution-wide assessment work. Presented as a 
type of professional development activity for engagement leaders on campus, the 
initiative promised to provide guidance, support, and direction for each campus 
enrolled in the cohort for the initiative. Further, the initiative brought together leaders 
from other institutions across the state, helping to continue to build a network of 
statewide engagement in higher education.

Leaders from our assessment office, health sciences campus, student affairs, 
chancellor’s community relations staff, and others were invited to join the team. These 
individuals were chosen so that a broad spectrum of university representatives would 
engage in the discussion. This group ranged from senior administrators responsible for 
school or divisional assessment reporting to institutional research staff to departmental 
representatives charged with “on the ground” assessment. As such, our evolving cross-
disciplinary assessment team began the process by developing a project charter to 
clarify our aims. This charter was articulated in a bold manner. The charter reads: 

In an effort to support the mission of the university – ‘to be a national model for 
student success, public service, and regional transformation’—the objective of the 
Measuring and Monitoring Community Engagement (MMCE) project is to 
successfully institutionalize a comprehensive measuring and monitoring system that 
will document ongoing initiatives and their impact across the university and 
communities of North Carolina and beyond. MMCE will also afford the university 
systematic processes for capturing, analyzing, evaluating, and disseminating 
community engagement data to inform and guide our decisions. Reliable, valid, and 
accessible data will increase the university’s capability to more efficiently redirect 
institutional resources in an effort to respond to rapidly changing public and regional 
needs. Additionally, MMCE will allow the university to capture an institutional 
narrative of public service activities. 
 
Much of the work of this group centered around identifying current data collection 
processes – annual outcomes assessment for units across campus, engaged research 
activities by individual faculty, and engagement metrics requested by statewide 
reporting systems. Somewhat surprisingly, many of the individuals around the table 
were unaware of the extensive nature of our data collection across campus. Similarly, 
many were unaware about just how these data had been used for either internal 
improvement or external reporting. The team-based approach allowed stakeholders 
from different divisions and reporting areas within the university to come together, to 
understand each other’s work, and to attempt to determine how to best use the vast 
array of data being collected. Our goal was to move away from assessment as 
accumulating a “repository of information” to assessment as “thoughtful and structured 
change and improvement.” Ultimately, we challenged ourselves to understand the 
mantra of “the mission is my mission.” 
 



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There is precedent for this type of team-based approach, particularly within 
decentralized campus environments. Arcario and others (2013, 22) suggest that “the 
creation of a strong faculty-led assessment leadership team who are committed to an 
on-going process of thinking and rethinking the outcomes assessment approach” is 
critically important for each campus. Thus, not only should the outcomes assessment 
process be continually evaluated, but the broader engagement assessment process 
should also be continually critiqued. Our team-based working group attempted to do 
just that – identify current data collection and make thoughtful recommendations for 
how these data could be used to tell key parts of the institution’s story about its 
connection to the community. One important next step in this team-based process will 
be to include community partner voices. Only internal campus stakeholders directed 
the work for this first iteration. Community voices will help to further ground this 
process and provide important perspective.
 

Assessment Goal 2: Measuring Activities versus Impacts
Over the past several years, institutions have been expected to report engagement 
metrics. Many universities collect student community service hours that serve as useful 
data for internal reporting and messaging. These hours and accompanying information 
on student placements within the community can provide interesting insight into trends 
in student engagement. Moreover, there are a number of third-party data collection 
systems that allow universities to easily track their students’ engagement hours in the 
community. These systems allow for reporting on types of social issues in which 
students take action and total numbers of students who are self-reporting those hours as 
well as providing a snapshot of hours contributed to local community partner agencies.
 
While the collection of these quantitative data can offer interesting information about 
student involvement, some questions exist about the overall usefulness of these data. 
Further, there is lack of rigorous agreement at the highest levels of reporting on key 
definitions and concepts. The Creating Impact…UNC Engagement Report (University 
of North Carolina, Office of International, Community, and Economic Engagement 
2015) suggests that: 

we know that the majority of our campuses have been designated ‘engaged 
universities’ under criteria developed by the Carnegie Foundation and a 
majority of our campuses have been named to the ‘honor roll’ of the national 
President’s Higher Education Community Service based on a different set of 
‘engagement’ criteria. Ongoing conversations continue at meetings of the 
Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities about what criteria 
campuses should use to assess and quantify their ability to engage the 
community. And while community and public service is now one of the five 
elements of institutional effectiveness in reaffirmation reports submitted to the 
Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) (Standard 3.3.1.5), 
there is no agreement on how to define, measure, or improve university 
engagement (p. 5). 



