As a large, deliberative group, we have within our ranks a variety of perspectives that have informed DEA. We have surfaced our own points of tension and have worked hard to hold them creatively as we attempt to model the core values and commitments of DEA and as we seek the transformation in our understandings that can result. Indeed, we believe our understandings have transformed. In many ways the ideas we have explored in this white paper have truly been co-generated through rounds and rounds of deliberation in which we used some of the strategies we just discussed: deeply hearing one another’s stories, holding on to the shared goals that transcend particular differences, reading literature others bring into the mix, and being attentive to the ways we use language differently, to name a few examples.
This all leaves us with the belief that DEA is both incredibly powerful and necessarily never complete.
This is an interesting tension in itself: to resist the desire to wrap it up in a pretty ribbon so that we can point to it and say, “There, that is DEA,” and instead leave the framework open to revision, renovation, and reimagination. Indeed, we embrace not only our own unresolved questions — which is part and parcel of any scholarship — but also the unfinished and contested nature of these ideas. This, we believe, is profoundly appropriate given that DEA is, like democracy itself, an ongoing process not a settled product and thus will always be riddled with tensions that yield critique and questions. Living into our own commitment to re-imagine assessment means welcoming this reality as inspiration for hope and new possibilities.
Thus, while we have attempted in this white paper to clarify DEA’s origins and core values, to suggest some opportunities for practicing it, and to sort through some of the associated tensions and leverage points, there is clearly much left to say about DEA and much room for ongoing development. Here, we invite you to contemplate with us several questions that may guide future inquiry and to join with us in ongoing dialogue about what DEA might yet become.
1. How might DEA be conceived, understood, and applied to other specific contexts?We are a group of community engagement practitioner-scholars located primarily within academic
institutions, and in many ways our perspectives have been shaped — for better and for worse — by these contexts. More specifically, we come from the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
While we have had personal and professional commitments to public scholarship and
engagement in a variety of community settings, and while we have learned from the experiences and perspectives of colleagues rooted in other locations — community organizations, K-12 education, philanthropic foundations, government, STEM disciplines (the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics) — our voices as co-authors are clearly but a subset of those that need to be at this table. Has our location within higher education biased or stilted DEA and rendered its application limited? In what ways have we insufficiently thought through and expressed how DEA might be conceptualized and practiced in the full range of contexts in community and public life? How might those voices with more direct grounding in community organizations and activism participate fully in this work of reimagining assessment? What contributions or critiques might those from philanthropic foundations contribute to the
development of more participatory assessment? How might those in STEM fields contribute to the dialogues about the challenges and possibilities of DEA? Similarly, how might those within
K-12 education or government agencies raise questions about the limitations and opportunities of DEA in their very different institutional and policy contexts?
2. How might DEA be conceived, understood, and applied with a greater realization of full participation and co-creation?Our voices are also positioned in other ways that we must name and interrogate if we are to retain integrity and question our limitations. While our group
represents some lines of diversity — particularly in our class histories, disciplinary backgrounds, gender, and geographies — the fact is that we are all currently able-bodied, white, predominantly cis-gendered, and have post-graduate educations, among other privileged positions we hold.
While we all have struggled to hold ourselves accountable to critical engagement with our own relationships to power and privilege, we readily acknowledge our limited perspectives and how they may shape our formulation or discussion of DEA. These limitations speak to an as yet
incomplete fulfillment of a commitment that we all share to full participation and co-creation in our own work. This has us asking: How might DEA be constituted and communicated if our group included broader representation across lines of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, ideology, education, and national origin, to name a few? Living out DEA values is hard and slow work. We view living more fully into these values as an ongoing commitment and would like to more thoroughly pursue participatory and co-creative work in future development of DEA, including building cases, developing contextual applications, and reformulating DEA’s principles
accordingly. What will DEA be in the future as we more fully live out our own commitments to its values and as it is applied by us and others shaped by a wide variety of experiences,
perspectives, and contexts?
3. How might DEA be scaled to address macro-level assessment, and with what costs?
Democratically Engaged Assessment focuses on highly participatory, relational, and deliberative processes of negotiating values and inquiry, knowledge and action. As such it is more easily modeled in those settings that are more conducive to full participation and co-creation: those smaller scale, micro-level assessments of individuals, partnerships, organizations, and
communities. Even at a small scale, democratic approaches to engagement and their assessment are messy endeavors, and they therefore tend to focus myopically on the particular over the general, the micro over the macro, and the short- over the long-term. These issues apply not only to assessment, of course, but also to democratic processes and institutions more generally, since more participatory and deliberative democracy is easier at smaller scales. However, there may be creative ways to use DEA at larger scales to assess social change processes, particularly those that involve coalitions (e.g., Bandy & Smith, 2005) and community solidarity efforts (e.g., Loh &
Shear, 2015), which span geographies and share resources to scale up and build power.
