“Engaged Scholarship seeks to discover new knowledge through activities that collaboratively generate, exchange, or apply academic and community knowledge and practices through reciprocal partnerships among members of the University and members of the broader public. This often includes methods or approaches such as community-based participatory research (CBPR), engaged action research, and research-practice partnerships (RPPs), etc., and results in the public dissemination of new knowledge through academic publications, policy recommendations, technical reports, co-created exhibitions and creative pieces, and joint projects that benefit the community and the university.”

- Year of Engagement Scholarship Committee and Office of the Provost (2020)

Image source: Loyola University New Orleans Office of Academic Affairs.

Retrieved from http://www.loyno.edu/engage/community-based-research-and-scholarly-projects

Best Practices for Community Engaged Scholarship

• CES requires meaningful, trusting, and sustained partnerships, which take time and capacity to develop. This relationship work is an essential part of the scholarship-building process that incorporates community-based collaborators into all phases of research and creative processes.
• CES must be mutual and reciprocal in benefits and responsibilities. The effort that community engaged scholars make to ensure that benefits are equitably distributed among community partners and academics takes time and skill. In addition to traditional academic products, the research must also lead to products useful to the community partner and community more broadly. This process involves extra responsibilities for the scholar and their community-based collaborators that should be acknowledged.
• CES requires holistic perspective and review. Community engaged scholarship most often occurs in the context of a project that may have multiple processes, partnerships, products, and impacts. Assessing the products of CES separately from one another and from the larger context of the whole project may reduce and diminish their relevance, rigor, and holistic impact.
• CES has impact within and beyond the academy. Its community impacts are tangible, applied, and can occur at a variety of scales - neighborhood, locality, region, nation, global, community of interest or shared identity or experience.
• CES stands on its own as a form of rigorous scholarship and takes many forms. Impact, products, and assessment have their own unique kinds of rigorous evidence. CES looks different in different disciplines and spaces and involves diverse knowledge traditions, partners, sources of accountability, funding, and forms of dissemination.

- Excerpt from Recommendations from Provost’s Advisory Subcommittee on Community Engaged Scholarship in Promotion & Tenure Processes Approved by University Senate, May 2022