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With a multitude of criteria at the national level, campuses are pulled in different 
directions when it comes to deciding how to dedicate assessment resources.
 
At large institutions, there are also inherent flaws in collection and reporting when 
data are largely self-reported. Mechanisms exist to verify student participation in 
community engagement activities, but these mechanisms are never without error. 
Therefore, these engagement hours only tell part of the story of student engagement. 
For the most part, they offer a surface-level view of student involvement and activities.

Our inclusive assessment strategy, then, takes into account this push for collecting and 
reporting on these metrics, but attempts to diversify this data with qualitative accounts. 
We couple these broad assessment and reporting measures with smaller, more focused 
efforts. For example, our institution has begun to collect narratives of community 
impact to highlight some of the qualitative aspects of student engagement. These 
narratives are sometimes used for larger external reporting. We have also used these 
narratives for internal “annual report” functions as well as institution-wide divisional 
reporting. These narratives are frequently used to highlight how we are working toward 
achieving objectives stated in our strategic plan. Our next step is to find ways to catalog 
these narratives for easy access. Unfortunately, with multiple internal reporting and 
data repositories – from assessment data warehouses to faculty performance portfolios 
to student engagement tracking systems – this goal is not without its challenges.
 
Further, qualitative understandings of data we collect on student service hours show 
what students learn from their experiences. We have developed an observation 
protocol to guide our assessment efforts for large-scale “days of service” activities. 
These observations are designed to capture data that might go unnoticed and 
unreported if only quantitative measures were used. For example, students might 
report on a survey instrument that their overall commitment to community was 
enhanced as a result of the experience of service. They also might report that they have 
a greater sense of citizenship, largely because of the interactions they had with local 
community. To add to this picture, observation data – collected by trained students – 
might describe actual student interactions with community leaders. These qualitative 
data show students asking questions, listening intently. Other data might describe 
student body language during the experience. While the students might seem 
comfortable around their peers and working in small groups (as one would expect of 
first-year students), observation data might tell us that their interactions with 
unfamiliar contexts in the local community brought discomfort.
 
To further add to the overall picture of this experience, student leaders are asked to 
collect student responses to reflection questions. During the service experience and 
shortly afterward, student leaders engage other student participants in a guided 
conversation. These conversations attempt to summarize student experiences – to let 
them voice their individualized “lessons learned” – with the goal of each student 
listening carefully to each other. Once students are finished talking about their 
experiences, they aggregate their shared experiences into common themes. A closing 
activity with all participants – also led by day-of-service student leaders – involves 



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each small group sharing their compiled lessons learned and take-away themes. These 
themes are then used to draft an assessment report about the overall day. Student 
Affairs educators review the student reflections and select key quotes to share with 
community partners. Again, these themes are compared with compiled survey data 
from an online assessment instrument.
 
Other examples come out of our alternative break programming within our Division of 
Student Affairs. While each student is expected to complete a “service experiences 
survey” both before and after their travels, other qualitative measures are also 
employed. Using a model borrowed from National Public Radio’s “This I Believe” 
program, students participate in a closing reflection activity once they return from their 
trip. After collectively reviewing their reflection notes and daily journal activities, the 
student participants attempt to summarize their experience in a “now what?” framing. 
That is, as a group, the students make a statement about what they experience, what 
they learned about the community and/or particular community and social issues, and 
what they believe moving forward. In a sense, the exercise encourages students to 
make their commitment more concrete and sustainable. They state it publicly for other 
students, faculty, and administrators to hear at a closing ceremony for the program. 
This closing program provides a forum for students to articulate a public statement 
about their learning where they make a firm commitment to the community from 
which they learned.
 
