Policy Change at UNCG

Faculty efforts to modify promotion and tenure guidelines were part of a larger movement among faculty champions and administrative leaders who were involved in seeking recognition of and reward for CES. In the early to mid-2000s, a confluence of events, people, and opportunities helped to build significant infrastructure and support for community engagement and CES as an aspect of faculty academic work in particular. As described by one senior member of the faculty, the university

finds itself at several crossroads—between its history as a teaching institution and its present efforts to increase research activity, between its traditional means of evaluating faculty performance and the increasing faculty whose engage [sic] in public research and community engagement, between increasing access to its academic programs through online teaching and other outreach efforts and maintaining the student-centered culture that has distinguished UNCG from other institutions (C. Fairbanks, personal communication, November 24, 2008).

The term community engagement was selected as the term used in the university policy in recognition of UNCG’s recent (2008) Community Engagement Elective Classification conferred by the Carnegie Foundation. However, no definition of the term was developed and written into the university policy. Instead of a definition, community engagement was described across the faculty roles of teaching, research and creative activity, and service, as described in Table 1.

Clarifying Approved Terms and Definitions after Policy Adoption

Though a definition for CES was not included in the university policy, a supplemental document was developed the year after the policy was approved. The issue of needing definitions was raised at a meeting the provost held in which academic deans were asked to initiate efforts to align school and department policies with the university policy. In that meeting, the deans asked: What is community engagement? How do we assess it? The language drafted into the university policy, while sufficient for getting the policy through, seemed, to the academic deans, to fall short. If they were to lead efforts to support the policy revisions, they needed greater clarity and specificity. This was important not only for draft policy revisions but also to help in subsequent documentation and review of community-engaged scholar dossiers. A “definitions document,” therefore, was created by drawing from a range of local and national conversations regarding the meaning of community engagement, scholarship, and CES (Janke & Shelton, 2011). The document provided explicated definitions and descriptions for eight terms. Table 2 provides a sample of the text excerpted from the full document. The full text is available at https://communityengagement.uncg.edu/definitions/.

Democratic Civic Engagement

Democratic civic engagement (DCE) is grounded in a set of assumptions about knowledge and organizational change, explicitly advancing social justice in a diverse democracy to fulfill the public purposes of higher education (Saltmarsh et al., 2009; Saltmarsh & Hartley, 2011). The DCE framework expands our understanding of community engagement from a focus on activity and place to a focus on process and purpose. This shift has implications for how we understand and approach community relationships, knowledge-production, epistemology, the political dimension of engagement, and outcomes. DCE as a project of social justice in a diverse democracy committed to equity raises questions of power, privilege, politics, positionality, identity, and implication in the work of higher education (Simpson, 2014). When DCE accounts for the epistemic inclusion of CES and the scholars—inside and outside of the academy—who produce it, connecting epistemology with identity, power, and justice (Fricker, 2007), it creates the possibility of what Sturm et al. (2011) call “full participation.” A full participation orientation accounts for the institutional architecture necessary for community-engaged scholars to thrive.

The DCE framework was useful to our study, both in the initial theming phase as we developed an understanding of various ways that faculty expressed community engagement as aspects of scholarship in their department, unit, and university-level policies as well as in later analysis that tried to characterize the aspects of CES that were included, or not. The DCE framework served as a common standard for the research team in discussion and assessments of what it means for scholarship to be “community-engaged.” Key elements of DCE are:

• Participatory epistemology: the cocreation of knowledge that shifts the position of students from knowledge consumers to knowledge producers and shifts community groups from being subjects or spectators of the research process to collaborators in knowledge generation and problem solving.

• Collaborative research: recognizing an ecosystem of knowledge and acknowledging that the generation of new knowledge requires that academic knowledge be combined with community-based knowledge, eliminating a hierarchy of knowledge and a one-way fl w of knowledge outward from the college or university. Collaboration is not collaborating internally within the college or university but with those outside of it.

• Transdisciplinarity: recognizing that interdisciplinary inquiry remains bounded by academic disciplines and that transdisciplinarity is fundamentally different in that it combines multiple disciplinary knowledge within the college or university with knowledge that exists and is generated outside the college or university.

• Scholarly artifacts as publications: expanding the understanding and valuing of scholarly products beyond publication in highly specialized disciplinary journals.

• Nonacademic knowledge experts (peers): along with a valuing of the knowledge and experience that both academics and nonacademics bring to the processes of education and knowledge production comes the reframing of who is a peer in the peer-review process and the recognition that in certain circumstances the expert will be a noncredentialed, nonacademic collaborator.

• Impact: academic impact is conceived as “the advancement of … knowledge and activities that contribute to the achievement of societally relevant outcomes” (National Science Foundation, 2023) and is shaped by examining the nature of the system within which knowledge is transformed into public policy or social action and how scholars engage others to transform teaching, learning, and research into actionable and useful knowledge.

