Community-engaged scholarship and teaching involve mutually beneficial collaboration in between institutions of higher education and community partners at the local, state, national, or international level. This work is critical to the mission of the University of Iowa and a core component of the University of Iowa’s current Strategic Plan. 

Evaluation of engaged scholarship and teaching may require alternative approaches attuned to community engagement best practices, as well as variations in scholarly processes, products, and impact for community-engaged work. The following materials were developed by the University of Iowa Office of Community Engagement in collaboration with the Office of the Provost as an addendum to existing promotion and tenure processes.

These materials:

• Offer institutional definitions of community-engaged scholarship and teaching
• Explain best practices in review of community-engaged scholarship across process, product, and impact
• Provide advice for community-engaged scholars on documentation of process and product during the research process to demonstrate societal impact 
• Provide guidelines, including timelines and templates, for how the current faculty promotion and tenure process can be adapted to assess community-engaged scholarship and teaching

The Office of Community Engagement (OCE) is working with colleges and departments across the university to adapt and adopt these guidelines. OCE is also happy to meet with and work one-on-one with faculty who are considering utilizing this approach to assess their scholarship and/or teaching. Please e-mail Nick Benson (Nicholas-benson@uiowa.edu) or Rima Afifi (rima-afifi@uiowa.edu) for more information. 

These guidelines below are also found on the Office of the Provost website. 

Overview

Community-engaged scholarship and teaching involve mutually beneficial collaboration in between institutions of higher education and community partners at the local, state, national, or international level.

• Institutional support for community engagement helps recruit and retain faculty
• Community-engaged learning is an evidence-based, high-impact teaching practice
• Evidence of community impact is preferred for some federal and foundation grant funding

Excellence in community-engaged scholarship and teaching is defined and assessed differently than traditional scholarship across three domains: 

• Process: Community-engaged scholars must take time to develop relationships that meaningfully involve communities in the research or teaching process
• Product: Community-engaged scholarship products appear in both disciplinary and non-traditional outlets, including interdisciplinary journals, white papers, or as public scholarship
• Impact: Assessment considers impact on related scholarly disciplines or on students as well as local impact to the community, an organization, a population, a place, or policy

Alterations and additions to the promotion and tenure process encourage community-engaged scholarship that both generates knowledge within the discipline and demonstrates societal impact

As the experts in their disciplines, colleges and departments are best situated to know which specific alternations to the process and dossier fit current disciplinary norms for review 

Introduction and Definitions

Community-engaged scholarship and teaching are defined as the collaboration between institutions of higher education and communities for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in the context of reciprocity and partnership.[1] In community-engaged scholarship, research and creative activity are collaborative processes that create and disseminate knowledge and creative expression to contribute to the discipline and strengthen community well-being. Community engagement also includes collaborations at the intersection of scholarship, teaching, and service. This work takes various forms depending on the discipline. Examples include: 

• Public art projects completed alongside local governments and nonprofit arts councils;
• Public health interventions designed in partnership with local health organizations;
• Oral histories of rural small towns in collaboration with local librarians.

Community-engaged scholarship and teaching exist along a spectrum of community involvement and public participation in the process. The flowchart from The International Association for Public Participation (Figure 1) highlights potential levels of community involvement in a research project. 

• Outreach occurs when researchers provide information externally, perhaps through a public presentation or by writing an article in a local publication, but there is no expectation of bi-directional communication or collaboration.
• As one moves from left to right, the collaboration between the scholar and the community deepens and becomes more bidirectional, as decision making and project activities become shared by all stakeholders.
• The “gold standard” of community engagement occurs when scholarship and teaching begin with a topic of importance to the community and equitably involves both academic and community partners throughout the entire process.

The guidelines in this document are intended for faculty whose work aligns with the chart columns furthest to the right, although those with less substantial community involvement may also seek to apply these guidelines to portions of their scholarship and teaching.