All of these assessment methods seek to paint a fuller picture of student learning 
through service. Thus, while challenges exist about how service experiences and 
community engagement work can be categorized and classified, these diverse 
assessment measures are intended to provide a more holistic view. Further, they can 
help provide a solid grounding for critiques against assessment efforts that only describe 
activities. While description of activity is important, this more holistic approach helps to 
further elucidate impact on students. Additionally, the assessment results – and the 
process of generating and collecting them in public forums – allows students to hear 
about the learnings of other students directly. This can be a powerful exercise and 
enables students to teach each other about their experiences. Thus, the assessment effort 
serves a twofold purpose: collecting program data for quality improvement and 
providing summative, public experiences for students to educate one another.
 

Assessment Goal 3: Formulating Data  
Collection Processes in Decentralized Environments
Our third goal emerges as both an achievement and a work in progress. Our hope is that 
we will continue to refine this goal as we develop staff – both professional and student 
– capacity in program assessment. One of the significant challenges related to the 
assessment of engagement work is that there are a variety of assessment “champions.” 
These champions do good work on campus and are committed to both ongoing quality 
improvement of their work and telling an important public service narrative. Yet, these 
individuals are located within different divisions, schools, and departments. With 
different reporting structures, position responsibilities, and spheres of influence, these 



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individuals could very easily work in isolation within their respective areas. Our 
engagement assessment team seemed to understand this challenge from the start. Thus, 
our strategy involved identifying resources and assets at our ready disposal.
 
Those identified assets certainly included student leaders who are regularly engaged in 
community engagement work. They take seriously the programs they oversee, often 
infusing passion into them that no professional staff member could offer. Many of 
those who are best poised to lead this assessment work are student staff members and 
student leaders. But student participants in community engagement programs can also 
add to the institution’s public service narrative as well. These students often carry 
remarkable stories of transformation, partnership with community agencies, and 
initiatives on specific social issues. Our work involves making sure that these powerful 
student stories are heard and promoted. 
 
We took as our lead some of the outreach and process-building work that was done for 
our institution’s Carnegie Community Engagement Classification application. In 
reflecting on one campus’ efforts, assessment leader Zuiches (2008, 44) suggested that 
it is important to “reach out to leaders in units on campus where programs are 
conducted and records are kept – a vital prerequisite on a decentralized campus. 
Whenever possible, make the request in person. Describe your need or word the survey 
instrument you use in campus-vernacular terms instead of the language of the Carnegie 
framework.” Because our campus had worked diligently to collect useful information 
for the Carnegie classification in 2008, and subsequent re-appointment in 2015, we 
sought to build on the culture of assessment that was created through that process. 
 
What emerged was a renewed conversation about recognition and rewards for engaged 
faculty. A few empirical studies have been conducted into the work of civic 
engagement within the university and the specific role faculty play in this work (Dey 
2009; Ellison and Eatman 2008; O’Meara 2012; Ward et al. 2013). The focus of this 
literature has been describing and making intelligible how faculty contribute to civic 
engagement through their main activities (e.g., teaching, research, and service). Of 
these studies, none have focused specifically on early career faculty, however, and the 
way these professionals develop identities as researchers vis-a-vis the scholarship of 
engagement. Instead, the focus has been on establishing structures of inclusion for 
conducting civic work across disciplines, largely by describing successful examples of 
this work across a wide variety of disciplines.

One of the most robust examples of this descriptive scholarship is Ellison and Eatman 
(2008, iv), who interviewed dozens of faculty at a variety of career stages across 
disciplines ranging from the visual arts to education. In their own words, their aim is 
to “propose concrete ways to remove obstacles to academic work carried out for and/
or with the public by giving such work full standing as scholarship, research, or artistic 
creation.” Specifically, they seek to describe the work of engaged faculty across four 
“continuums” (2008, ix):
•   a continuum of scholarship within which academic public engagement has full and 

equal standing;



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•   a continuum of scholarly and creative artifacts;
•   a continuum of professional pathways for faculty, including the choice to be a civic 

professional; and
•   a continuum of actions for institutional change.

Their goal in describing these continuums is to map the many ways in which faculty 
create knowledge that is useful to partners beyond the university.
 
