Recording: Talloires Network Leaders Conference 2021

Descriptive transcript

I would like to acknowledge and pay respects to the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, and that's worldwide now. This is worldwide, so the traditional owners are all those countries.

If we were at UTS, which we're not, we'd be on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and I'd like to say thanks for allowing us to be on their land and to have our beautiful UTS building there. As we share our knowledge, teaching and learning and research practices within this university, may I also pay respect to the knowledge embedded forever within Aboriginal custodianship of country. I also pay respects to the Elders past and acknowledge their struggles and strengths so that we can have opportunities that were not afforded to older people in this country, Aboriginal people, and people of diverse backgrounds.

I'd also like to acknowledge our non-Indigenous brothers and sisters and say thank you for walking on this journey with us and holding our hands and walking beside us. If we were at UTS Broadway, we'd be on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation.

Today, and for many days, I am on the land of the Darug and Gundungurra people because we've been in strict lockdown.

Universities are leaders and, in most communities, are big picture thinkers and looking outside the box. Unis are, I believe, guided by the principles of engagement, integrity and making a difference.

It has been an extremely difficult time for universities in our country, with little or no support, but the heart of universities battles on, as unis always do, getting involved in the big issues.

So that's my little acknowledgement. I think Verity said, could I talk a little bit about engagement? Because I guess I've been doing that since the Bringing Them Home report. Actually, before that, it was learning from the past that nobody even knows about because it's so far back in the past.

So the Bringing Them Home report was like a movement that happened in Australia, eh, Verity? Aboriginal people knew that there was a government policy that removed Aboriginal kids at birth from their parents because they were Aboriginal, but people didn't believe it. And then all of a sudden there was this movement and people went, "Hang on, that's not right. That's really, really dreadful." And Michael Lavarch, when he was Attorney General, said that we'd have an inquiry. So that was my first start of engaging.

To get people to talk about the most painful thing in their life was really difficult, but to be good at engagement, you have to actually get the whole story. Then you have to listen deeply and you have to be guided by the people that you want to share stuff with. And I think that's the principle of all engagement.

For our mob, the hardest one I ever did was the Royal Commission into child sexual abuse in institutions. I think most countries have had the same issue. For us, we don't talk about this, and when I went for the job at the Royal Commission, I did say to them, "I don't think we'll get anyone to talk about this," but because when you've been around for a long time, you come with a sense of, "I'm not going to be harmed by this person," so you don't want to do any more harm and you have to listen.

Am I—have I got time to tell a little story?

Yes, please do.

Okay. One of my gigs—well, two of my gigs—I had prisons, but I had Tiwi Island. Tiwi Island was a mission that was taken over, and the big boss, the Commissioner, I think he was, he said to me, "Okay, so our first public hearing is going to be Tiwi." I said, "That's never going to happen," and he went, "No, that's going to be our first engagement," and I thought, he hasn't done any history. I mean, for anybody that can Google the Sistagirls on Tiwi, you know, and can find out what happened there—there were dreadful things that happened. The community took legal action; some people were brave enough to take legal action, and everybody on Tiwi is Catholic, so it was against the heart of most people.

So, forty people were brave enough to go and say that this wasn't right, but then the Catholic Church sent them a message, a letter saying, "Oh no, we're going to—" what's the word, Verity? "We don't believe this, so we're going to fight this." But people on Tiwi—English is their third language—so they get this piece of paper. They thought it was all done and dusted. They get this piece of paper that's saying, "No, you've got to come back to court on the 12th of December." No one turned up.

So it was put out, and then the community—those people harmed themselves in the worst possible way. I don't really want to traumatise everyone at nine o'clock in the morning. And we never had a public hearing, and, you know, he got more peed off as time went on.

But it was never going to happen because there was no engagement beforehand, you know, and every month I went to Tiwi, and in the end there were people brave enough to go out, back to Darwin, to tell their story, but it had to be done gently and with holding your hand and walking together with people. And it was so brave of those people. They're so brave.

So, yes, that's a story of how to engage when other people are bullying you to engage in another way.

That's a perfect way to introduce you, Aunty Glenda. Thank you so much. I think, because really what you're saying is engagement takes time, right?

Exactly. Time and patience and listening deeply—listening deeply to the people that you want to bring with you on this journey, because otherwise they'll be off the bus.

Yes. And that's often what's hard to convince people of, that real change—and change that sticks—takes time. It can't be done overnight and you have to bring people with you. So thank you, Aunty Glenda. Thank you.

Descriptive transcript

It's my pleasure now to be joined by Dr Mathew Johnson, Joanne Curry and Professor John Saltmarsh, all of whom are joining us from North America. We're going to be looking at the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification for universities and how it's being used internationally to celebrate and share good practice of university community engagement from across the sector. Again, the Carnegie is—we'll get to that. I was about to say it also talks a lot about why engagement takes time and needs to be authentic and genuine.

We're also delighted to be launching the Network for Community Engagement and Carnegie Classification Australia, which includes a collaboratively designed community of practice around engaged scholarship for universities and their partners, and we'll tell you a little about that later on.

So, to welcome our panellists. Dr Mathew Johnson is the President of Albion College in the United States and leads the development of the Carnegie Foundation Elective Classifications, including the Elective Classification for Community Engagement and a multi-year international Carnegie Community Engagement Classification project, which involves 26 institutions of higher education across the world. He co-founded and co-directs the National Assessment of Service and Community Engagement and consults for universities globally. He has previously served as Associate Dean of the College for Engaged Scholarship, as well as Senior Fellow and Executive Director of the Howard R. Swearer Center for Public Service at Brown University. Welcome, Mathew.

Joanne Curry is the Vice President of External Engagement at Simon Fraser University in Canada. She has made a career of advancing higher education locally, provincially and nationally and connecting the university with business and community. Her leadership has improved the university's capacity to enhance the social and economic wellbeing of British Columbia communities. Joanne plays a strategic role in engaging with stakeholders and raising the profile of the university. She is the institutional lead for community engagement and accountable for government relations, communications and marketing, and ceremonies and events. She co-chairs Universities Canada's Social Impact Committee and has served on the board of Community Living British Columbia. She is a member of SFU's Aboriginal Reconciliation Council and also the Aboriginal Strategic Initiative Working Group. Welcome, Joanne.

John Saltmarsh is Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Leadership in Education in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He publishes widely on community engaged learning, teaching and research and organisational change in higher education. John is a member of the Board of Trustees with College Unbound in Providence, Rhode Island, a Visiting Fellow at Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and a Ludington Centre Visiting Scholar at Albion College. From 2005 to 2016, he served as the Director of the New England Resource Center for Higher Education. He was also a Director of the national program on Integrating Service with Academic Study at Campus Compact. Welcome, John.

So, this is good. The conversation is starting and the room is building up as I speak. So, my first question is really a place-creating question and it goes to Mathew Johnson. Mathew, can you tell us a bit about the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification? What is it and why should it be considered the gold standard for demonstrating university community engagement?

Thank you, Verity, very much and thank you for all the participants and my co-panellists for being here in my part of the world this evening.

The Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement is a designation that the Foundation offers to institutions in the US and soon in international locations that signifies the Foundation's endorsement of those institutions as having made broad and deep commitments within their institutional life to community engagement as defined by the Foundation.

I think part of what makes it the gold standard from my perspective is that definition. It's a clear definition that calls on our institutions to build mutually beneficial, reciprocal relationships with communities and community organisations and community members.

In the context of mutually beneficial reciprocal relationships, it calls on us to examine the epistemological foundations of the academy and to acknowledge that knowledge is generated both inside and outside the academy at the same time. So, in such a relationship, we would be co-creating knowledge. Once you have a full appreciation of that definition, it's hard for me at least to think of a more noble way to pursue the public purposes of our institutions.

The second aspect I would say that makes it the gold standard is that it is a self-study process that takes the course of the better part of a year or more, involves often constituencies across the institution, and collects a variety of different types of information to raise questions about the alignment of mission, vision, strategy, the organisation and distribution of resources, and the ways in which the institution is committed to continuous improvement in those partnerships. So, that's a couple of pieces I would say, Verity, that make it the gold standard from where I stand.

So, I'm now going to ask Joanne Curry. For those of you who don't know, we have recently had a pilot of the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification in Australia. Ten universities got together to actually apply for the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification in order to work out how it worked in the Australian context and whether we needed to do some adjustments in order to be able to roll it out in the Australian context. Joanne Curry led that process in Canada, so Canadian universities did a similar thing, and we've been really interested watching the Canadians as the Australians have been undergoing it, because there's been some real similarities and differences, and we've been able to talk through the process as we've both gone through this together.

So, Joanne, what were the major reasons motivating institutions in Canada to undertake the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification pilot process?

Great. Well, welcome, everyone. I'm really privileged to be with you today, joining you from British Columbia, the unceded territories of Coast Salish people. Today is a significant first statutory holiday on the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, so a day for us to reflect on the horrendous legacy of residential schools in Canada.

I have personally been interested in the Carnegie Classification for over 20 years. I was attending US conferences and I fell into a workshop for institutions looking to complete the process and I just thought this would be amazing because it goes from the attempt to go from grassroots to institutionalised views, the very deep definition of mutual and reciprocal partnerships.

The idea of looking to improve, measure and work across the institution. I remember looking at question number one and not being able to successfully complete it and I thought, okay, maybe we're not there yet. But in 2011, our university came up with a vision and mission to be an engaged university where community engagement was really at the centre of our vision and mission for our research, teaching and community work.

I think with the 16 institutions across Canada, they were excited with the idea. They're all leaders in community engagement in various ways and very different institutional types—colleges, institutes, research universities, teaching universities, Aboriginal-led universities—but I think we all share the idea of improving our practice and also moving our practice to really accomplish the definition of the deep and mutually reciprocal partnerships.

