Rethinking Metrics for Community-Engaged Scholarship: Introducing the CEnTR*IMPACT Framework

Abstract

Most metrics in higher education were built for market-driven goals, not the relational, context-dependent work of community-engaged scholarship. In this session, Dr. Jeremy Price introduces CEnTR*IMPACT, a new metrics framework designed to honor the full complexity of community-engaged research: the relationships, the labor, the context, and the community. Drawing on Neil Postman’s constructive approach to change and grounded in a humanizing stance, Dr. Price presents metrics developed with support from the CUMU-Collaboratory Fellowship that resist oversimplification without sacrificing communicability. These tools are designed to speak across audiences from funders and administrators to colleagues and the communities at the center of this work, while remaining clear-eyed about their own limitations.