{"id":5456,"date":"2008-05-30T21:31:46","date_gmt":"2008-05-30T21:31:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5456"},"modified":"2008-05-30T21:31:46","modified_gmt":"2008-05-30T21:31:46","slug":"evaluating-community-projects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5456","title":{"rendered":"evaluating community projects"},"content":{"rendered":"

(At Fordham in New York City for the day) Here is a further reflection on the “Tenure Report<\/a>” from Imagining America, which I summarized on Wednesday. I think if I were involved in campus politics or administration, I might advocate one strategic reform to promote “engagement.” I would argue that projects<\/i> undertaken in communities ought to be assessed on a par with peer-reviewed publications for the purposes of hiring, tenure, and promotion. Standards for evaluating such projects should be rigorous and stringent, so that most would not<\/i> be deemed fully successful. Launching a community project is no more commendable than opening Microsoft Word and starting to type; in either case, one is accountable for the quality <\/em>and impact of what one achieves. An impressive community project should be:<\/p>\n

\n
  • Generative: producing a substantial array of performances, events, programs, exhibitions, curricula, experiments, organizations, institutions, policies, maps, research instruments, data, peer-reviewed publications, college courses, and\/or graduate student work.\n
  • Intellectually ambitious: driven by challenging and innovative hypotheses, narratives, or methodologies and designed to test the organizers’ own presumptions and biases.\n
  • Coherent: capable of being summarized in one story about its purposes, activities, and results. (Although a project should be flexible over time and should include diverse people and agendas, the whole should be worth more than the sum of its parts).\n
  • Ethically responsible: sustained (no “drive-by scholarship”), accountable to relevant people inside and outside the academy, transparent, including real dialog with all the participants.\n
  • Effective: demonstrating real outcomes appropriate to its own objectives at a reasonable cost in terms of money, time, and political capital.<\/blockquote>\n

    Methods of assessing the quality of projects will vary, but one should at least consider using portfolios and peer reviews by independent, reliable community members.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    (At Fordham in New York City for the day) Here is a further reflection on the “Tenure Report” from Imagining America, which I summarized on Wednesday. I think if I were involved in campus politics or administration, I might advocate one strategic reform to promote “engagement.” I would argue that projects undertaken in communities ought […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5456\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}