I think it's also a way for our executive to become more aware because every institution had amazing things happening across it and I think Mathew refers to this as the thousand flowers blooming. So, lots of great work, but lots of passionate people that were burning out, and how can we lift their work? How can we better support it institutionally?

And just finally, it was really to learn from one another. I think part of the excitement was the cohort was going through this together and we've really benefited from the Australian cohort being slightly ahead of us, and Verity's come in at various points. We just think your work has been brilliant and look forward to a global sort of community around the Carnegie Classification.

Thanks, Joanne. Now, John, Joanne sort of alluded to it there. Part of what the Carnegie Classification is, is almost an institutional response, right? Let's be honest about it, it's often getting the community engagement people a seat at the table with the senior exec to actually say, what are we going to shift in our institution that is going to better support and enable this work?

I know that you, of course, are part of your expertise is around organisational change and community engagement. So, what are the insights that you think universities gain and where are the learnings that happen throughout this Carnegie Classification process? And any other thoughts you have around this organisational change issue? How do we get universities to move in this direction in a more holistic way?

Well, that's an easy one.

Yes, so I just want to pick up on what Joanne was talking about too, in terms of why engage in this kind of a process? Having done this for multiple cycles in the United States, we know that there's not one reason. There tend to be multiple reasons, sometimes multiple reasons on the same campus, but we know that this sort of piece around institutional self-assessment is really important. Mathew mentioned that.

And that may be sort of the key one. It just creates this opportunity to reflect on one's practice and figure out how you're going to improve it, and doing that across an entire institution. We don't really have many opportunities like that. We do it with accreditation, maybe when we do strategic planning. So, it's an opportunity to do that.

Another reason we found is that it creates legitimacy because a lot of these campuses have been doing this for a while, but it hasn't really been legitimised. So, this process can bring that sense of legitimacy. For some of our campuses, also a sense of accountability, particularly our public institutions, where they can demonstrate accountability to the public good mission of their institution and how they're actually fulfilling that public good.

Then Joanne sort of talked about this too—it becomes a catalyst for change, right? You can actually use this as a way to try to move the work forward on the campus. So, as a tool, it's really helpful for that. Mathew and I always start workshops by saying the point here is not to get the classification, the point here is to do the self-assessment so you can advance the work, right? That's what you're trying to do.

The last thing I would say is just it's about institutional identity. How do we want to be known as an institution? From the Carnegie Foundation point of view, prior to the elective classification, the way we were known was essentially by this classification scheme that we had nothing to do with, but it put us into these different categories. Like we could be a research high institution or a research less intensive institution or a liberal arts institution. So, we get categorised. This provides the opportunity to say, sure, I'm a master's high institution, but I'm also a community engaged institution. So, it's a way of claiming that identity. I would say that's actually really important. Campuses are trying to distinguish themselves and this is a key piece.

To the latter point of your question around change, I would say the thing that's probably most important to understand here is that the Foundation is really pushing campuses towards deep cultural change at their institutions. That's really hard work and when they say deep cultural change, what they mean is change in the academic core of the institution.

So, while campuses can talk about engagement around students going out into the community—and that's really important and we want to see that kind of volunteerism happening—or they might talk about it in terms of their economic relations around procurement and investment and employment, and that's also really important, but what Carnegie is trying to get to is that's not the core of who we are as institutions. At the core of our institutions are about generating and disseminating knowledge—it's that academic core.

So, at the core of the classification is the question of, is this institution committed such that this is central to the work of faculty and central to student learning? If it isn't, it's really hard to get classified, right? We hope you're doing all of those other things I mentioned, but what the Foundation is really looking at is that academic core.

That is also the core culture of the institution and shifting that culture to those kinds of commitments can be very challenging. I think we all know that, but that's also where the deep change takes place, that deep and pervasive change that Mathew was talking about. We can talk more about that, but that's the key.

I'm going to drop an article in the chat that Mathew and I did a little less than a year ago, which really tries to get at these sort of cultural change pieces.

I think that's really interesting because the concept—the reason it's such a deep cultural change—is it almost goes against the very way universities, at least in the sort of Western tradition, have been run for centuries, right? An expert model based on the expertise of the academy, and shifting to, as Mathew said, a co-creation of knowledge model, where there is equal knowledge on both sides, is a pretty fundamental shift. Mathew, have you seen some really good examples of this, where there has been that shift?

Oh, yes. You know, I think John and I have seen, particularly now that there have been successive cycles in the US, many campuses who in their first application will be in a very nascent state and they talk about the right things that need to be done, but they haven't quite done them yet. They haven't quite figured out how to quality control for partnerships or how to do assessment related to student learning in engaged learning settings, or perhaps they still are using two or three different definitions across the institution and haven't yet come together around a solid definition that is reflective of the commitments that are required in the classification's formal definition.

And then two years later or five years later, they come back for a second time to apply and now they've operationalised a single definition. They have a clear assessment strategy. They've organised either a centre or some other organisational structure to begin the deep cultural change that John is talking about.

And perhaps they come back several years hence for a reclassification because perhaps they've earned it the second time. Now we see not only those initial structures and initial commitments, but we see changes being made based on insights from the continuous improvement process they have embedded in their institutional culture, so they're reporting on data they've collected and how that's influenced their practice of community engagement across the institution and led to real changes in the way that they approach the work.

So, that kind of developmental pathway, I think, is present and common across the US experience where we've had multiple cycles of classification.

Yes, interesting.

Joanne, so again, to sort of give some context, Canada was running the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification as a pilot, we were doing it in Australia, and our job was to actually see, okay, this is good, this applies to us, this actually doesn't apply to us, or this is where we actually need to enhance the Canadian version of the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification to speak more directly to an issue that is pertinent to our universities. What were some of those that happened, Joanne, in the Canadian experience? Where did you feel there needed to be additions made to the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification for the Canadian context?

The most significant area was on Indigenous and work with Indigenous communities and also Indigenous knowledge and recognising that. Both John and Mathew have talked about sort of a deep and a cultural change, and you mentioned, Verity, the kind of expert view and recognising community knowledge. This definition sounds great, but to really enact and support it so it is mutually beneficial is really important. So that was probably the biggest area.

I know there were additions around justice and equity. My sense was Carnegie was already going there because this is not isolated to Canada and I certainly saw it in Australia's cohort as well, because I think that's just more of a global movement. As to some extent Indigenous—I know that's important for Australia as well.

I guess what I'd have to say, though, is at the beginning at workshops it's like we're special, we're different in Canada, and as we go through the process, maybe we're not so different after all, that there's just a lot of commonality. That's why I'm excited about the idea of the global sort of community because we'll be able to learn and share from each other and like our cohort ourselves, we recognise both our differences but also our common areas of work.

Yes, I agree. One of the best things about the Australian experience was because it's an accreditation and not a ranking, there is actually no competition, right? So you're sitting around with other universities and you're not actually competing with them. You're wanting to share knowledge and practice and listen to what they have to say. I think also the pilot context created that collegiality as well, but it was a rare space in higher education where there was genuine collegiality.

Absolutely. We too often stratify according to levels. To learn from different approaches was extremely valuable as part of the process.

So, Mathew, I'm going to come back to you and then I'm going to get John to elaborate as well. There's a number of these pilots now around the world. Can you give us a bit of an insight into where the pilots are and what they're doing to adapt the classification to their unique local contexts and how does the Carnegie Foundation address that adaptation?

That's a wonderful question, Verity. Thank you. Part of what I love about the internationalisation project is that it has, I believe, followed and remained true to the very notion of partnership that we're talking about in the sense that its model is to say to international partners, we have one way of thinking about how we might classify institutions as community engaged. Let's start there, but we want to learn from you in our partnership, in our developmental mutually beneficial partnership, how we might actually change our one way and be changed by the partnership, even as you might develop a framework that is referential to the original framework here in the US.

So, in that regard, Australia, as you say, has started the process and gone through thinking about what the US-designed framework would mean, how it would need to be changed and adapted, and changed that framework in significant ways to be relevant in an Australian context.

The Canadian cohort is in the midst of doing that adaptation currently to make a framework that is relevant and meaningful in the Canadian context. What is so fun about it for me is that that has then been iterated back on the US framework and caused us to think differently about our own framework in quite profound ways and inspired new thinking in the US about indigeneity, about the centrality of race and equity in our own framework, and even caused us to rethink positionality of certain questions in the framework, forwarding partnership much more prominently in our own framework and looking for and thinking about how the framework leads a school through a certain set of questions about itself that we only came to understand as clearly as we did by working with the two cohorts that are doing it internationally.

We're excited that there may, as soon as COVID allows, be a cohort in South Africa and perhaps another one now in Vietnam. Again, part of our excitement there is that we learn and change from the process of partnership, and that is really the joy in the work—to do it together.

And John, I just thought you may also have some insights into sort of the internationalisation of Carnegie and also the community-engaged universities movement.

Yes, I would just pick up on what Mathew was saying—maybe a couple of things. One is I do want to recognise what I think of as the original pilot, which was a group of 12 campuses in Ireland who went through a similar process that you've gone through in Australia and Canada in 2015–16. At that point, the Foundation was not really that interested in this international classification. So, this was almost an attempt to convince them that this would be worth doing.

I would say we learned a lot from that process that I think is playing out now in the two other pilots and I would say probably most importantly was the way that we had to recognise how US-centric the classification was and that it wasn't going to work in other cultural and national contexts and that there were some major differences.

