Promotion & Tenure
Community Engaged Scholarship
Community Engaged Scholarship (CES) is the integration of research, teaching, creative activity, and service with community priorities through reciprocal, mutually beneficial partnerships. It involves meaningful collaboration with community partners in identifying priorities, shaping questions, and approaches, generating and interpreting knowledge, and determining how outcomes are shared and used. Through these partnerships, CES addresses societal challenges and generates knowledge, learning, creative work or other outcomes that contribute to both academic and community purposes.
Community Engaged Scholarship may include community based participatory research, place-based research, action research, public scholarship, community-engaged teaching, creative practice, evaluation, applied research, and other forms of scholarly inquiry. It maintains appropriate standards of disciplinary rigor while recognizing community knowledge, lived experience and expertise as essential contributions to the co-creation of knowledge. It also values accessible dissemination of knowledge, sustained relationships, and outcomes that are meaningful and useful to community partners as well as academic audiences.
Outreach and Community Engagement
Outreach generally refers to the sharing or application of University knowledge, expertise, services, or resources with external audiences.
Community Engagement involves a relationship in which faculty, staff, and students and community partners have a meaningful role in shaping the work and in which knowledge, expertise, learning, or benefits move between the University and community partners. Such relationships should be grounded in mutual respect, ethical responsibility, reciprocity, and accountability, with the University and its faculty, researchers, staff, and students recognizing their responsibility to fulfill agreed-upon commitments and to engage responsibly with community partners.
Outreach and engagement are not mutually exclusive. An outreach activity may develop into engagement as relationships become more reciprocal and collaborative.
The distinction is therefore not based simply on whether an activity occurs outside the University. It is based on how the University and community partners relate to one another within the activity and whether that relationship is rooted in a responsible, ethical, and reciprocal partnership.
Service and Community Engagement
Faculty, staff, and students engage in many forms of service that contribute substantially to communities and the public good. Community service, professional service, volunteerism, and public service should be recognized as valuable contributions even when they do not meet the definition of Community Engagement.
Similarly, Community Engagement may be appropriately recognized within teaching, research, creative activity, service, or multiple categories depending on the nature of the work.
The purpose of this framework is not to require that all public-facing work be classified as Community Engagement. Rather, it provides a consistent way to identify and describe work that involves meaningful reciprocal relationships with communities and to support reflection on how those relationships may contribute to learning, scholarship, creative practice, professional practice, and community priorities.
Considerations for Identifying Community Engagement
When determining whether an activity constitutes Community Engagement, faculty, staff, departments, and community partners may consider the following questions:
- Who identifies the purpose or priority?
Was the issue identified by the community, jointly developed, or meaningfully informed by community priorities? - Who participates?
Do community partners have a meaningful role appropriate to the purpose of the work? - What knowledge is exchanged?
Does the work recognize knowledge and expertise that exist within both the University and the community? - Who benefits?
Are there meaningful outcomes or benefits for participating community partners as well as the University? - How are decisions made?
Do community partners have an appropriate opportunity to influence goals, processes, interpretation, or outcomes? - What is the nature of the relationship?
Is the work based on mutual respect, trust, accountability, and, where appropriate, an ongoing relationship? - What is the scholarly or educational contribution?
Where the work is presented as Community-Engaged Scholarship or Community-Engaged Learning, is there a clearly articulated contribution to knowledge, creative practice, student learning, professional practice, or community capacity? - How does community engagement create opportunities for disciplinary reflection and growth?
In the process of Community Engaged Scholarship or Community Engaged Learning, does the work invite new possibilities for thinking about knowledge building, creative practice, student learning, professional practice, or community capacity? Does engagement with community partners offer alternative approaches, challenge existing assumptions, or create new possibilities for the discipline in relation to its partners?
