Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University A Resource on Promotion and Tenure in the Arts, Humanities, and Design (original) (raw)
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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.
An Exploration of the Influence of Public Scholarship on Faculty Work
Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 2008
The purpose of our study was to explore the effects of engagement on faculty members' academic work, research, teaching, and service. We found that faculty were more open with their students about how their teaching plans work and do not work; faculty members' initial commitments to providing service for communities were reinforced; and faculty viewed their research, teaching, and service as integrated, and not separate acts of scholarship. This article applies social identity and job characteristics theories to these three themes to explore why faculty members' perception of their work changed as a result of their engagement in public scholarship.
Discussion Guide for Departments and Colleges About Engaged Scholarship in Promotion and Tenure
2011
In 2001, Michigan State University revised it reappointment, promotion, and tenure form to encourage faculty members to report engaged scholarship during the review process. While such revisions in institutional policies are necessary, they are not sufficient for shifting academic culture at college and department levels, where the significant decisions about reappointment, promotion, and tenure often reside. On-going discussions between tenure track faculty members and administrators about how scholarly outreach and engagement is interpreted and valued in their disciplines, departments, and colleges is critical.
Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 2012
You do it to yourself, you do and that's what really hurts."-Radiohead HE IRRELEVANCE of curriculum scholarship, or perhaps, just education scholars more generally, is in the air. The 6 th Annual Curriculum and Pedagogy Conference in October, 2005, dedicated a full conference town-hall gathering to exploring in what ways education scholars might better engage in the work of "public intellectuality." The theme of the 2006 conference of the American Educational Research Association, "Education Research in the Public Interest," attempted to mine a related vein of concern. In an Education Week commentary (April 6, 2005), Stanford scholar Sam Wineburg gives voice to an apparently prevalent anxiety in and about the education research community: I bring you, my fellow researchers, an upbeat message. We're doing a terrific job preparing future education researchers for a career of keeping out of people's hair! […] To America's millions-strong teaching force, NCME, AERA, NARST, PES, and NSSE might well be noodles on the surface of alphabet soup […] But we can't fall asleep at the job. Maintaining irrelevance demands a keen vigilance over curriculum and mission. Allow me to suggest that laments for a lack of public influence by education scholars or scholarship produce more heat than light when we fail to attend to the conditions in which we operate that reduce our individual and collective capacities to engage in public intellectual work (as might even be enacted in our own faculties). To shed some light, I wish to propose an experiment into the multifaceted shades of scholarship in the public interest. The experiment I propose calls for a self-imposed hiatus by professors from submitting new articles to journals for two years and, simultaneously, the refusal of journals to publish submitted articles from professors for two years. This proposal does not call for a hiatus on study and
Community-Engaged Scholarship and Promotion and Tenure: Lessons from Lynton Award Recipients
Metropolitan Universities
In 2008, for my dissertation research, I interviewed 11 faculty members who received the Ernest Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement to examine their experiences with promotion and tenure. There were 3 assistant professors, 1 associate professor, and 7 full professors. All faculty members were female and represented 8 4-year public institutions (4 RU/VH, 2 Master’s and 2 Doctoral Granting Universities) and 3 4-year private institutions (2 Bac/A&S and 1 RU/VH). They represented the humanities (8) and the sciences (3). Through qualitative, semi-structured, opened ended interviews I aimed to understand their experiences with engaged scholarship in the context of promotion and tenure. Many community-engaged scholars fight to receive the internal validation that Ernest advocated for with Amy Driscoll via Making Outreach Visible: A Guide to Documenting Professional Service and Outreach (1999). Ernest might be somewhat content to know that the award in his name provides exte...