So, in Ireland, major differences were around funding sources and the fact of having a state authority and a state authority that also had performance measures that were tied to those funding sources. We don't have that, but that was critical in terms of how you think about change, how do you position this on a campus. Then there were the cultural nuances around language. Just to give you an example, in Ireland, faculty are referred to as staff, so you've got to translate the classification if you're going to make it work. That's just one example.

But also a cultural nuance of a country with deep Catholic heritage also has deep roots in volunteerism, so how do you figure that into the classification scheme and make sure that you honour that in that context.

So, we learned a lot from that process as we went forward and I think it also convinced the Foundation that this was actually something that we needed to pursue.

But going back to the core of your question, I think it fundamentally tells us there is no one classification. It's a classification scheme that's adapted to different contexts and that's what Mathew was getting at too.

I'm also going to drop in the chat an article on that Irish pilot that was in the Gateways Journal, if anybody is interested.

I'm glad you plugged the Gateways Journal. It's a joint publication between UTS and Albion College, where Mathew Johnson is President. So, please, everybody, go to John's link, but also explore Gateways Journal.

Well, look, I am mindful to keep us to time because I know it's a long day ahead of us. I really want to thank our panellists. I hope that's been a nice little vignette for people to be introduced to the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification.

We're around all day—our international guests are probably not around all day, they have to go to bed—but we're around all day. Throughout the day we can answer any questions you like around the Australian process and next steps.

To that end, I just want to share quickly—now, of course, it's not going to work properly—I want to share quickly some slides with you because we do, in fact, have a nice convenient QR code for people to have a look at.

So, today, in line with the Talloires Network, we're also launching the Network for Community Engagement and Carnegie Classification in Australia and we have a number of universities who've already signed up, our pilot universities, as well as some new ones. Melbourne University is on board, Victoria University is on board. It's really exciting to bring people into the network.

We're launching it today and the idea—I'm just going to change that, that's the rather boring governance chart—but as you can see, we now have a National Advisory Committee which is steering this network. We'll have a National Review Panel which actually looks at running out the Carnegie Classification in Australia.

Our plan, however, this year—partly because of all the challenges that are involved with COVID and lockdowns and everything—this year we're not going to ask you to commence the classification. We're going to ask you to be involved in a community of practice, which we're co-creating with universities to build capacity and best practice for community engagement in Australia, basically to introduce the sector to the Carnegie Classification and run some workshops on how to apply and how to actually make it work from people who've done it themselves through the pilot process.

We're going to be having monthly capacity building information sessions around the classification framework, but more importantly, actual communities of practice around engagement full stop—so, engaged scholarship, what does that look like in research, what does it look like in teaching and learning—and sharing the knowledge that we've all got and all the great stuff that's happening in universities across Australia.

So, if you're interested in joining that network, here is a cool QR code. I know most people in Australia are very used to using QR codes. I don't know what it's like in Canada and the US, but QR codes is how we now have to log in when we go and do our supermarket shopping and so forth. Here's a different type of QR code—a QR code that allows you to register for our community of practice. So, please do so. We're really excited just to bring people on board and start to build a real movement in Australia around all of this.

Descriptive transcript

It's my pleasure now to be joined by Dr Matthew Johnson, Joanne Currie and Professor John Saltmarsh, all of whom are joining us from North America. We're going to be looking at the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification for Universities and how it's been used internationally to celebrate and share good practice of university community engagement from across the sector. The Carnegie also talks a lot about why engagement takes time and needs to be authentic and genuine.

We're also delighted to be launching the Network for Community Engagement and Carnegie Classification Australia, which includes a collaboratively designed community of practice around engaged scholarship for universities and their partners. We'll tell you a little bit about that later on.

To welcome our panellists: Dr Matthew Johnson is the President of Albion College in the United States and leads the development of the Carnegie Foundation Elective Classifications, including the Elective Classification for Community Engagement and a multi-year international Carnegie Community Engagement Classification project, which involves 26 institutions of higher education across the world. He co-founded and co-directs the National Assessment of Service and Community Engagement and consults for universities globally. He has previously served as Associate Dean of the College of Engaged Scholarship, as well as a Senior Fellow and Executive Director of the Howard R. Swearer Centre for Public Service at Brown University. Welcome, Matthew.

Joanne Currie is the Vice President of External Engagement at Simon Fraser University in Canada. She's made a career advancing higher education locally, provincially and nationally, and connecting the university with business and community. Her leadership has improved the university's capacity to enhance the social and economic wellbeing of British Columbia communities. Joanne plays a strategic role in engaging with stakeholders and raising the profile of the university. She is the institutional lead for community engagement and accountable for government relations, communications and marketing, and ceremonies and events. She co-chairs Universities Canada's Social Impact Committee and has served on the Board of Community Living British Columbia. She's a member of SFU's Aboriginal Reconciliation Council and also the Aboriginal Strategic Initiative Working Group. Welcome, Joanne.

John Saltmarsh is Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Leadership in Education in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He publishes widely on community engaged learning, teaching and research and organisational change in higher education. John is a member of the Board of Trustees with College Unbound in Providence, Rhode Island, a Visiting Fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and a Ludington Centre Visiting Scholar at Albion College. From 2005 to 2016, he served as the Director of the New England Resource Centre for Higher Education. He was also a Director of the National Program on Integrating Service with Academic Study at Campus Compact. Welcome, John.

The conversation is starting and the room is building up as I speak. My first question is really a place-creating question and it goes to Matthew Johnson. Matthew, can you tell us a bit about the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification? What is it and why should it be considered the gold standard for demonstrating university community engagement?

MATTHEW JOHNSON: Well, thank you, Verity, very much and thank you for all the participants and my co-panellists for being here in my part of the world evening. The Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement is a designation that the Foundation offers to institutions in the U.S. and soon in international locations that signifies the Foundation's endorsement of those institutions as having made broad and deep commitments within their institutional life to community engagement as defined by the Foundation.

I think part of what makes it the gold standard from my perspective is that definition. It's a clear definition that calls on our institutions to build mutually beneficial, reciprocal relationships with communities and community organisations and community members. In the context of mutually beneficial reciprocal relationships, it calls on us to examine the epistemological foundations, really, of the academy and to acknowledge that knowledge is generated both inside and outside the academy at the same time. And so, in such a relationship, we would be co-creating knowledge. Once you have a full appreciation of that definition, it's hard for me, at least, to think of a more noble way to pursue the public purposes of our institutions.

The second aspect I would say that makes it the gold standard is that it is a self-study process that takes the course of the better part of a year or more, often involving constituencies across the institution, and collects a variety of different types of information to raise questions about the alignment of mission, vision, strategy, the organisation and distribution of resources, and the ways in which the institution is committed to continuous improvement in those partnerships. So, that's a couple of pieces I would say, Verity, that make it the gold standard from where I stand.

VERITY FIRTH: So, I'm now going to ask Joanne Currie. For those of you who don't know, we have recently had a pilot of the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification in Australia. Ten universities got together to actually sit, apply for the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification in order to work out how it worked in the Australian context and whether we needed to do some adjustments in order to be able to actually roll it out in the Australian context. Joanne Currie led that process in Canada. So, the Canadian universities did a similar thing. And we've been really interested watching the Canadians as the Australians have been undergoing it, because there's been some real similarities and differences, and we've been able to talk through the process as we've both gone through this together.

So, Joanne, what were the major reasons motivating institutions in Canada to undertake the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification pilot process?

JOANNE CURRIE: Great. Well, welcome, everyone. I'm really privileged to be with you today, joining you from British Columbia, the unceded territories of Coast Salish people. And today is a significant first statutory holiday on the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation. So, a day for us to reflect on the horrendous legacy of residential schools in Canada. I have personally been interested in the Carnegie Classification for over 20 years, and I was attending US conferences, and I fell into a workshop for institutions looking to complete the process. And I just thought this would be amazing, because it goes from the attempt to go from grassroots to institutionalised views, the very deep definition of mutual and reciprocal partnerships. So I just thought, and the idea of looking to improve, measure, and work across the institution.

I remember looking at question number one and not being able to successfully complete it, and I thought, okay, maybe we're not there yet. But in 2011, our university came out with a vision and mission to be an engaged university where community engagement was really at the centre of our vision and mission for our research, teaching, and community work.

I think with the 16 institutions across Canada, they were excited with the idea. They're all, I think, leaders in community engagement in various ways, and very different institutional types: colleges, institutes, research universities, teaching universities, Aboriginal-led universities. But I think we all share the idea of improving our practice, and also moving our practice to really accomplish the definition of the deep and mutually reciprocal partnerships.

I think it's also a way for our executive to become more aware, because every institution had amazing things happening across it. And I think Matthew refers to this as the thousand flowers blooming. So lots of great work, but lots of passionate people that were burning out, and how can we lift their work? How can we better support it institutionally? And just finally, it was really to learn from one another. I think part of the excitement was the cohort was going through this together. And we've really benefited from the Australian cohort being slightly ahead of us, and Verity's come in at various points. And we just think your work has been brilliant, and look forward to a global sort of community around the Carnegie classification.

VERITY FIRTH: Thanks, Joanne. Now, John, Joanne sort of alluded to it there, like part of what the Carnegie classification is, is almost an institutional response, right? Let's be honest about it, it's often getting the community engagement people a seat at the table with the senior exec to actually say, what are we going to shift in our institution that is going to better support and enable this work? And I know that you, of course, are part of your expertise is around organisational change and community engagement. So what are the insights that you think universities gain? And where are the learnings that happen throughout this Carnegie classification process? And any other thoughts you have around this organisational change issue? How do we get universities to move in this direction in a more holistic way?

