Celebrating and Understanding Community Engagement at UWindsor
Our partnerships with community members and organizations inspire scholarship, creative activity, learning and service. They foster prosperity, resilience, cultural vitality, social justice, and innovation in Windsor Essex and beyond. The Faculty, Staff and Students who have committed to community engagement believe that learning with and from each other is at the heart of our capacity to thrive and evolve.
Sustaining and scaling community engagement requires that we understand what drives faculty, staff and students to participate in community engagement, and how community members experience this engagement. The Canadian Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement Pilot is a unique opportunity for us to come together to create a common understanding of the transformative impact of community engaged work at the University, and to learn from scholars, learners, and partners, here and across the country, about their efforts and about strategies and practices that make this work easier and more impactful. We hope that our participation will allow us to learn more about what is happening elsewhere n Canada and participate in a national conversation about how to make this work more impactful.
What is the Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement?
What is the Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement?
Carnegie Classifications have been a leading framework for describing and recognizing institutional diversity in U.S. higher education for decades. The elective Community Engagement Classification (CEC) involves collecting data to document and better understand important aspects of institutional mission, identity, commitments, and activities, and is intended to support a process for institutional learning and transformation, the outcome of which is an institution in which high-quality community engagement is deeply rooted and pervasive. The classification is not an award. It is an evidence-based documentation of institutional practice to be used in a process of self-assessment and quality improvement. Currently only American universities are eligible to undertake this process: the University of Windsor is part of a Canadian pilot exploring its potential and value for the Canadian post-secondary sector.
About the Canadian Pilot Cohort
The Canadian Pilot Cohort (CPC) is a group of sixteen Canadian post-secondary institutions who have agreed to undertake the Carnegie Classification to reflect on its fit in Canadian community engagement contexts. From 2019–2020, the CPC will work together as a learning community to evaluate the framework’s fit with the Canadian context, identify needed adjustments to the existing Classification if it were to be used in the Canadian context, and, recommend solutions and contribute to the development of a Canadian version of the Classification, if desirable.
Canadian Pilot Cohort Members