While a growing body of scholarship has focused on the personal, professional, and organizational factors that influence faculty members’ involvement in publicly engaged scholarship, the nature and scope of faculty publicly engaged scholarship itself has remained largely unexplored. What types of activities are faculty members involved in as publicly engaged scholar- ship? How does their involvement vary by demographic, type of faculty appointment, or college grouping? To explore these questions, researchers conducted a quantitative content analysis of 173 promotion and tenure documents from a research-inten- sive, land-grant, Carnegie Classified Community Engagement university and found statistically significant differences for the variables age, number of years at the institution, faculty rank, Extension appointment, joint appointment, and college grouping. Recommendations for future research are discussed as well as implications for institutional leadership, faculty development programming, and the structuring of academic appointments.
Learning About Scholarship in Action in Concept and Practice
2010
In her inaugural year (2005), Chancellor Nancy Cantor announced her vision of Syracuse University as a campus that would be deeply engaged with the world, in activities and partnerships with communities that she named "scholarship in action." Recognizing the difficulty of fitting such public or community-engaged scholarship into the traditional framework for defining and evaluating faculty work, she called on the Academic Affairs Committee of the Senate (AAC) to study the issues related to implementing this vision. The Committee responded to this request by undertaking in Spring, 2005 a study of scholarship of action both as a concept and as a set of faculty practices on the Syracuse campus. This white paper reports on what the Committee has learned from this inquiry. Although Chancellor Cantor encouraged the AAC to tackle the problem of evaluating excellence in scholarship in action, the project focused instead on understanding what is meant by scholarship in action (and related terms) and exploring the questions it raises about values, disciplinary differences, and the relationship between this concept and the traditional categorizing of faculty work as research, teaching, or service. The Committee decided to educate itself on these fundamental issues before trying to solve problems of evaluation. The Committee adopted a strategy of examining scholarship in action from three angles: "outside in" (the external context), "top down" (administrative leadership), and "bottom up" (faculty practices and views). The "outside in" and "top down" perspectives provided the context in which we examined Syracuse faculty practices and views. This approach provides the structure for the white paper. To address the first two perspectives, the Committee researched the literature of higher education and the speeches and writings of Chancellor Cantor, aided by research assistant Dianna Winslow. We drew on many sources for the faculty perspective, including interviews and discussions with faculty and administrators on campus, as well as the Committee itself as a resource. The richest source of insights into the variety and complexity of scholarship in action at Syracuse was a series of panels comprised of tenured and tenure-track Syracuse faculty, who were asked to describe their own faculty work as exemplifying scholarship in action. The Committee organized a total of five such panels, hearing from 22 tenured and tenure track faculty. In the course of planning these panels, the Committee identified a set of interdisciplinary models or roles for scholars in action that cuts across the traditional categories of research, teaching, and service. The paper begins by tracing the evolution of engagement as an important commitment of higher education. This research was important because of faculty fears that "scholarship in action" was idiosyncratic to Syracuse or represented a passing fad in higher education. The concept of "engagement" arose in response to a widespread perception that the academy had become disconnected from society and lost public support. This response, beginning in public institutions with a history of commitment to outreach, has been developed, debated, and advocated over the last decade by many stakeholders in and out of the academy. In one of the most influential statements, a series of reports from the Kellogg foundation, this definition was offered: Engagement goes well beyond extension, conventional outreach, and even most conceptions of public service. Inherited concepts emphasize a one-way process in which the university transfers its expertise to key constituents. Embedded in the engagement ideal is a commitment to sharing and reciprocity. By engagement the Commission envisions partnerships, two-way streets defined by mutual respect among the partners for what each brings to the table (Kellogg, Executive Summaries 13).
From Rhetoric to Reality: A Typology of Publically Engaged Scholarship
Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 2010
Despite significant institutional rhetoric about engaged scholarship, scant empirical research focuses on the activities that constitutepublicly engaged scholarship from the faculty perspective. This study's purpose was to develop a typology of publicly engaged scholarship based upon faculty descriptions of their scholarly work. An interdisciplinary research team conducted an interpretive content analysis of 173 promotion and tenure forms provided by successful tenure-track faculty at a research-intensive, land-grant, Carnegie ...