JOHN SALTMARSH: Well, that's an easy one. Yes, so I just want to pick up on what Joanne was talking about, too, in terms of why engage in this kind of a process. So having done this for multiple cycles in the United States, we know that there's not one reason, there tend to be multiple reasons sometimes, multiple reasons on the same campus. So we know that this sort of piece around institutional self-assessment is really important. Matthew mentioned that. And that may be sort of the key one. It just creates this opportunity to reflect on one's practice and figure out how you're going to improve it. And doing that across an entire institution, we don't really have many opportunities like that. We do it with accreditation, maybe when we do strategic planning. So it's an opportunity to do that.

Another reason we found is that it creates legitimacy. Because a lot of these campuses have been doing this for a while, but it hasn't really been legitimised. And so this process can bring that sense of legitimacy. For some of our campuses, also a sense of accountability, particularly our public institutions, where they can demonstrate accountability to the public good mission of their institution and how they're actually fulfilling that public good.

And then Joanne sort of talked about this too, it becomes a catalyst for change, right? You can actually use this as a way to try to move the work forward on the campus. And so as a tool, it's really helpful for that. Matthew and I always start workshops by saying the point here is not to get the classification. The point here is to do the self-assessment so you can advance the work, right? That's what you're trying to do.

And then the last thing I would say is just, it's about institutional identity. How do we want to be known as an institution? And from the Carnegie Foundation point of view, prior to the elective classification, the way we were known was essentially by this classification scheme that we had nothing to do with, but it put us into these different categories. Like we could be a research high institution or research less intensive institution, or we could be a liberal arts institution. So we would get categorised. This provides the opportunity to say, sure, I'm a master's high institution, but I'm also a community engaged institution, right? And so it's a way of claiming that identity. And so I would say that's actually really important. Campuses are trying to distinguish themselves, and this is a key piece.

To the latter point of your question around change, I would say the thing that's probably most important to understand here is that what the foundation is really pushing campuses towards is deep cultural change at their institutions. That's really hard work. And when they say deep cultural change, what they mean is change in the academic core of the institution. And so while campuses can talk about engagement around students going out into the community, and that's really important, and we want to see that kind of volunteerism happening, or they might talk about it in terms of their economic relations around procurement and investment and employment, and that's also really important. What Carnegie is trying to get to is that's not the core of who we are as institutions. At the core of our institutions are about generating and disseminating knowledge, is that academic core. And so at the core of the classification is the question of, is this institution committed such that this is central to the work of faculty and central to student learning? And if it isn't, it's really hard to get classified. We hope you're doing all of those other things I mentioned, but what the foundation is really looking at is that academic core. That is also the core culture of the institution, and shifting that culture to those kinds of commitments can be very challenging. I think we all know that. But that's also where the deep change takes place, that deep and pervasive change that Matthew was talking about, and we can talk more about that, but that's sort of the key.

I'm going to drop an article in the chat, too, that Matthew and I did a little less than a year ago, which really tries to get at these sort of cultural change pieces.

VERITY FIRTH: I think that's really interesting because the concept, the reason it's such a deep cultural change is it almost goes against the very way universities, at least in the sort of Western tradition, have been run for centuries, right? An expert model based on the expertise of the academy and shifting to a, as Matthew said, co-creation of knowledge model where there is equal knowledge on both sides is a pretty fundamental shift. Matthew, have you seen some really good examples of this, where there has been that shift?

MATTHEW JOHNSON: Oh, yes. I think John and I have seen, particularly now that there have been successive cycles in the U.S., many campuses who, in their first application, will be in a very nascent state and they talk about the right things that need to be done, but they haven't quite done them yet. They haven't quite figured out how to quality control for partnerships or how to do assessment related to student learning in engaged learning settings. Or perhaps they still are using two or three different definitions across the institution and haven't yet come together around a solid definition that is reflective of the commitments that are required in the classification's formal definition.

And then two years later, or five years later, they come back for a second time to apply and now they've operationalised a single definition. They have a clear assessment strategy. They've organised either a centre or some other organisational structure to begin the deep cultural change that John is talking about. And perhaps they come back several years hence for a reclassification because perhaps they've earned it the second time. And now we see not only those initial structures and initial commitments, but we see changes being made based on insights from the continuous improvement process they have embedded in their institutional culture. So they're reporting on data they've collected and how that's influenced their practice of community engagement across the institution and led to real changes in the way that they approach the work. So that kind of developmental pathway, I think, is present and common across the U.S. experience where we've had multiple cycles of classification.

VERITY FIRTH: Interesting. Joanne, so again, to sort of give some context, Canada was off running the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification as a pilot. We were doing it in Australia. And our job was to actually see, okay, this is good, this applies to us, this actually doesn't apply to us, or this is where we actually need to enhance the Canadian version of the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification to speak more directly to an issue that is pertinent to our universities. What were some of those that happened, Joanne, in the Canadian experience? Where did you feel there needed to be additions made to the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification for the Canadian context?

JOANNE CURRIE: The most significant area was on Indigenous and work with Indigenous communities and also Indigenous knowledge and recognising that. Well, John and Matthew have talked about sort of the deep and the cultural change, and you mentioned, Verity, that kind of expert view and recognising community knowledge and this definition, it sounds great, but to actually really enact and support it, so it is mutually beneficial, is really important. So that was probably the biggest area. We also, I know there were additions around justice and equity. My sense was Carnegie was already going there, because this is not isolated to Canada, and I certainly saw it in Australia's cohort as well, because I think that's just more of a global movement. To some extent, Indigenous is, and I know that's important for Australia as well.

I guess what I'd have to say, though, is at the beginning at workshop, it's like, we're special, we're different in Canada, and then as we go through the process, well, maybe we're not so different after all, that there's just a lot of commonality, and that's why I'm excited about the idea of the global sort of community, because we'll be able to learn and share from each other, and like our cohort ourselves, we recognise both our differences, but also our common areas of work.

VERITY FIRTH: And I agree. One of the best things about the Australian experience was, because it's an accreditation and not a ranking, there is actually no competition, right? So you're sitting around with other universities, and you're not actually competing with them. You're wanting to share knowledge and practice and listen to what they have to say. And I think also the pilot context created that collegiality as well, but it was a rare space in higher education, where there was genuine collegiality.

We too often stratify according to levels, like we have a research universities organisation in BC, and to learn from different approaches was extremely valuable as part of the process.

So, Matthew, I'm going to come back to you, and then I'm going to get John to elaborate as well. There are a number of these pilots now around the world. Can you give us a bit of an insight into where the pilots are and what they're doing to adapt the classification to their unique local contexts? And how does the Carnegie Foundation address that adaptation?

MATTHEW JOHNSON: That's a wonderful question, Verity. You know, part of what I love about the internationalisation project is that it has, I believe, followed and remained true to the very notion of partnership that we're talking about, in the sense that its model is to say to international partners, we have one way of thinking about how we might classify institutions as community engaged. Let's start there, but we want to learn from you in our partnership, in our developmental mutually beneficial partnership, how we might actually change our one way and be changed by the partnership, even as you might develop a framework that is referential to the original framework here in the US.

So in that regard, Australia, as you say, has started the process and gone through thinking about what the US design framework would mean, how it would need to be changed, and adapted and changed that framework in significant ways to be relevant in an Australian context. The Canadian cohort is in the midst of doing that adaptation currently to make a framework that is relevant and meaningful in the Canadian context. And what is so fun about it for me is that that has then been iterated back on the US framework and caused us to think differently about our own framework in quite profound ways and inspired new thinking in the US about indigeneity, about the centrality of race and equity in our own framework. And even caused us to rethink positionality of certain questions in the framework, forwarding partnership much more prominently in our own framework, and looking for and thinking about how the framework leads a school through a certain set of questions about itself that we only came to understand as clearly as we did by working with the two cohorts that are doing it internationally.

We're excited that there may, as soon as COVID allows, be a cohort in South Africa and perhaps another one now in Vietnam. And again, part of our excitement there is that we learn and change from the process of partnership. And that is really the joy in the work to do it together.

VERITY FIRTH: And John, I just thought you may also have some insights into the internationalisation of Carnegie and also the community-engaged universities movement.

JOHN SALTMARSH: Yes, I would just pick up on what Matthew was saying. Maybe a couple of things. One is I do want to recognise what I think of as the original pilot, which was a group of 12 campuses in Ireland who went through a similar process that you've gone through in Australia and Canada in 2015-16. At that point, the foundation was not really that interested in this international classification. So this was almost an attempt to convince them that this would be worth doing. I would say we learned a lot from that process that I think is playing out now in the two other pilots.

And I would say probably most importantly was the way that we had to recognise how US-centric the classification was and that it wasn't going to work in other cultural and national contexts and that there were some major differences. So in Ireland, the major differences were around funding sources and the fact of having a state authority and a state authority that also had performance measures that were tied to those funding sources. We don't have that, but that was critical in terms of how you think about change. How do you position this on a campus? And then there were the cultural nuances around language. For example, in Ireland, faculty are referred to as staff. So you have to translate the classification if you're going to make it work. That's just one example.

But also a cultural nuance of a country with deep Catholic heritage also has deep roots in volunteerism. So how do you figure that into a classification scheme and make sure that you honour that in that context? We learned a lot from that process as we went forward, and I think it also convinced the foundation that this was actually something that we needed to pursue.

Going back to the core of your question, I think it fundamentally tells us there is no one classification. It's a classification scheme that's adapted to different contexts, and that's what Matthew was getting at too. And I'm also just going to drop in the chat an article on that Irish pilot that was in the Gateways Journal, if anybody's interested.

VERITY FIRTH: Oh, I'm glad you plugged the Gateways Journal. The Gateways Journal is a joint publication between UTS and Albion College, where Matthew Johnson is president. So please, everybody, go to John's link, but also explore Gateways Journal.

