Hello, AEA365 community, and happy Conference Week from Portland! The AEA staff have been working overtime to prepare for our biggest event of the year, and we’re excited to see all of you who can make it. Whether you will be joining us for the conference or not, you can keep up with our happenings via the AEA365 blog. See you around!
-Liz DiLuzio, Lead Curator
Hello friends! I’m Lauren Wendling, PhD, and I am deeply passionate about recognizing and rewarding faculty who leverage their time, talent, and skills to advance community-identified issues. I was excited to share some of my work with AEA colleagues at 2023’s annual conference but life (and a new baby!) got in the way!
“What are you going to do after you get your degree?” – this is the most common question a student gets during their years of study. As a doctoral student studying Higher Education at Indiana University who was considering various post-degree pathways, I questioned where my work would have the most impact. Currently, as a freshly minted PhD, I am very happily situated in the edtech field, at Collaboratory, where I assist institutions collect and strategically leverage community engagement data to advance campus and community efforts.
However, when considering the various professional paths available to me as a PhD student, I had little desire to pursue a faculty position and be beholden to a grueling 6+ years of research, publish, rinse, repeat – especially while knowing community-engaged research doesn’t necessarily carry much (if any) weight in the tenure review process. Cue the topic of my dissertation: How do promotion and tenure review committees evaluate faculty’s community engaged research? How can they do better? Here are highlights from my research.
Lessons Learned
Faculty work is inherently rooted in the advancement of the public good. However, the rise of contingent faculty positions, institutions’ focus on traditional research, and limited resources encourage tenure-track faculty to forgo an engaged research agenda. Rather, they are pushed to produce as many traditional research outputs as possible (e.g., peer-reviewed journal articles with high impact factors) to achieve tenure. Prior research and countless anecdotal stories from engaged faculty illustrate that while institutions claim to uphold community-focused missions, how they reward their faculty is in direct opposition to such sentiments.
The incongruity between institutional rhetoric on community engagement and the actual recognition and rewarding of engaged faculty is especially prominent in the guidelines and metrics institutions use to evaluate their faculty. While institutional-level promotion and tenure guidelines may broadly promote community engagement, school and department-level guidelines and the metrics committees use to evaluate their peers often do not.
Findings from a multi-site single case study interviewing review committee members from R1 institutions that were most recently designated as engaged by the Carnegie Foundation revealed that the most significant barriers to properly evaluating engaged faculty include:
- The absence of a clear definition of community-engaged research in guidelines
- Very narrow conceptions of research that excludes community-engaged scholarship
- Disagreement about “what counts” as a scholarly output of research
- Strict reliance on traditional metrics to assess the quality of engaged research
Hot Tip
The most critical challenge, reliance on traditional metrics, completely hinders review committees’ abilities to effectively evaluate the rigor and impact of faculties’ engaged research. The left column in the table below identifies the five most cited metrics school and department-level committees use to evaluate faculty scholarship. The right column proposes adjustments to the traditional metrics which are more aligned with the tenets of engaged research and should be used when evaluating community engaged scholarship.
| Traditional Metric | Proposed Adjustment |
| Peer-Reviewed Publications | Expand the notion of what “counts” as evidence of scholarship. Equally weight other forms of scholarship and involvement of other, community audiences. Examples of community-based outputs: · Community programs, reports, presentations, etc. · Laws/public policy · Delivery of products and/or services Creative products (e.g., art shows, videos) |
| Funding | Recognize local/regional funding as evidence of the need for work within local/regional communities. Consider outputs and outcomes of locally funded research on par with products of nationally funded projects. |
| Reputation | Acknowledge the reputation of faculty on a local/regional level, as evidenced by voices of community members and/or partner organizations. |
| Impact | Expand impact beyond journal impact factors. Also consider: · Depth of relationship faculty has established with community · Impact of faculty’s scholarship (e.g., policy, programs) on community · Number of community members or organizations impacted |
| External Letters | If faculty conducts engaged research, their academic peer reviewers should also conduct and/or be knowledgeable about engaged research. Community partners should be considered as equally legitimate reviewers. |
Appropriately recognizing and rewarding the work of engaged faculty is critical if higher education wants to “walk the talk” when it comes to advancing the public good. Institutions must redefine what counts as valued and meaningful faculty work, expand definitions of scholarship, and develop new metrics to evaluate community-engaged research appropriately. At the same time, school and department leaders and review committees must recognize community engaged research products as valid forms of scholarship and create a culture that values and encourages faculty engagement.
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