Reference: Modified by the authors from the International Association for Public Participation.
Figure 1. Spectrum of Engagement

Faculty may also use the checklist below (adapted from the University of Illinois Public Engagement Research Option) to determine whether they should consider utilizing the community-engaged scholarship review guidelines. 

• Engaged scholarship or teaching is a substantial proportion of your portfolio over time, vs. a single project.

• Your scholarship or teaching is an in-depth collaboration with community or other public partners—for example, the partner identified the need for the research, developed the research questions, or is involved in the analysis.

• Your work requires significant relationship-building with community partners.

• Your work has a definable impact on the community at the local, state, national, or international level.

• Your work is done in a way that the community can continue the program and/or policy developed by the work; the impact of the work can be sustained.

• Your discipline’s traditional review mechanisms are insufficient to evaluate the impact of the work.

Points specific to community-engaged scholarship include:

• Your scholarship meaningfully addresses a community or societal problem, need, issue, or interest related to your area of expertise.

• Your community-engaged scholarship generates significant new transferable knowledge that can be used outside the specific community setting where it was produced.

The Centrality of Community Engagement in Higher Education

Over the past 30 to 40 years, community engagement has become critical to achieving the public purpose of higher education. By collaborating and partnering with communities around issues of importance to the broader public, faculty, staff, and students not only better understand their scholarship, their studies and their coursework, but they become important partners to businesses, nonprofit organizations, government entities and others in addressing the challenges and opportunities facing our world today. This strengthens higher education’s value to society, while helping to advance our tripartite mission of teaching, research, and service. 

Supporting community-engaged scholarship and teaching can also help support higher education goals for external funding, recruitment and retention of faculty, and providing high-impact practices for students: 

• Community-engaged scholarship is encouraged and may be required for major sources of state and federal government funding, as well as private foundations and other non-governmental sources of funds.
  • Examples include the Broader Impacts expectations for National Science Foundation (NSF) grants, and the requirements of a Community Benefits Plan for all Department of Energy (DOE) grants.[2]
• Institutional support for community-engaged scholarship and teaching is an important tool for recruitment and retention of talented new faculty.
  • New research demonstrates that junior faculty are overwhelmingly more interested in community engagement than senior faculty.[3]
• Community engagement is a high-impact teaching practice for students.[4]
  • When faculty and instructors involve students in community-engaged courses and community-engaged scholarship, students not only better understand their field of study and feel more connected to their future profession, but they also develop stronger critical thinking skills, professional communication skills, and learn how to work across differences. 
     

Evaluating Community-Engaged Scholarship and Teaching: Best Practices and Documentation

Community-engaged scholarship represents a shift from dominant academic hierarchies of knowledge production and requires new forms of evaluation and new definitions of impact and merit. According to the University of Minnesota’s Review Committee on Community-Engaged Scholarship, engaged scholarship is distinguished from traditional academic scholarship in the following ways: 

• Products are often published in both traditional disciplinary outlets and non-traditional venues.
• The work is often multi-disciplinary.
• Scholarly products often include multiple co-authors, including community partners who contribute to the work in significant ways.
• The work often integrates scholarship, teaching, and service in a way that makes it difficult to compartmentalize efforts into a single category.
• The work requires significant relationship-building with external partners.

Because of these differences, quality in community-engaged scholarship in particular is defined differently than for traditional scholarship across three domains: process, product, and impact. Understanding these differences is crucial to accurate assessment of community-engaged scholarship in faculty review. 

Valuing process: 