All right. Well, look, I am mindful to keep us to time, because I know it's a long day ahead of us. I really want to thank our panellists. I hope that's been a nice little vignette for people to be introduced to the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification. I don't know if our international guests are probably not around all day, but they've got to go to bed. But we're around all day. So throughout the day, we can answer any questions you'd like around the Australian process and next steps.

To that end, I just want to share quickly — now, of course, it's not going to work properly — I want to share quickly some slides with you, because we do, in fact, have a nice, convenient QR code for people to have a look at. So today, in line with the Talloires Network, we're also launching the Network for Community Engagement and Carnegie Classification in Australia, and we've got a number of universities who've already signed up, our pilot universities as well as some new ones. Melbourne University is on board, Victoria University is on board. It's really exciting to bring people into the network.

And we're launching it today, and the idea — I'm just going to change that. That's the rather boring governance chart, but as you can see, we now have a National Advisory Committee, which is steering this network. We'll have a National Review Panel, which actually looks at running out the Carnegie Classification in Australia. Our plan, however, this year, partly because of all the challenges that are involved with COVID and lockdowns and everything, this year, we're not going to ask you to commence the classification. We're going to ask you to be involved in a community of practice, which we're co-creating with universities to build capacity and best practice for community engagement in Australia, basically to introduce the sector to the Carnegie Classification and run some workshops on how to apply and how to actually make it work from people who've done it themselves through the pilot process.

We're going to be having monthly capacity building, information sessions around the classification framework, but more importantly, actual communities of practice around engaged scholarship — what does that look like in research, what does it look like in teaching and learning — and sharing the knowledge that we've all got and all the great stuff that's happening in universities across Australia.

If you're interested in joining that network, here is a cool QR code. I know most people in Australia are very used to using QR codes. I don't know what it's like in Canada and the US, but QR codes are how we now have to log in when we go and do our supermarket shopping and so forth. Here's a different type of QR code, a QR code that allows you to register for our community of practice. Please do so. We're really excited just to bring people on board and start to build a real movement in Australia around all of this.

Descriptive transcript

It's my pleasure now to be joined by Dr Matthew Johnson, Joanne Currie and Professor John Saltmarsh, all of whom are joining us from North America. We're going to be looking at the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification for universities and how it's been used internationally to celebrate and share good practice of university community engagement from across the sector.

The Carnegie Classification also talks a lot about why engagement takes time and needs to be authentic and genuine.

We're also delighted to be launching the Network for Community Engagement and Carnegie Classification Australia, which includes a collaboratively designed community of practice around engaged scholarship for universities and their partners. We'll tell you a little bit about that later on.

To welcome our panellists: Dr Matthew Johnson is the President of Albion College in the United States and leads the development of the Carnegie Foundation Elective Classifications, including the Elective Classification for Community Engagement and a multi-year international Carnegie Community Engagement Classification project, which involves 26 institutions of higher education across the world. He co-founded and co-directs the National Assessment of Service and Community Engagement and consults for universities globally. He has previously served as Associate Dean of the College of Engaged Scholarship, as well as a Senior Fellow and Executive Director of the Howard R. Swearer Centre for Public Service at Brown University. Welcome Matthew.

Joanne Currie is the Vice President of External Engagement at Simon Fraser University in Canada. She's made a career advancing higher education locally, provincially and nationally and connecting the university with business and community. Her leadership has improved the university's capacity to enhance the social and economic wellbeing of British Columbia communities. Joanne plays a strategic role in engaging with stakeholders and raising the profile of the university. She is the institutional lead for community engagement and accountable for government relations, communications and marketing and ceremonies and events. She co-chairs Universities Canada's Social Impact Committee and has served on the Board of Community Living British Columbia. She's a member of SFU's Aboriginal Reconciliation Council and also the Aboriginal Strategic Initiative Working Group. Welcome Joanne.

John Saltmarsh is Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Leadership in Education in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He publishes widely on community engaged learning, teaching and research and organisational change in higher education. John is a member of the Board of Trustees with College Unbound in Providence, Rhode Island, a Visiting Fellow at Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and a Ludington Centre Visiting Scholar at Albion College. From 2005 to 2016, he served as the Director of the New England Resource Centre for Higher Education. He was also a Director of the National Program on Integrating Service with Academic Study at Campus Compact. Welcome John.

The conversation is starting and the room is building up as I speak. My first question is really a place-creating question and it goes to Matthew Johnson.

So, Matthew Johnson, can you tell us a bit about the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification? What is it and why should it be considered the gold standard for demonstrating university community engagement?

Matthew Johnson: Well, thank you, Verity, very much and thank you for all the participants and my co-panellists for being here in my part of the world evening. The Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement is a designation that the Foundation offers to institutions in the U.S. and soon in international locations that signifies the Foundation's endorsement of those institutions as having made broad and deep commitments within their institutional life to community engagement as defined by the Foundation.

I think part of what makes it the gold standard from my perspective is that definition. It's a clear definition that calls on our institutions to build mutually beneficial, reciprocal relationships with communities and community organisations and community members. In the context of mutually beneficial reciprocal relationships, it calls on us to examine the epistemological foundations, really, of the academy and to acknowledge that knowledge is generated both inside and outside the academy at the same time. And so, in such a relationship, we would be co-creating knowledge.

Once you have a full appreciation of that definition, it's hard for me, at least, to think of a more noble way to pursue the public purposes of our institutions. The second aspect I would say that makes it the gold standard is that it is a self-study process that takes the course of the better part of a year or more, involves often constituencies across the institution, and collects a variety of different types of information to raise questions about the alignment of mission, vision, strategy, the organisation and distribution of resources, and the ways in which the institution is committed to continuous improvement in those partnerships.

So, that's a couple of pieces, I would say, Verity, that make it the gold standard from where I stand.

So, I'm now going to ask Joanne Currie. For those of you who don't know, we have recently had a pilot of the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification in Australia. Ten universities got together to actually sit, apply for the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification in order to work out how it worked in the Australian context and whether we needed to do some adjustments in order to be able to actually roll it out in the Australian context.

Joanne Currie led that process in Canada, so Canadian universities did a similar thing, and we've been really interested watching the Canadians as the Australians have been undergoing it, because there's been some real similarities and differences, and we've been able to talk through the process as we've both gone through this together.

So, Joanne, what were the major reasons motivating institutions in Canada to undertake the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification pilot process?

Joanne Currie: Great. Well, welcome, everyone. I'm really privileged to be with you today, joining you from British Columbia, the unceded territories of Coast Salish people. And today is a significant first statutory holiday on the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation. So, a day for us to reflect on the horrendous legacy of residential schools in Canada.

I have personally been interested in the Carnegie Classification for over 20 years, and I was attending U.S. conferences and I fell into a workshop for institutions looking to complete the process. And I just thought this would be amazing because it goes from the attempt to go from grassroots to institutionalised views, the very deep definition of mutual and reciprocal partnerships. And the idea of looking to improve, measure and work across the institution.

I remember looking at question number one and not being able to successfully complete it, and I thought, OK, maybe we're not there yet. But in 2011, our university came out with a vision and mission to be an engaged university where community engagement was really at the centre of our vision and mission for our research, teaching and community work.

I think with the 16 institutions across Canada, they were excited with the idea. They're all, I think, leaders in community engagement in various ways and very different institutional types: colleges, institutes, research universities, teaching universities, Aboriginal-led universities. But I think we all share the idea of improving our practice and also moving our practice to really accomplish the definition of the deep and mutually reciprocal partnerships.

I think it's also a way for our executive to become more aware because every institution had amazing things happening across it. And I think Matthew refers to this as the thousand flowers blooming. So lots of great work, but lots of passionate people that were burning out. And how can we lift their work? How can we better support it institutionally?

And just finally, it was really to learn from one another. I think part of the excitement was the cohort was going through this together and we've really benefited from the Australian cohort being slightly ahead of us. And Verity's come in at various points. And we just think your work has been brilliant and look forward to a global sort of community around the Carnegie classification.

Thanks, Joanne. Now, John, John sort of alluded to it there, like part of what the Carnegie classification is, is almost an institutional response. Right. They often, let's be honest about it, is often getting the community engagement people a seat at the table with the senior exec to actually say, what are we going to shift in our institution that is going to better support and enable this work?

And I know that you, of course, are part of your expertise is around organisational change and community engagement. So what are the insights that you think universities gain and where are the learnings that happen throughout this Carnegie classification process? And any other thoughts you have around this organisational change issue? How do we get universities to move in this direction in a more holistic way?

John Saltmarsh: Yeah, so I just want to pick up on what Joanne was talking about, too, in terms of so why, why engage in this kind of a process, right? So having done this for multiple cycles in the United States, we know that there is not one reason. There tend to be multiple reasons, sometimes multiple reasons on the same campus. But we know that this sort of piece around institutional self-assessment is really important. Matthew mentioned that. And that may be sort of the key one. It just creates this opportunity to reflect on one's practice and figure out how you're going to improve it. And doing that across an entire institution, we don't really have many opportunities like that. We do it with accreditation, maybe when we do strategic planning. But so it's an opportunity to do that.

Another reason we found is that it creates legitimacy because a lot of these campuses have been doing this for a while, but it hasn't really been legitimised. And so this process can bring that sense of legitimacy for some of our campuses. Also, a sense of accountability, particularly our public institutions, where they can demonstrate accountability to the public good mission of their institution and how they're actually fulfilling that public good.

And then Joanne sort of talked about this, too, it becomes a catalyst for change, right? You can actually use this as a way to try to move the work forward on the campus. And so as a tool, it's really helpful for that.