Ultimately, our efforts challenged us to further the work of scholars such as Ellison 
and Eatman (2008, ix) and others by more fully describing how stakeholders involved 
in community engagement deal with a variety of “conditions of knowledge.” In other 
words, we wish to understand how conditions within universities both influence, and 
are influenced by, engaged knowledge-making. We posit that these conditions of 
knowledge are affected and influenced by a variety of cultural factors within 
individual academic disciplines and units. Perceptions of engaged and public forms of 
scholarship, particular emphases articulated by accrediting bodies, agendas and 
perspectives promoted by departmental leaders, and key thought leaders within fields – 
to name only a few – are all potential influences that impact one’s identity as an 
engaged scholar. Further, by focusing on disciplines beyond the humanities and social 
sciences (e.g., the health sciences), our assessment work hopes to add a more inclusive 
scope to the work of engagement. 

These various efforts at building a system of data collection processes in a decentralized 
environment – from valuing the unique contributions of student leaders and participants 
in the assessment process, to building on previously established work patterns, to using 
this process to encourage us to think about the many ways faculty assess their 
engagement work – now have positioned us well. We are able to see with more clarity 
the gaps that exist on our campus and opportunities that may have not been capitalized 
upon previously. As the saying goes, “the destination is the journey.” This journey of 
building campus-wide networks to streamline data collection and analysis has shown us 
what next steps we might take in our journey toward inclusive assessment.

Conclusion
More than anything, we hope to further a conversation regarding holistic, inclusive 
approaches to the assessment of university engagement projects. We invite fellow 
researchers and practitioners of engaged scholarship, teaching, and service to try out, 
critique, and help refine the methodology we are calling inclusive assessment. This 
methodology is simply an outcome of our own struggles to assess engagement in a 
manner that is fair to all stakeholders involved, including community members. It is 
also an outcome of our attention to the exciting engaged research happening at 
universities around the world.
 
We hope to follow up this article with a case study that explores our methodology and 
its limitations within the scope of a specific engagement project and its attendant 
outcomes. Our goal in this follow-up study will be to assess the strengths and 



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limitations of inclusive assessment as an empirical model for producing research 
findings as well as assessment outcomes. This new goal will undoubtedly cause us to 
reassess (pun intended) this model and its validity in a research context. Some 
questions we hope to answer in this inquiry will include: What are the limitations of 
this model as a research methodology? Can inclusive assessment as inclusive research 
produce outcomes for both scholars and local stakeholders? What needs to shift in our 
approach for this to happen?
 
We present this next step here in hopes that other scholars will try out this 
methodology in various contexts as a tool for research, assessment, or both, and will 
create their own outcomes and inclusive models. As we develop this methodology 
within our own institutional context, we are very curious if it will be useful in other 
contexts, and if not, why? Ultimately, whatever context fellow engaged scholars are 
operating in, we hope inclusive assessment will help them think about how to respond 
to institutional pressures without sacrificing the needs of community members. Such 
an aim calls for more robust models for assessment and research that are flexible and 
socially just.
 

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Author Information
Dr. Guiseppe Getto is an Assistant Professor of Technical and Professional 
Communication at East Carolina University. His research focuses on UX, content 
strategy, and the development of participatory cultures within communities and 
organizations. He has taught at the college level for over ten years, during which time 
he has consulted and formed service-learning partnerships with many nonprofits and 
businesses, from technical writing firms to homeless shelters to startups.

Dr. Dennis McCunney earned a BA in philosophy from Loyola University, Maryland, a 
MDiv from Boston College, and a PhD in higher education administration from Morgan 
State University’s School of Education and Urban Studies. His dissertation research 
focused on the formation of student culture around civic engagement and activism. His 
professional interests include leadership development, service-learning, campus-
community partnerships, social justice education, and qualitative research methods.

Guiseppe Getto
Assistant Professor of Technical and Professional Communication
East Carolina University
E-mail: gettog@ecu.edu
Telephone: 252-367-4364

Dennis McCunney
Director, Office for Leadership and Service-Learning
East Carolina University
E-mail: mccunneyw@ecu.edu
Telephone: 252-328-2802



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