The Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning has two recent publications on incorporating community engaged scholarship in promotion and tenure. These are excellent reads by leaders in this movement. Review the abstracts and access them below.
Janke, E. & Quan, M. & Jenkins, I. & Saltmarsh, J., (2023) “We’re Talking About Process: The Primacy of Relationship and Epistemology in Defining Community-engaged Scholarship in Promotion and Tenure Policy”, Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning 29(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/
Abstract
This study examines how community-engaged scholarship (CES) was defined and described in promotion and tenure policies at a university. Examining 67 policies across university, unit and department levels, findings show meaningful variability with regards to whether and how CES was defined or described. Analysis categorizes the types of descriptions used as outputs, outcomes, and/or processes related to or enacting CES. We address the importance of not just naming, but fully describing the core values of CES; the importance of process as a definitional characteristics, and relationships and epistemology in particular; and, the importance of continuing to explicate the interconnectivity and distinctions between justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and CES.
Janke, E. & Jenkins, I. & Quan, M. & Saltmarsh, J., (2023) Persistence and Proliferation: Integrating Community-Engaged Scholarship into 59 Departments, 7 Units, and 1 University Academic Promotion and Tenure Policies, Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning 29(1). doi: https://doi.org/
Abstract
Choosing how to recognize community-engaged scholarship in promotion and tenure policies so that it is assessed accurately and fairly remains a relatively new and ongoing challenge for institutions of higher education. This case study examines how one U.S. research university integrated recognition of community-engaged scholarship across all levels of policy, including university, unit, and department. The terms used within and across policies reveal that while some terms were perpetuated across policies, many more terms proliferated across policies. Using organizational change and signaling theories, as well as the Democratic Civic Engagement Framework, analysis raises questions and insights regarding the use of both specificity and ambiguity when choosing and defining terms, and the use of terms across faculty roles of teaching, research/creative activity, and service to signal and address legitimacy of community-engaged scholarship within a larger context of institutional values.
Incorporating Community Engagement in Faculty Reward Policies (Janke, E., Saltmarsh, J., Jenkins, I., & Quan, M). (March 2019). Eastern Region Campus Compact Conference, Providence, RI. (conference handout)
Handout Excerpt provided by the authors:
Drawing on previous scholarship (e.g., O’Meara, Eatman & Peterson, 2015), preliminary findings from our research indicate that revised guidelines should:
- Provide language of community engagement in college and department level policies.
- Clearly articulate a definition of scholarship that is not synonymous with the term research, but instead embraces diverse forms of faculty roles, scholarly approaches, methods, audiences for impact, and products.
- Clearly define community engagement as distinct in purpose and process from other forms of scholarly work (so that it is not confused with applied research, public scholarship, and other forms of experiential education).
- Recognize the relationship between community-engaged scholarship and the integration of faculty roles.
- Address who is considered a peer in peer-review.
- Clearly identify the “products” of community engaged scholarship (providing a range of scholarly artifacts beyond peer-reviewed journal articles).
- Question the use of the term “rigor” and how and where it is used, and instead, providing guidance around standards of “quality scholarship”, which can be applied across a continuum of diverse scholarly approaches and products.
- Clarify measures of impact of scholarship, which take into account diverse audiences that may include but which extend beyond academic or disciplinary communities.
- Provide guidance for the evaluation of community-engaged scholarship.
- Recognize the role and contribution of inter- and trans-disciplinary knowledge and scholarship in fulfilling the mission’s tripartite mission of teaching, research and service.