And Matthew and I always start workshops by saying the point here is not to get the classification. The point here is to do the self-assessment so you can advance the work. That's what you're trying to do.

And then the last thing I would say is just it's about institutional identity. How do we want to be known as an institution? And from the Carnegie Foundation point of view, prior to the elective classification, the way we were known was essentially by this classification scheme that we had nothing to do with, but it put us into these different categories like we could be a research high institution or research less intensive institution or we could be a liberal arts institute. So we would get categorised. This provides the opportunity to say, sure, I'm a master's high institution, but I'm also a community engaged institution. And so it's a way of claiming that identity. And so I would say that's actually really important. Campuses are trying to distinguish themselves. And this is a key piece.

To the latter point of your question around change, I would say the thing that's probably most important to understand here is that what the foundation is really pushing campuses towards is deep cultural change at their institutions. That's really hard work. And when they say deep cultural change, what they mean is change in the academic core of the institution.

And so while campuses can talk about engagement around students going out into the community, and that's really important and we want to see that kind of volunteerism happening, or they might talk about it in terms of their economic relations around procurement and investment and employment. And that's also really important. What Carnegie is trying to get to is that's not the core of who we are as institutions. At the core of our institutions are about generating and disseminating knowledge, is that academic core.

And so at the core of the classification is the question of is this institution committed such that this is central to the work of faculty and central to student learning? And if it isn't, it's really hard to get classified. We hope you're doing all of those other things I mentioned. But what the foundation is really looking at is that academic core. That is also the core culture of the institution. And shifting that culture to those kinds of commitments can be very challenging. I think we all know that. But that's also where the deep change takes place, that deep and pervasive change that Matthew was talking about. And we could talk more about that, but that's sort of the key.

I'm going to drop an article in chat that Matthew and I did a little less than a year ago, which really tries to get at these sort of cultural change pieces.

I think that's really interesting because the concept, the reason it's such a deep cultural change is it almost goes against the very way universities, at least in the sort of Western tradition, have been run for centuries, right, an expert model based on the expertise of the academy and shifting to a, as Matthew said, co-creation of knowledge model where there is equal knowledge on both sides is a pretty fundamental shift.

Matthew, have you seen some really good examples of this? Where there has been that shift?

Matthew Johnson: Oh, yes. John and I have seen, particularly now that there have been successive cycles in the US, many campuses who in their first application will be in a very nascent state and they talk about the right things that need to be done, but they haven't quite done them yet. They haven't quite figured out how to quality control for partnerships or how to do assessment related to student learning in engaged learning settings. Or perhaps they still are using two or three different definitions across the institution and haven't yet come together around a solid definition that is reflective of the commitments that are required in the classification's formal definition.

And then two years later or five years later, they come back for a second time to apply and now they've operationalised a single definition. They have a clear assessment strategy. They've organised either a centre or some other organisational structure to begin the deep cultural change that John is talking about. And perhaps they come back several years hence for a reclassification because perhaps they've earned it the second time. And now we see not only those initial structures and initial commitments, but we see changes being made based on insights from the continuous improvement process they have embedded in their institutional culture. So they're reporting on data they've collected and how that's influenced their practice of community engagement across the institution and led to real changes in the way that they approach the work.

So that kind of developmental pathway, I think, is present and common across the US experience where we've had multiple cycles of classification.

Joanne, so again, to sort of give some context, Canada was off running the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification as a pilot. We were doing it in Australia. And our job was to actually say, OK, this is good, this applies to us, this actually doesn't apply to us, or this is where we actually need to enhance the Canadian version of the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification to speak more directly to an issue that is pertinent to our universities.

What were some of those that happened, Joanne, in the Canadian experience? Where did you feel there needed to be additions made to the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification for the Canadian context?

Joanne Currie: The most significant area was on Indigenous and work with Indigenous communities and also Indigenous knowledge and recognising that. And well, John and Matthew have talked about sort of the deep and the cultural change. And you mentioned, Verity, that kind of expert view and recognising community knowledge. And this definition, it sounds great, but to actually really enact and support it so it is mutually beneficial is really important. So that was probably the biggest area.

We also, I know there was additions around justice and equity. My sense was Carnegie was already going there because this is not isolated to Canada. And I certainly saw it in Australia's cohort as well, because I think that's just more of a global movement. As to some extent, Indigenous is, and I know that's important for Australia as well.

I guess what I have to say, though, is at the beginning at workshop, it's like we're special, we're different in Canada. And then as we go through the process, well, maybe we're not so different after all, that there's just a lot of commonality. And that's why I'm excited about the idea of the global sort of community, because we'll be able to learn and share from each other. And like our cohort ourselves, we recognise both our differences, but also our common areas of work.

Yes, and I agree. One of the best things about the Australian experience was because it's an accreditation and not a ranking, there is actually no competition. So you're sitting around with other universities and you're not actually competing with them. You're wanting to share knowledge and practice and listen to what they have to say. And I think also the pilot context created that collegiality as well. But it was a rare space in higher education where there was genuine collegiality.

Yeah, absolutely. We too often stratify according to levels. Like we have a research universities organisation in BC and to learn from different approaches was extremely valuable as part of the process.

So, Matthew, I'm going to come back to you and then I'm going to get John to elaborate as well. There's a number of these pilots now around the world, so can you give us a bit of an insight into where the pilots are and what they're doing to adapt the classification to their unique local contexts and how does the Carnegie Foundation address that adaptation?

Matthew Johnson: Oh, that's a wonderful question, Verity. You know, part of what I love about the internationalisation project is that it has, I believe, followed and remained true to the very notion of partnership that we're talking about in the sense that its model is to say to international partners, we have one way of thinking about how we might classify institutions as community engaged. Let's start there. But we want to learn from you in our partnership, in our developmental, mutually beneficial partnership, how we might actually change our one way and be changed by the partnership, even as you might develop a framework that is referential to the original framework here in the US.

So in that regard, Australia, as you say, has started the process and gone through thinking about what the US design framework would mean, how it would need to be changed and adapted and changed that framework in significant ways to be relevant in an Australian context. The Canadian cohort is in the midst of doing that adaptation currently to make a framework that is relevant and meaningful in the Canadian context.

And what is so fun about it for me is that that has then been iterated back on the US framework and caused us to think differently about our own framework in quite profound ways and inspired new thinking in the US about indigeneity, about the centrality of race and equity in our own framework, and even caused us to rethink positionality of certain questions in the framework, forwarding partnership much more prominently in our own framework and looking for and thinking about how the framework leads a school through a certain set of questions about itself that we only came to understand as clearly as we did by working with the two cohorts that are doing it internationally.

We're excited that there may, as soon as COVID allows, be a cohort in South Africa and perhaps another one now in Vietnam. And again, part of our excitement there is that we learn and change from the process of partnership, and that is really the joy in the work to do it together.

And John, I just thought you may also have some insights into sort of the internationalisation of Carnegie and also the community-engaged universities movement.

John Saltmarsh: Yeah, I would just pick up on what Matthew was saying, maybe a couple of things. One is I do want to recognise sort of what I think of as the original pilot, which was a group of 12 campuses in Ireland who went through a similar process that you've gone through in Australia and Canada in 2015-16. At that point, the foundation was not really that interested in this international classification. So this was almost an attempt to convince them that this would be worth doing.

I would say we learned a lot from that process that I think is playing out now in the two other pilots. And I would say probably most importantly was the way that we had to recognise how US-centric the classification was and that it wasn't going to work in other cultural and national contexts and that there were some major differences.

So in Ireland, major differences were around funding sources and the fact of having a state authority and a state authority that also had performance measures that were tied to those funding sources. We don't have that, but that was critical in terms of how you think about change. How do you position this on a campus?

And then there were the cultural nuances around language. And so just to give you an example, in Ireland, faculty are referred to as staff. And so you've got to translate the classification then if you're going to make it work. That's just one example.

But also a cultural nuance of a country with deep Catholic heritage also has deep roots in volunteerism. And so how do you figure that into the classification scheme and to make sure that you honour that in that context?

So we learned a lot from that process as we went forward. And I think it also convinced the foundation that this was actually something that we needed to pursue.

But going back to the core of your question, I think it fundamentally tells us there is no one classification. It's a classification scheme that's adapted to different contexts. And that's what Matthew was getting at, too.

And I'm also just going to drop in the chat an article on that Irish pilot that was in The Gateways Journal, if anybody's interested.

Oh, I'm glad you plugged The Gateways Journal. The Gateways Journal is a joint publication between UTS and Albion College, where Matthew Johnson is president. So please, everybody, go to John's link, but also explore Gateways Journal.

All right. Well, look, I am mindful to keep us to time because I know it's a long day ahead of us. I really want to thank our panellists. I hope that's been a nice little vignette for people to be introduced to the Carnegie Community Engagement classification.

We're around all day. I don't know if our international guests are probably not around all day, but they've got to go to bed. But we're around all day. So throughout the day, we can answer any questions you like around the Australian process and next steps.

To that end, I just want to share quickly. Now, of course, it's not going to work properly. I want to share quickly some slides with you because we do, in fact, have a nice convenient QR code for people to have a look at.

So today, in line with the Talloires Network, we're also launching the Network for Community Engagement and Carnegie Classification in Australia. And we've got a number of universities who've already signed up, our pilot universities, as well as some new ones. Melbourne University is on board. Victoria University is on board. It's really exciting to bring people into the network. And we're launching it today.

And the idea, this is the, I'm just going to change that, that's the rather boring governance chart. But as you can see, we now have a National Advisory Committee, which is steering this network. We'll have a National Review Panel, which actually looks at running out the Carnegie Classification in Australia.

