2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Academia can engage with communities in a variety of ways, including an education focus (such as service-learning) or geared toward research (community engaged research, CER). These different forms of community engagement (CE) share many elements in common, while other attributes differ. This paper first compares and contrasts educationally-focused CE with CER. We then present a rubric that was developed to evaluate CER in environmental engineering, indicating what aspects are appropriate for community engaged education. The CER rubric proposes nine evaluation categories: centering on communities, capacity building, action-oriented outcome, shared leadership, shared funding, shared data, equitable valuing of CER scholarship, culturally specific assessment, and culturally specific communication and dissemination. For illustrative purposes the rubric is applied to two case studies. In the educationally-focused CE case study, a senior capstone design course in environmental engineering worked on a project defined by a community partner. The rubric did a good job revealing where improvements in the project could have been realized while also revealing that the non-profit facilitator was instrumental in engaging the community. In the second case study, a community sub-contracted an academic partner to explore residential indoor air quality. The project was at a higher level of the rubric for most criteria compared to the educationally-focused case study. Use of the rubric at the start of any project will open important conversations, thereby contributing to both the community and academic partners more fully meeting their needs.