immanence

The American Anthropological Association’s publication yesterday of guidelines on public scholarship marks a significant advance in the recognition of public scholarship within academe.

Anthropology may have good reasons to be in the forefront with this, but it is not the only field in which public scholarship and community engagement are valued and recognized. Numerous efforts have been made toward this end, particularly in the field of community engaged research, which is arguably more advanced in gaining recognition in the tenure and promotion process than the kinds of public outreach referred to in the AAA’s guidelines.

Some useful resources for publicly engaged scholars include the Imagining America Tenure Team Initiative‘s report on “Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University — A Resources on Promotion and Tenure in the Atts, Humanities, and Design” (Ellison & Eatman, 2008), O’Meara, Eatman, & Petersen’s “Advancing Engaged Scholarship in Promotion & Tenure: A Roadmap and Call for Reform,” Whitmer et al’s 2010 article “The Engaged University” (published in the Ecological Society of America’s journal Frontiers in Ecology and Environment), Fitzgerald et al’s Handbook of Engaged Scholarship, Nancy Franz’s excellent “Tips” paper for engaged scholars, NDHE’s special issue on community engagement in higher education, and Hutchinson’s “Outside the Margins: Promotion and Tenure with a Public Scholarship Platform.”

Within environmental scholarship, the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences journal JESS has published some useful articles, including Clark et al’s “Professional development of interdisciplinary environmental scholars.”

For the record, here’s the definition of scholarship that my own Environmental Studies program approved a few years ago for internal purposes:

“Scholarship” is defined inclusively, building on the work of Boyer and others,[1] as encompassing five domains of scholarly work:

• scholarship of discovery (which builds new knowledge through traditional “basic research”),
• scholarship of integration (which connects across disciplines or discourses, reinterprets and/or recontextualizes topics, or provides novel illuminations of knowledge),
• scholarship of application and engagement (which aids society or professions in addressing problems, as in applied and translational sciences, action research, and community engaged praxis),
• scholarship of creativity (which communicates knowledge and insight through the creative arts), and
• scholarship of teaching and learning (which innovates pedagogically so as to transform and extend knowledge and its generation[2]).

Each of these is understood to take place within the context of collective assessment according to standards recognized by relevant scholarly communities. The teaching, research and service of a faculty member are seen, from this perspective, “not as isolated activities, but as unified and integrated work in support of learning.”[3]

“Environmental” scholarship refers specifically to scholarship that includes a central engagement with the relations between humans (includes human cultures, communities, practices, and so on) and the larger biophysical world(s) within which humans are immersed.

Notes:

[1] Boyer, E. L., Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990); O’Meara, K. A. and R. E. Rice, ed., Faculty Priorities Reconsidered: Rewarding Multiple Forms of Scholarship (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005); Jaschik, Scott, “Has scholarship been reconsidered?” Inside Higher Ed, Oct. 4, 2005, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/10/04/tenure; Weiser, C. J., “The value system of a university: Rethinking scholarship,” College of Agricultural Sciences, Oregon State University, n.d., accessed on Nove. 5, 2014, at http://www.adec.edu/clemson/papers/weiser.html.

[2] As noted by Kreber, “scholars of teaching are excellent teachers, but they differ from both excellent and expert teachers in that they share their knowledge and advance the knowledge of teaching and learning in the discipline in a way that can be peer-reviewed”; in Kreber, C. “Teaching excellence, teaching expertise, and the scholarship of teaching” Innovative Higher Education 2 (2002), 5-23. And see Boshier, R., “Why is the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning such a hard sell?” Higher Education Research & Development 28.1 (2009), 1-15; La Lopa, J., “The evolution of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the academic community,” Journal of Tourism Research & Hospitality S1 (2013), 1-5.

[3] Dirks, A. L. “The new definition of scholarship: How will it change the professoriate?” (paper prepared for HIED 641 Effecting Change in Higher Education, Graduate College of Education, University of Massachusetts, Boston 1998), accessed Nov. 4, 2014 at http://webhost.bridgew.edu/adirks/ald/papers/skolar.htm.