Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part series evaluating DukeEngage since its inception in 2007. Today’s article focuses on the DukeEngage experience for students. In Part 2, The Chronicle will analyze the relationship between DukeEngage and the Duke brand. In Part 3, The Chronicle will illustrate critiques of the program and discuss DukeEngage’s responsive strategic plan.
As DukeEngage enters its sixth summer, the University’s signature civic engagement program is still encountering challenges as it attempts to bring its ambitious mission to fruition.
Since its creation, the heralded program has sent almost 2,000 students around the world and gives a summer experience to roughly 5 percent of the Duke student body every year. One of the foremost challenges for the program, which has an annual budget of more than $4 million, is striking a balance between service to the community and ensuring that students have a meaningful and positive experience.
The program’s official mission is listed in the recently released DukeEngage 2017 Strategic Plan: “DukeEngage empowers students to address critical human needs through immersive service, in the process transforming students, advancing the University’s educational mission, and providing meaningful assistance to communities in the U.S. and abroad.”
DukeEngage first assesses community need when considering a proposal for a program, Director Eric Mlyn said. “You can’t disentangle responding to a need in the community from student experience,” he said.
Senior Emily McGinty, who interned at a literacy project in Hot Springs, N.C. during summer 2010, believes the program’s goal is more student-oriented. While McGinty was an intern, the project was under review to become a DukeEngage program. DukeEngage administrators, including Mlyn, visited Hot Springs and spoke with McGinty and the other interns about their experience.
McGinty said she was surprised when the majority of questions she was asked revolved around her personal experience instead of the work or the relationship with the community. DukeEngage administrators asked McGinty and the other interns questions such as, “Do you feel entertained here?” and “Do you feel that there are things to do and places to go?”
“I was surprised that they cared that we had so little access to nightlife,” McGinty said. “We all laughed, and said, ‘What do you mean?’ They said, ‘We’re worried because there’s not enough nightlife in this area.’”
Mlyn acknowledged issues of student safety and assessing risk when developing a program.
“If I could do one thing for DukeEngage, I would ban alcohol,” Mlyn said. “Our incidents are almost always students who lose judgment and let down their guard a little bit.”
Still, McGinty said she was skeptical of the idea that DukeEngage prioritizes a community’s needs over a student’s experience. DukeEngage administrators do survey community partners to assess the value of student volunteers in the region. In 2011, 78 percent of community partners said they found their DukeEngage students had a “great impact” on the community.
Based on DukeEngage’s evaluation techniques, it appears that the program is successful in delivering a positive student experience. More than 75 percent of students found their DukeEngage experience to have a “great impact” on them, according to data compiled from student surveys in 2011. Administrators noted that survey questions are not consistent on a year-to-year basis, making it difficult to discern the definition of “great impact.”
Imbalanced interest
DukeEngage provides a summer experience to a group of students that is not entirely representative of Duke’s student body. After five summers, the program still struggles with attracting an equal share of men and women. Duke’s student body is usually equally split between male and female students—the Class of 2012 was composed of exactly 50 percent men and 50 percent women. In summer 2012, however, 62.4 percent of students admitted to DukeEngage were women and 37.6 percent were men, according to data from Jacki Purtell, DukeEngage evaluation and assessment coordinator. The DukeEngage office declined to provide gender breakdowns of applicant pools in the last five years.
This gender imbalance is widespread in civic engagement, Mlyn said, adding that DukeEngage has reached out to male students through many channels, including focused outreach to fraternities.
“Some fraction of men at institutions like Duke don’t see DukeEngage experiences as being instrumental toward their career goals,” Mlyn wrote in an email April 5.
DukeEngage declined to provide other data, including the number of applicants to each program, the number of applicants in each class, and the race breakdown of who participates in and applies to DukeEngage.
Baishakhi Taylor, program director for DukeEngage India-Kolkata and an academic dean in the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, echoed that sentiment, suggesting that it is possible that women are more attracted to programs like hers that require students to take on a teaching and caregiving role. The Kolkata program in particular attracts a predominantly female applicant pool—the number of female applicants to the Kolkata program generally outnumbers the male applicants about 6 to 1, she said.
“Why are we getting more women in the University’s largest civic engagement program? There’s not any difference in outreach or marketing,” Taylor said.
Although Mlyn declined to provide numbers on greek and independent students participating in DukeEngage, in remarks at the 2011 Greek Convocation he noted that greek men are particularly underrepresented among DukeEngage participants.
The challenge of coming home
Among DukeEngage participants, differences in the type of experience present another challenge for the program. There are 39 international and domestic projects on the 2013 DukeEngage roster, and there are 430 students participating this year. The scope of the program is a strength in terms of its impact on Duke’s culture but also a challenge in ensuring that each experience is “substantive and meaningful,” Mlyn said.
DukeEngage prepares its students through the DukeEngage Academy—a two day workshop that primes program participants with certain skills, such as blogging, cultural competency and general safety. The majority of sessions treat all program participants as equals with little preparation catered to a student’s specific program, which, for some students, provokes issues with expectations.
“I was prepared for a glorified educative vacation, I wasn’t prepared for an intense emotional experience,” said junior Flora Muglia, a 2012 DukeEngage Jordan participant.
Being in Jordan was challenging for Muglia—her homestay dad frequently picked on her, and she experienced lapses in feeling safe due to her gender. Reintegration back into Duke culture can also be problematic as some students do not feel prepared for the return home.
“I came home feeling very overwhelmed and critical of the way people treated natural resources,” Muglia said, noting that she sought counseling after her DukeEngage experience. “People didn’t understand me. I felt like an alien in my homeland.”
A common trajectory for junior DukeEngage participants, like Muglia, is to go straight from their engagement project to a semester abroad. Reintegration infrastructure for these students does not yet exist, Mlyn said.
“Coming back is very challenging in terms of integrating back into your own culture and saying goodbye to the intensity of your experience,” he said, noting that the ways his office tries to reintegrate students are through its student handbook, DukeEngage Academy and post-summer reunions.
Inequities across experiences
Not all students encounter the difficulties that Muglia faced and, in fact, many students have a transformative experience through DukeEngage. This raises, however, another fundamental challenge of the program—how to better equalize the experiences of students across so many different programs, whether international or domestic.
Senior Molly Superfine, a member of the DukeEngage student advisory board, acknowledged that every student may not have the same level of experience. As a participant in DukeEngage Colombia 2010, Superfine had a near-ideal DukeEngage experience.
“We were friends with students at the local university, engaged in their school and social life,” Superfine said. “Seeing street art in Medellín turned me on to my thesis topic.”
DukeEngage administrators want students to get this kind of synthesis and application to their education out of their experience, though it does not always happen. Institutional and curricular changes are being developed to better address this problem and help bring some equity across DukeEngage experiences.
“From talking to students, we need to help students connect their DukeEngage experience with the overall arc of their educational trajectory,” said Steve Nowicki, dean and vice provost for undergraduate education. “For some, this works very well, for others the connections are harder to make. I think a thoughtful analysis of how the curriculum can and can’t connect with DukeEngage is what we need to do.”
The reporter participated in DukeEngage South Africa-Durban 2012.
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