Rachel Parroquin and Danielle Wood’s article on “Identifying and measuring broader impacts of Spanish community-engaged learning and implications for academic programming and Latino community development” has been published with online-open access [https://doi.org/10.1080/26883597.2025.2484548] in Local Development and Society. Doing CEL effectively involves challenges. Two key areas to address in engaged learning programs include developing and maintaining deep, robust partnerships over time and determining ways to measure outcomes and impacts in a complex ecosystem of factors. This article addresses both.
As stated in the abstract: As higher education institutions trend toward greater interest in the community impacts of engagement activities, understanding the range of impacts from department-wide investments in community-engaged approaches is critical for intentional programming. Most assessments, however, focus on students alone; broader community outcome areas and their associated departmental investments are less understood.
As community-engaged programming for Romance Languages and Literatures at University of Notre Dame reached its tenth year, researchers used this program as an influential case to examine community outcomes from wide-ranging departmental engagement, investment, and support both on and off-campus. This article forwards a method (outcome harvesting) for identifying and analyzing the broader impacts of community engagement across the range of partners in the Latino community; it then examines the implications of those findings for community-engaged academic program design.
Photo Information: Notre Dame students and families discussing family histories in Tatiana Botero's CEL class: Immigration and Construction of Memory class at El Campito.
Photography: Marc Parroquín.