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Community-Engaged Research (CER) Toolkit
Evaluating CER for promotion and tenure
Community engaged research (CER) meets the same standards of rigor and scholarly excellence as traditional research. What distinguishes CER is the collaborative partnership with communities throughout the research process and the dual commitment to advancing knowledge and addressing real-world problems in specific community contexts.
Evaluating the quality of community engaged research requires attention to collaborative process, quality product, and meaningful impact.
In this section:
Key considerations for evaluating quality
- Scholarly rigor: Clear research questions, appropriate methods, systematic inquiry, and contributions to knowledge that meet disciplinary standards
- Partnership quality: Meaningful collaboration with community partners throughout the research process, demonstrating reciprocity, mutual respect, and shared authority
- Community impact: Demonstrable benefits to community partners and broader publics, including but not limited to policy changes, practice improvements, capacity building, and addressing community-identified needs
- Diverse scholarly products: Recognition that community engaged research may generate valuable outputs beyond traditional peer-reviewed articles, such as policy briefs, curricula, community reports, tools for practitioners, and public scholarship
Documentation and evidence examples
- Traditional scholarly metrics (peer-reviewed publications, presentations, grants)
- Letters from community partners describing the impact of the research and the quality of the collaborative partnership
- Community-facing products and their documented use by stakeholders
- Evidence of translation to practice or policy
- Documentation of the participatory research processes employed
Recommended resources
Understanding promotion and tenure expectations
- How to Include Community-Engaged Scholarship in the Tenure and Promotion Process, American Sociological Association
- Toolkit and guide for faculty, a guide for committees evaluating community-engaged scholarship, and guidelines for departments adapting their promotion and tenure procedures
- Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University, Imagining America
- Practical toolkit for faculty, staff, and students to shift the culture surrounding promotion and tenure
- Offers strategies to create supportive settings for doing and reviewing rigorous public scholarship
Documenting community-engaged scholarship
- Community-Engaged Scholarship Toolkit, Community-Campus Partnerships for Health
- Toolkit that addresses how to document and present community-engaged work in ways that satisfy promotion and tenure requirements
- Covers development of a vision, finding mentors, framing community-engaged work as rigorous scholarship, and building each component of a promotion portfolio
- Tips for Constructing a Promotion and Tenure Dossier that Documents Engaged Scholarship Endeavors, Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement
- Addresses how to document effectively in a promotion and tenure dossier
- Includes how to distinguish between service, engagement, scholarship, and engaged scholarship
- Outlines steps and lists best practices
- Community-Engaged Scholarship Review, Promotion & Tenure Package, Community-Engaged Scholarship Review Peer Review Workgroup
- Resource package developed to help (a) faculty seeking to document and present community-engaged scholarship (CES) work in a dossier and (b) Review, Promotion, and Tenure (RPT) committees in gaining a greater understanding of how the rigor and impact of CES can be documented
Publishing and building a scholarly record
- Writing and Publishing Community-Engaged Scholarship: Advice for Junior Faculty on Promotion, Publishing, and Craft, Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education
- Draws on surveys of published authors and journal editors to offer advice on navigating promotion and tenure, getting community-engaged work published in academic journals, and the craft of academic writing