The 2025 North Carolina Campus Engagement PACE conference was hosted by Guilford Technical Community College on Feb. 12.
Mathew Gendle, director of Project Pericles and 黑料不打烊 professor of psychology and Allison Karpyn, director of the Center for Research in Education and Social Policy and professor of human development and family sciences at the University of Delaware presented their recent work at the 2025 North Carolina Campus Engagement PACE conference, hosted by Guilford Technical Community College on Feb. 12.
Karpyn and Gendle shared a presentation titled 鈥淏eyond the Numbers: Rethinking Success in Higher Education Community Partnerships鈥 that critiqued assessment efforts that utilize algorithmic 鈥渂ig data鈥 approaches in attempts to measure the quality of institutional-community partnerships. As an alternative, Karpyn and Gendle championed qualitative and mixed methodologies that prioritize trust, reciprocity and mutual benefit over quantitative measures such as physical distance between academic institutions and community partners, amount of dollars transferred to partner, and the temporal duration of partnerships.
Karpyn and Gendle asserted that the true value of a community partnership lies in the impact it has on lives, perspective, and knowledge sharing. Although quantitative measures can play a role in thoughtful mixed-measures evaluation strategies for partnerships, qualitative measures that capture the complexity and true value of partnerships must be embraced.
A broader discussion of these issues can be accessed in a written by Karpyn and Gendle and published by the Community-Based Global Learning Collaborative on Dec. 18, 2024.