Beyond the Deliverable

Abstract

Those who participate in service-learning/civic engagement (SLCE) in engineering have a common practice of reflecting on partnerships to determine if they were successful and how they might be improved. But what makes a partnership successful? We wanted to learn more about how and why to quantify partnership success to think “beyond the deliverable,” which is often the singular focus of engineering SLCE projects. To this end, we created a rubric for three dimensions of partnership that we selected after consulting engagement partnership literature: transactional, cooperative, and transformational. Using this rubric, we assessed the 55 completed partnerships of the LSU Community Playground Project (LSUCPP) by plotting scores in a 3-axis coordinate system (transactional as the x-axis, cooperative as the y-axis, and transformational as the z-axis) where a placement closer to (3.0, 3.0, 3.0) means a more universally successful partnership. Within each dimension of partnership, we assessed design, people, and process in equal measure to ensure that we paid adequate attention to each of these key aspects of engineering SLCE efforts. Further, part of this assessment involved surveying constituents (community partners, students, and faculty) about the transformational dimension of completed partnerships. Results showed  that our partnerships had high transactional (2.4) and cooperative (2.5)  mean scores overall, with a lower transformational mean (1.8). We also identified a transactional/cooperative threshold (2.0/2.0) at which the chance of having a transformational partnership went up; overall, our percentage of highly (2.0 or higher) transformational partnerships was 58%, but 70% of our partnerships that reached the threshold were highly transformational. The aspects of transformation most often identified by our survey respondents included building your capacity personally (81%), building lasting connections with colleagues (73%), and building your capacity professionally (70%). We believe that the method of holistic assessment for community-university partnerships presented here can lead to better engaged partnerships and can be adapted by others who wish to improve their SLCE engineering partnerships.