Learners, who are staff at a community center, have to demonstrate that they have gained knowledge about how to addres issues of inclusion/exclusion in their community, by engaging a group of people who have historically not engaged with their community center. This group of people has a different native language than the one the learners speak, and have a different country of origin, as well as other differences in culture and religion from the learners' group. Ultimately, the staff learners will need to answer two questions: "Why is this community not currently included in our community center?" and "How can we create a program or other solution in order to include them?"
Utilizing a project-based learning approach, they will embark upon a series of activities in order to better research and understand this community and the opportunities for inclusion. As part of this project-based learning approach, they will need to:
They need to design a program, and update some of their processes, practices, and policies, to be more inviting and to engage more people from the new group at their community center. Their goal is to create an engaging program for this new part of their community, and to document their progress throughout via a documentary.
The above learning scenario poses a unique challenge that is often found within the diversity & inclusion space (among others, such as membership, sales, community development, strategic planning, etc.): the need to engage new people, and learn how best to include them in the current environment in order to successfully do so. A formative assessment would be one way to gauge learners' education within this process. A formative assessment is one that includes questions while someone is undergoing the learning and information-gathering, in order to ensure they are "on the right track" and understanding the material meaningfully throughout, rather than just at the end of the assignment.
Assessment Part I: Documentary-Style Film
This assessment could look like a documentary-style film (formative assessment)--wherein students utilize technology to record their interactions, their thought processes, the challenges they faced throughout the process, and their successes. The instructor would, as part of the process, introduce other documentaries relating to effective community engagement or community organizing where a group of people has partnered with another group to solve an issue and improve development. As the course went on, the group would regularly review--via collaboration and discuss questions--effective elements of community engagement demonstrated in the documentaries or films they viewed. Accompanied by the film assignment would be a rubric that is structured based off of steps 1-7 above. It would ensure that students had followed each aspect of the project in order to demonstrate they took the steps needed to engage with the group, along with an added requirement that each step be filmed along the way. During class meetings, the group would share their some of their weekly footage with the instructor to get feedback regularly on the progress of the assignment and to demonstrate how learning took place. The instructor could invite a community leader, or someone involved with other community-based projects, to each class session to review the weekly project and share their feedback and insight as well.
Assessment Part II: Program Launch
At the end of the course, the final product would be the documentary film (for the purposes of the class to share with each other), as well as the community program itself--which would be for the community to demonstrate the results of the project and what the group had learned.
The above assessment is an authentic assessment because it "is one that requires application of what students have learned to a new situation, and that demands judgment to determine what information and skills are relevant and how they should be used" (Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning). It includes a number of necessary components for authentic assessments, which are numbered below and come from Grant Wiggins (1998):
This project also represents a Project-Based Learning Approach, because it is "inquiry-based" and the lesson is being taught "through the project--not teaching and then doing the project" (Miller 2017).
This project is heavily constructivist, through its reliance on More Knowledgeable Others, and scaffolding through engagement of experts and instructor support, and peer learning. It uses what is likely the Zone of Proximal Development with staff at a community center, who are likely primed to learn about community work, through requiring them to engage in regular conversations and design interviews and focus groups with the community to help them learn new perspectives and apply them to their professional work.
References
Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning, Indiana University. Authentic Assessment. Retrieved from https://citl.indiana.edu/teaching-resources/assessing-student-learning/authentic-assessment/.
Miller, A. (2017, November 3). Getting Started With Project-Based Learning (Hint: Don't Go Crazy). Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/project-based-learning-getting-started-basics-andrew-miller.
Wiggins, Grant. (1998). Ensuring authentic performance. Chapter 2 in Educative Assessment: Designing Assessments to Inform and Improve Student Performance. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 21 – 42.