Our plan, however, this year, partly because of all the challenges that are involved with COVID and lockdowns and everything, this year, we're not going to ask you to commence the classification. We're going to ask you to be involved in a community of practice, which we're co-creating with universities to build capacity and best practice for community engagement in Australia, basically to introduce the sector to the Carnegie Classification and run some workshops on how to apply and how to actually make it work from people who've done it themselves through the pilot process.

We're going to be having monthly capacity building, information sessions around the classification framework, but more importantly, actual communities of practice around engaged engagement, full stop. So, engaged scholarship, what does that look like in research? What does it look like in teaching and learning? And sharing the knowledge that we've all got and all the great stuff that's happening in universities across Australia.

So, if you're interested in joining that network, here is a cool QR code. And I know most people in Australia are very used to using QR codes. I don't know what it's like in Canada and the US, but QR codes is how we now have to log in when we go and do our supermarket shopping and so forth. Here's a different type of QR code, a QR code that allows you to register for our community of practice. So, please do so. We're really excited just to bring people on board and start to build a real movement in Australia around all of this.

Descriptive transcript

It's my pleasure now to be joined by Dr Matthew Johnson, Joanne Currie and Professor John Saltmarsh, all of whom are joining us from North America. We're going to be looking at the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification for universities and how it's been used internationally to celebrate and share good practice of university community engagement from across the sector.

The Carnegie Classification also talks a lot about why engagement takes time and needs to be authentic and genuine. We're also delighted to be launching the Network for Community Engagement and Carnegie Classification Australia, which includes a collaboratively designed community of practice around engaged scholarship for universities and their partners. We'll tell you a little bit about that later on.

So, to welcome our panellists. Dr Matthew Johnson is the President of Albion College in the United States and leads the development of the Carnegie Foundation Elective Classifications, including the Elective Classification for Community Engagement and a multi-year international Carnegie Community Engagement Classification project, which involves 26 institutions of higher education across the world. He co-founded and co-directs the National Assessment of Service and Community Engagement and consults for universities globally. He has previously served as Associate Dean of the College of Engaged Scholarship, as well as a Senior Fellow and Executive Director of the Howard R. Swearer Centre for Public Service at Brown University. Welcome, Matthew.

Joanne Currie is the Vice President of External Engagement at Simon Fraser University in Canada. She's made a career advancing higher education locally, provincially and nationally, and connecting the university with business and community. Her leadership has improved the university's capacity to enhance the social and economic wellbeing of British Columbia communities. Joanne plays a strategic role in engaging with stakeholders and raising the profile of the university. She is the institutional lead for community engagement and accountable for government relations, communications and marketing, and ceremonies and events. She co-chairs Universities Canada's Social Impact Committee and has served on the Board of Community Living British Columbia. She's a member of SFU's Aboriginal Reconciliation Council and also the Aboriginal Strategic Initiative Working Group. Welcome, Joanne.

John Saltmarsh is Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Leadership in Education in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He publishes widely on community engaged learning, teaching and research, and organisational change in higher education. John is a member of the Board of Trustees with College Unbound in Providence, Rhode Island, a Visiting Fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and a Ludington Centre Visiting Scholar at Albion College. From 2005 to 2016, he served as the Director of the New England Resource Centre for Higher Education. He was also a Director of the National Program on Integrating Service with Academic Study at Campus Compact. Welcome, John.

So, this is good. The conversation is starting and the room is building up as I speak. My first question is really a place-creating question and it goes to Matthew Johnson. Matthew, can you tell us a bit about the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification? What is it and why should it be considered the gold standard for demonstrating university community engagement?

MATTHEW JOHNSON: Well, thank you, Verity, very much and thank you for all the participants and my co-panellists for being here in my part of the world evening. The Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement is a designation that the Foundation offers to institutions in the US and soon in international locations that signifies the Foundation's endorsement of those institutions as having made broad and deep commitments within their institutional life to community engagement as defined by the Foundation.

I think part of what makes it the gold standard from my perspective is that definition. It's a clear definition that calls on our institutions to build mutually beneficial, reciprocal relationships with communities, community organisations and community members. In the context of mutually beneficial reciprocal relationships, it calls on us to examine the epistemological foundations of the academy and to acknowledge that knowledge is generated both inside and outside the academy at the same time.

And so, in such a relationship, we would be co-creating knowledge. Once you have a full appreciation of that definition, it's hard for me, at least, to think of a more noble way to pursue the public purposes of our institutions. The second aspect I would say that makes it the gold standard is that it is a self-study process that takes the course of the better part of a year or more, involves often constituencies across the institution, and collects a variety of different types of information to raise questions about the alignment of mission, vision, strategy, the organisation and distribution of resources, and the ways in which the institution is committed to continuous improvement in those partnerships.

So, that's a couple of pieces, I would say, Verity, that make it the gold standard from where I stand.

VERITY: So, I'm now going to ask Joanne Currie. For those of you who don't know, we have recently had a pilot of the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification in Australia. Ten universities got together to actually sit, apply for the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification in order to work out how it worked in the Australian context and whether we needed to do some adjustments in order to be able to actually roll it out in the Australian context.

Joanne Currie led that process in Canada, so Canadian universities did a similar thing, and we've been really interested watching the Canadians as the Australians have been undergoing it, because there's been some real similarities and differences, and we've been able to talk through the process as we've both gone through this together. Joanne, what were the major reasons motivating institutions in Canada to undertake the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification pilot process?

JOANNE CURRIE: Great. Well, welcome, everyone. I'm really privileged to be with you today, joining you from British Columbia, the unceded territories of Coast Salish people. And today is a significant first statutory holiday on the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation. So, a day for us to reflect on the horrendous legacy of residential schools in Canada. I have personally been interested in the Carnegie Classification for over 20 years, and I was attending US conferences and I fell into a workshop for institutions looking to complete the process. I just thought this would be amazing because it goes from the attempt to go from grassroots to institutionalised views, the very deep definition of mutual and reciprocal partnerships, and the idea of looking to improve, measure and work across the institution.

I remember looking at question number one and not being able to successfully complete it, and I thought, OK, maybe we're not there yet. But in 2011, our university came out with a vision and mission to be an engaged university where community engagement was really at the centre of our vision and mission for our research, teaching and community work. I think with the 16 institutions across Canada, they were excited with the idea. They're all leaders in community engagement in various ways and very different institutional types: colleges, institutes, research universities, teaching universities, Aboriginal-led universities.

But I think we all share the idea of improving our practice and also moving our practice to really accomplish the definition of the deep and mutually reciprocal partnerships. I think it's also a way for our executive to become more aware because every institution had amazing things happening across it. And I think Matthew refers to this as the thousand flowers blooming. So lots of great work, but lots of passionate people that were burning out. How can we lift their work? How can we better support it institutionally?

And just finally, it was really to learn from one another. I think part of the excitement was the cohort was going through this together and we've really benefited from the Australian cohort being slightly ahead of us. Verity's come in at various points. We just think your work has been brilliant and look forward to a global sort of community around the Carnegie classification.

VERITY: Thanks, Joanne. Now, John, John sort of alluded to it there, like part of what the Carnegie classification is, is almost an institutional response. Let's be honest about it, it's often getting the community engagement people a seat at the table with the senior exec to actually say, what are we going to shift in our institution that is going to better support and enable this work? And I know that you, of course, are part of your expertise is around organisational change and community engagement. So what are the insights that you think universities gain and where are the learnings that happen throughout this Carnegie classification process? And any other thoughts you have around this organisational change issue? How do we get universities to move in this direction in a more holistic way?

JOHN SALTMARSH: Well, that's an easy one. Yeah, so I just want to pick up on what Joanne was talking about, too, in terms of why engage in this kind of a process, right? Having done this for multiple cycles in the United States, we know that there is not one reason. There tend to be multiple reasons, sometimes multiple reasons on the same campus. But we know that this sort of piece around institutional self-assessment is really important. Matthew mentioned that. And that may be sort of the key one. It just creates this opportunity to reflect on one's practice and figure out how you're going to improve it. And doing that across an entire institution, we don't really have many opportunities like that. We do it with accreditation, maybe when we do strategic planning, but so it's an opportunity to do that.

Another reason we found is that it creates legitimacy because a lot of these campuses have been doing this for a while, but it hasn't really been legitimised. And so this process can bring that sense of legitimacy for some of our campuses. Also, a sense of accountability, particularly our public institutions, where they can demonstrate accountability to the public good mission of their institution and how they're actually fulfilling that public good. And then Joanne sort of talked about this, too, it becomes a catalyst for change, right? You can actually use this as a way to try to move the work forward on the campus. And so as a tool, it's really helpful for that.

Matthew and I always start workshops by saying the point here is not to get the classification. The point here is to do the self-assessment so you can advance the work. That's what you're trying to do. And then the last thing I would say is just it's about institutional identity. How do we want to be known as an institution? And from the Carnegie Foundation point of view, prior to the elective classification, the way we were known was essentially by this classification scheme that we had nothing to do with, but it put us into these different categories like we could be a research high institution or research less intensive institution or we could be a liberal arts institute. So we would get categorised.

This provides the opportunity to say, sure, I'm a master's high institution, but I'm also a community engaged institution. And so it's a way of claiming that identity. And so I would say that's actually really important. Campuses are trying to distinguish themselves. And this is a key piece. To the latter point of your question around change, I would say the thing that's probably most important to understand here is that what the foundation is really pushing campuses towards is deep cultural change at their institutions. That's really hard work. And when they say deep cultural change, what they mean is change in the academic core of the institution.