• Process is defined as the steps or stages that develop a scholarly program or project and ensure rigor and high quality. 
• In promotion review, impact and quality are traditionally assessed primarily based on outcomes at the individual level.
• Assessment of community-engaged scholarship and teaching must consider the time needed to develop relationships that meaningfully involve communities in the research process. 
• Valuing process involves recognition that developing community-engaged research projects or courses might take longer to develop because of the time needed to develop trust, understand community needs and aspirations, and solicit input from community members at different stages in the process: ideation, execution, analysis, and application.
• The process of community-engaged scholarship, and the time required, becomes more intensive along the spectrum of engagement: 
  • Engaged scholarship that involves communities in developing questions, developing methods, and analyzing and distributing findings (e.g., community-based participatory research) will likely require more time than research that involves communities only at certain stages in the process, as research participants or class speakers for instance.
• Recommendation for faculty: Faculty should carefully document the process for community-engaged projects from their initiation; documenting process goes beyond documenting hours spent gathering data, such as time spent conducting interviews, or time spent in instruction and includes description of the time needed to collaborate with communities.
  • Examples of documenting process include: listing and summarizing meetings held to develop relationships and involve communities; documenting community involvement in generating ideas or collecting and analyzing data; explaining how communities were involved at different stages in the research process.

Recognizing engaged scholarship and teaching products: 

• Products, or the tangible outcomes of the scholarship and teaching process, are typically considered to be courses taught or developed; students mentored; journal articles within the discipline; scholarly books; grants received; or items or assessments developed through research, like patents, instruments, etc. 
• In community-engaged scholarship and teaching, products in addition to publications in disciplinary outlets may include publications for other scholarly outlets, public scholarship, presentations, testimony, or other work produced for community partners. Specific examples include: 
  • Publications in journals outside the research subfield, such as pedagogy journals or journals on the scholarship of engagement
  • Publications in interdisciplinary journals 
  • Public scholarship: writing for the community or a general audience in local, regional, or national outlets
  • Contributions to policy or legislation, including testimony before legislative bodies 
  • Public presentations or community events 
  • Materials developed for community partners through community-engaged courses 
• In addition, because of the time needed to develop community-engaged research projects in particular, community-engaged scholars’ productivity should be assessed differently than that of researchers who do not meaningfully involve communities; community-engaged scholarship and teaching require acknowledgment that the research process, community impact, and products must be considered together rather than assessing individual scholarly products in isolation.
• Recommendations for faculty: The checklist (under Guidelines) to be filled out by the faculty member and the DEO may include a description of engaged research or other scholarly products and how the impact of those products should be assessed. The community-engaged scholarship statement should also include brief explanation of the credibility, value, and impact of scholarship processes and products meant to demonstrate the impact of engaged research. 

Assessing impact: 

• Impact broadly defined is a change or benefit to the field of research or to society, institutions, cultural understanding, social critique, health, environment, or quality of life. 
• In promotion review for research faculty, impact is typically defined as impact on the field of research assessed through quantitative metrics (citations, journal impacts, reviews, grant funds) or through qualitative metrics (assessment of external reviewers, tone or content of published reviews of scholarship).
• Community-engaged scholarship and teaching consider the impact of generalizable knowledge generation or course content on related scholarly disciplines and on students as well as local impact to the community, an organization, a place, or policy.
• Assessment of impact for community-engaged scholarship should include evidence of impact at the level specified by project goals, including: 
  • Contribution to the body of knowledge or research subfield that extends beyond local impact 
  • Sustained and collaborative relationships with community partners
  • Evidence of meaningful participation from community partners or community members in developing project goals, methods, etc.
  • Policy or procedure change because of the research 
  • Increased capacity for community partners in the form of funding or other resources 
  • Evidence of sustainability for projects or initiatives beyond the research term 
  • Contribution to the scholarship of engagement
• Recommendation for faculty: Some disciplines define the impact of engagement with more consideration of process, while others define engagement with more weight given to products. Throughout the research process, community-engaged faculty should clearly document how impact was defined and assessed for those courses, research projects, or programs. The sample checklist includes a section on defining products of community-engaged scholarship and how their impact will be assessed.
  • Example: Impact for a community-engaged project on new approaches to language learning could be defined as improvements in language acquisition for young children documented in peer-reviewed journals; capacity building for school partners; and sustainability of the new initiative; impact could be measured by language assessments; qualitative feedback from parents and teachers; materials or resources provided to community partners as part of the project; grants acquired to continue new approaches; and evidence of how the program continues after the specific project is completed