Defining and Assessing Social Responsibility

On Friday at the AAC&U conference “Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility: Deepening Student and Campus Commitments,” five faculty and staff members from Minneapolis Community and Technical College presented about how – for the past seven years – they’ve used an assessment model at the college that measures general education outcomes and social responsibility among students at MCTC.

What struck me about this presentation is that MCTC seems to have developed a strong and usable definition of “social responsibility” that can be applied collegewide. Throughout the conference, I’d been wondering exactly how this could be defined, and worrying that it means so many things to so many different people that it would be hard to compare or share programs or ideas. MCTC’s definition has five components, all related to their blanket definition of “social responsibility.”

Social Responsibility: Ability and commitment to contribute to one’s community as a responsible citizen.

• Demonstrates an awareness of the individual and institutional dynamics of unequal power relations among groups in contemporary society.
• Recognizes, analyzes and articulates one’s own beliefs and behaviors regarding racism, sexism and other forms of social inequality.
• Recognizes and values human diversity.
• Identifies a social issue and demonstrates an appropriate informed response.
• Identifies and demonstrates ways to exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

Given this clear and cogent definition (and it has measurable components, too!), I think higher education institutions should band together and create a universal definition that can be applied throughout the country.

Here’s a link to plenty of documents and information about MCTC’s focus and their program.