This raises the question: How might DEA be challenged and extended to address pressing issues at the scales and timelines that larger groups, institutions, and communities need to foster
macro-level change (see scale of tension in Figure 3)? Can DEA accommodate or embrace approaches to the assessment of macro-scale endeavors for engagement — such as halting climate change or mass incarceration — that remains consistent with its values of full
participation, co-creation, generativity, practicability, resilience, and rigor? How would the values of DEA conflict or require compromise in the realization of assessment at this macro-level social scale? For instance, would the DEA value of full participation be compromised by the use of more representative, less participatory models of deliberation? Is practicability not strained by the full
participation of hundreds of thousands or millions of citizens in assessment processes? While the democratizing impact of new information technologies is often overstated and the object of thoroughgoing critique (e.g., Hindman, 2008), nevertheless, might newer technologies of data collection, networking, and analysis afford innovative methods and tools suitable to DEA at macro scales? Are there ways that these might be leveraged, particularly in the humanities, arts, and design, to develop creative tools that extend or challenge DEA?
4. How might DEA be challenged by contexts outside the United States?We as a group of authors are all from the U.S. and have been steeped in the traditions of democratic engagement, and its troubles, that are particular to that context. Despite our endeavors to live, work, and learn in cultures and societies beyond the U.S., and to inform DEA with a highly critical perspective that is open to, and empowering of, diverse values and communities throughout the world, we
recognize our own limitations and challenges. DEA emerges from the intellectual ideals of American or Western democracy and its application focuses on largely U.S. contexts. More, the term democracy itself, despite our efforts at a critical and participatory definition of it, is vexed by its complex history of ideological uses that support non-democratic, unjust governments and social inequalities throughout the world. We do not see our work as incompatible with efforts to resist this use of democracy, but we do wish to guard against DEA being co-opted for the purposes of legitimizing non-democratic approaches to assessment. Further, we wish for DEA to benefit from a more thorough dialogue with efforts to decolonize community engagement, and with it, assessment methods (e.g., Chilisa, 2011; Yep & Mitchell, 2017). In other words, we wish to more fully reimagine assessment through an engagement with the literatures on anti- and
post-colonial research models, and through a critically reflective renovation of DEA as it is applied and improved throughout non-U.S., non-Western, and indigenous contexts. How will different understandings and applications renegotiate the values and practices of DEA? Will such work help to refine or jettison democracy as an organizing principle? What other hierarchies of power in the practice of assessment will come into focus between, say, colonial and anti-colonial methods? And what models of resistance are necessary to more fully support and assess just, participatory, and transformative forms of public culture?
5. How might DEA be developed further through the use of different methods and tools? In the exploration of the five tools in Part II and Appendix A, we came to learn more about the ways DEA values may be realized through various methods and in different assessment contexts.
However, as we note in Part II and through the resources compiled in Appendix B, these five tools are merely a sample of the many existing methods or tools that may be consistent with DEA.
A detailed examination of the many other methods of assessment — their development, their approach to DEA or other values, the challenges they face in application — may inspire and inform a more expansive, useful framework for DEA. Further, as we explore at the end of Part II there are newly emerging methods and tools that, likewise, may be in dialogue with DEA principles and practices. These may develop assessments based on one value (e.g., Emory University’s Center for Faculty Development and Excellence’s focus on generativity) or one stakeholder (e.g., UCLA’s Center for Community Learning’s focus on graduate student
engagement), or some other broader framework (e.g., that of Arizona State University’s Design and Arts Corps), and develop a method or approach that helps to expand and renovate DEA practice. The never-ending inquiry into all of these existing or emerging innovations, along with their impacts on programs and projects, can help to inform and refine DEA, if not revolutionize it
altogether. This is something we only wish to encourage as part of an ongoing, open-ended process to shape ever more just and democratic methods of assessment. Indeed, we hope that DEA does not become some sort of institution or fixed model but rather an adaptable, flexible set of principles and processes — in addition to a network of practitioners — that can help any method become more democratic in its application across contexts.
Through these questions, we are issuing an invitation to you to join us in an ongoing exploration of the potentially transformative interweaving of assessment and democratic engagement that we call DEA. In bridging the gap between the world we encounter and the world we envision we are reminded of the folklore story that periodically makes its way through circles of community engagement
practitioner-scholars (as shared for example, by Russell Edgerton and Robert Bringle):
Two medieval stonemasons are working at a construction site. One of them, upon being asked what he is doing, replies, “I am squaring a stone.” The other answers “I am building a cathedral.”
Same task, two very different perspectives on the work and its purposes. It is our hope and intention that the ongoing development of DEA will proceed in the spirit of — and contribute to the flourishing of —
“cathedral building.” While no edifice is possible without carefully sculpted stones — a survey here, a story circle there — we hope that each may find meaning through its place as part of the whole structure.
Whether you think of that cathedral in terms of democracy, justice, or some other public good, please know that your work in and through community engagement and assessment is a necessary and valued contribution. Let’s keep learning from and with one another to hold tensions creatively and generatively.