And so while campuses can talk about engagement around students going out into the community, and that's really important and we want to see that kind of volunteerism happening, or they might talk about it in terms of their economic relations around procurement and investment and employment. And that's also really important. What Carnegie is trying to get to is that's not the core of who we are as institutions. At the core of our institutions are about generating and disseminating knowledge—it's that academic core. And so at the core of the classification is the question of: is this institution committed such that this is central to the work of faculty and central to student learning? And if it isn't, it's really hard to get classified. We hope you're doing all of those other things I mentioned, but what the foundation is really looking at is that academic core. That is also the core culture of the institution. And shifting that culture to those kinds of commitments can be very challenging. I think we all know that. But that's also where the deep change takes place, that deep and pervasive change that Matthew was talking about.

We could talk more about that, but that's sort of the key. I'm going to drop an article in chat that Matthew and I did a little less than a year ago, which really tries to get at these sort of cultural change pieces.

VERITY: I think that's really interesting because the concept, the reason it's such a deep cultural change is it almost goes against the very way universities, at least in the sort of Western tradition, have been run for centuries—an expert model based on the expertise of the academy—and shifting to a, as Matthew said, co-creation of knowledge model where there is equal knowledge on both sides is a pretty fundamental shift. Matthew, have you seen some really good examples of this, where there has been that shift?

MATTHEW JOHNSON: Oh, yes. You know, John and I have seen, particularly now that there have been successive cycles in the US, many campuses who in their first application will be in a very nascent state and they talk about the right things that need to be done, but they haven't quite done them yet. They haven't quite figured out how to quality control for partnerships or how to do assessment related to student learning in engaged learning settings. Or perhaps they still are using two or three different definitions across the institution and haven't yet come together around a solid definition that is reflective of the commitments that are required in the classification's formal definition.

And then two years later or five years later, they come back for a second time to apply and now they've operationalised a single definition. They have a clear assessment strategy. They've organised either a centre or some other organisational structure to begin the deep cultural change that John is talking about. And perhaps they come back several years hence for a reclassification because perhaps they've earned it the second time. And now we see not only those initial structures and initial commitments, but we see changes being made based on insights from the continuous improvement process they have embedded in their institutional culture. So they're reporting on data they've collected and how that's influenced their practice of community engagement across the institution and led to real changes in the way that they approach the work.

So that kind of developmental pathway, I think, is present and common across the US experience where we've had multiple cycles of classification.

VERITY: Joanne, so again, to sort of give some context, Canada was off running the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification as a pilot. We were doing it in Australia. Our job was to actually say, OK, this is good, this applies to us, this actually doesn't apply to us, or this is where we actually need to enhance the Canadian version of the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification to speak more directly to an issue that is pertinent to our universities. What were some of those that happened, Joanne, in the Canadian experience? Where did you feel there needed to be additions made to the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification for the Canadian context?

JOANNE CURRIE: The most significant area was on Indigenous and work with Indigenous communities and also Indigenous knowledge and recognising that. While John and Matthew have talked about the deep and the cultural change, and you mentioned, Verity, that kind of expert view and recognising community knowledge, this definition, it sounds great, but to actually really enact and support it so it is mutually beneficial is really important. So that was probably the biggest area.

We also—I know there were additions around justice and equity. My sense was Carnegie was already going there because this is not isolated to Canada. And I certainly saw it in Australia's cohort as well, because I think that's just more of a global movement, as to some extent, Indigenous is, and I know that's important for Australia as well.

I guess what I have to say, though, is at the beginning at workshop, it's like we're special, we're different in Canada. And then as we go through the process, well, maybe we're not so different after all, that there's just a lot of commonality. And that's why I'm excited about the idea of the global sort of community, because we'll be able to learn and share from each other. And like our cohort ourselves, we recognise both our differences, but also our common areas of work.

VERITY: Yeah, and I agree. One of the best things about the Australian experience was because it's an accreditation and not a ranking, there is actually no competition. So you're sitting around with other universities and you're not actually competing with them. You're wanting to share knowledge and practice and listen to what they have to say. And I think also the pilot context created that collegiality as well. But it was a rare space in higher education where there was genuine collegiality.

JOANNE CURRIE: Yeah, absolutely. We too often stratify according to levels. Like we have a research universities organisation in BC and to learn from different approaches was extremely valuable as part of the process.

VERITY: So, Matthew, I'm going to come back to you and then I'm going to get John to elaborate as well. There's a number of these pilots now around the world, so can you give us a bit of an insight into where the pilots are and what they're doing to adapt the classification to their unique local contexts and how does the Carnegie Foundation address that adaptation?

MATTHEW JOHNSON: Oh, that's a wonderful question, Verity. You know, part of what I love about the internationalisation project is that it has, I believe, followed and remained true to the very notion of partnership that we're talking about in the sense that its model is to say to international partners, we have one way of thinking about how we might classify institutions as community engaged. Let's start there. But we want to learn from you in our partnership, in our developmental, mutually beneficial partnership, how we might actually change our one way and be changed by the partnership, even as you might develop a framework that is referential to the original framework here in the US.

So in that regard, Australia, as you say, has started the process and gone through thinking about what the US design framework would mean, how it would need to be changed and adapted and changed that framework in significant ways to be relevant in an Australian context. The Canadian cohort is in the midst of doing that adaptation currently to make a framework that is relevant and meaningful in the Canadian context. And what is so fun about it for me is that that has then been iterated back on the US framework and caused us to think differently about our own framework in quite profound ways and inspired new thinking in the US about indigeneity, about the centrality of race and equity in our own framework, and even caused us to rethink positionality of certain questions in the framework, forwarding partnership much more prominently in our own framework and looking for and thinking about how the framework leads a school through a certain set of questions about itself that we only came to understand as clearly as we did by working with the two cohorts that are doing it internationally.

We're excited that there may, as soon as COVID allows, be a cohort in South Africa and perhaps another one now in Vietnam. And again, part of our excitement there is that we learn and change from the process of partnership, and that is really the joy in the work—to do it together.

VERITY: And John, I just thought you may also have some insights into sort of the internationalisation of Carnegie and also the community-engaged universities movement.

JOHN SALTMARSH: Yeah, I would just pick up on what Matthew was saying, maybe a couple of things. One is I do want to recognise what I think of as the original pilot, which was a group of 12 campuses in Ireland who went through a similar process that you've gone through in Australia and Canada in 2015–16. At that point, the foundation was not really that interested in this international classification. So this was almost an attempt to convince them that this would be worth doing. I would say we learned a lot from that process that I think is playing out now in the two other pilots.

And I would say probably most importantly was the way that we had to recognise how US-centric the classification was and that it wasn't going to work in other cultural and national contexts and that there were some major differences. So in Ireland, major differences were around funding sources and the fact of having a state authority and a state authority that also had performance measures that were tied to those funding sources. We don't have that, but that was critical in terms of how you think about change. How do you position this on a campus?

And then there were the cultural nuances around language. Just to give you an example, in Ireland, faculty are referred to as staff. And so you've got to translate the classification then if you're going to make it work. That's just one example. But also a cultural nuance of a country with deep Catholic heritage also has deep roots in volunteerism. And so how do you figure that into the classification scheme and to make sure that you honour that in that context?

So we learned a lot from that process as we went forward. And I think it also convinced the foundation that this was actually something that we needed to pursue. But going back to the core of your question, I think it fundamentally tells us there is no one classification. It's a classification scheme that's adapted to different contexts. And that's what Matthew was getting at, too.

And I'm also just going to drop in the chat an article on that Irish pilot that was in The Gateways Journal, if anybody's interested.

VERITY: Oh, I'm glad you plugged The Gateways Journal. The Gateways Journal is a joint publication between UTS and Albion College, where Matthew Johnson is president. So please, everybody, go to John's link, but also explore Gateways Journal.

All right. Well, look, I am mindful to keep us to time because I know it's a long day ahead of us. I really want to thank our panellists. I hope that's been a nice little vignette for people to be introduced to the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification. We're around all day. I don't know if our international guests are—probably not around all day, they've got to go to bed—but we're around all day. So throughout the day, we can answer any questions you like around the Australian process and next steps.

To that end, I just want to share quickly—now, of course, it's not going to work properly—I want to share quickly some slides with you because we do, in fact, have a nice convenient QR code for people to have a look at. So today, in line with the Talloires Network, we're also launching the Network for Community Engagement and Carnegie Classification in Australia. We've got a number of universities who've already signed up, our pilot universities, as well as some new ones. Melbourne University is on board. Victoria University is on board. It's really exciting to bring people into the network.

And we're launching it today. The idea—I'm just going to change that, that's the rather boring governance chart—but as you can see, we now have a National Advisory Committee, which is steering this network. We'll have a National Review Panel, which actually looks at running out the Carnegie Classification in Australia. Our plan, however, this year, partly because of all the challenges that are involved with COVID and lockdowns and everything, this year, we're not going to ask you to commence the classification. We're going to ask you to be involved in a community of practice, which we're co-creating with universities to build capacity and best practice for community engagement in Australia, basically to introduce the sector to the Carnegie Classification and run some workshops on how to apply and how to actually make it work from people who've done it themselves through the pilot process.

We're going to be having monthly capacity-building information sessions around the classification framework, but more importantly, actual communities of practice around engaged engagement, full stop. So, engaged scholarship—what does that look like in research? What does it look like in teaching and learning? And sharing the knowledge that we've all got and all the great stuff that's happening in universities across Australia.

So, if you're interested in joining that network, here is a cool QR code. And I know most people in Australia are very used to using QR codes. I don't know what it's like in Canada and the US, but QR codes is how we now have to log in when we go and do our supermarket shopping and so forth. Here's a different type of QR code—a QR code that allows you to register for our community of practice. So, please do so. We're really excited just to bring people on board and start to build a real movement in Australia around all of this.