The DCE framework is relevant to the analysis of the promotion and tenure policies reviewed for two reasons. First, DCE is aligned to the definition used by the Carnegie Foundation for the Community Engagement Elective Classification and, as such, is widely accepted across the scholarship-of-engagement field. Second, the DCE framework was referenced extensively by individuals supporting institutional change, including the consultants (e.g., Saltmarsh and Clayton) who worked with UNCG to support policy and culture change during this era.

Epistemic Justice

Ideas related to epistemic exclusion (Settles et al., 2021) and epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007) deepened and extended our understanding of participatory epistemology (a key element of DCE) to explore how inclusion of students and community partners is necessarily linked to issues of diversity, equity, and justice. Most simply stated, epistemic injustice is the persistent exclusion of one’s contribution to knowledge production (Dotson, 2014). Epistemic exclusion is more common for women and faculty of color who are more likely to engage in topics related to marginalized social groups and/or social justice (Diaz & Bergman, 2013), working with individuals and communities to collect primary and “everyday” data (Gonzales, 2018), and using methodologies beyond disciplinary norms (Antonio, 2002). Epistemic exclusion is multidimensional; it entails disciplinary-based (or presumed lack thereof, in the case of partners whose expertise lies beyond the credentials recognized by disciplinary norms and institutional regulations) and identity-based biases as women and underrepresented faculty of color report higher perceptions of scholarly devaluation (Settles et al., 2021). Epistemic exclusion is intersectional; women and faculty of color may be more likely to both be negatively stereotyped (Dotson, 2012, 2014; Settles et al., 2021), and they may be more likely to choose scholarly approaches that are outside of the academic mainstream (Gonzales, 2018). Therefore, analysis explored how community-engagement was conceptualized (through the lens of DCE) and how CES was framed (or not) as legitimate and rewarded as a form of faculty work (through the lenses of epistemic injustice and epistemic exclusion).

Critical Discourse Analysis

To ascertain the extent to which CES has been integrated into each unit’s tenure and promotion guidelines, we used critical discourse analysis. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) allowed for exploration of the relationship between policy language and institutional culture. CDA is a useful analytical tool because it takes into consideration that the meaning of discourses are contextual, that social constructs impact the ways texts are constructed and analyzed, and that words and images convey a certain set of underlying assumptions and beliefs. CDA has been described by Martínez-Alemán (2015) as “a method through which we can expose in text (words or images) the metanarratives of hegemonic structures in society” since CDA both reveals the “ideological foundation of discourse” and “provide[s] evidence (data) necessary to support corrective action” (pp. 21–24). Getting at these underlying assumptions and beliefs was critical to the research team, as it revealed the ways in which descriptions about CES expressed its distinctions from other forms of public-facing work and its legitimacy and value (or not) as scholarship.

As Martínez-Alemán (2015) highlights, there are multiple ways to conduct a CDA as it is informed by many different social science techniques. Common across CDAs is the practice of multiple, iterative readings of text so that researchers conducting the analysis can develop understandings of the text’s genre, assess the text’s context, and “uncover metanarratives” (p. 27). This is precisely what the research team did when analyzing the promotion and tenure guidelines of each unit. Through multiple readings, the team was able to not only assess the actual location and prevalence of community engagement in each set of guidelines but was also able to assess how, if at all, individual units and the university as a whole express value about CES. This critical inquiry is paramount to our study, as CES and the scholars who practice it are often marginalized in the academy (Post et al., 2016). The ways in which CES is valued in a university setting can be an indicator of the metanarrative of that specific university and whether or not it is inclusive, committed to the public good, and working to enact democratic change in the world. Performing a CDA of the tenure and promotion guidelines at a specific university can help to create a better understanding of how colleges and universities are integrating CES into their identities and ways in which it might be done in a more socially just and inclusive way.

Data Collection

The lead author collected promotion and tenure policies from the university as well as 59 departments across the seven schools. These policies had been modified during the 2010–2012 time period for the purpose of adopting CES into the policy. No repository of all policies could be located; therefore, the lead author emailed and received policies from the provost’s office, as well as deans, department chairs, and faculty members who had been present and had copies of the policies in their own files. We also included the “definitions document” in our analysis because it was influential in shaping the school and department policies.

Coding

This study is part of a larger effort to understand the ways in which a single university addressed CES as an aspect of its promotion and tenure policies. As part of the initial process, we used open inductive analysis to identify preliminary themes that could be used to guide the review of the full data set of policies. The themes developed in this exploratory phase were drawn from open coding of policies from six departments.

The research team utilized a matrix to record how, where, and with what emphasis CES had been (or had not been) incorporated into each unit’s guidelines. In pairs the research team coded and analyzed each school’s guidelines in order to corroborate and clarify findings. Next the team developed codes with definitions (codebook and data are published in CivicLEADS; see Janke et al., 2022) and then followed the same process to code the policies of 59 departments across the seven schools. In most cases, departments had developed departmental-level promotion and tenure policies. In a few cases, such as in the School of Nursing, some or all departments opted to use the school-level policy in lieu of a department one. Researchers met regularly to cull analyzed data and observations in order to develop an overarching analysis of the university’s mandate to integrate CES across individual schools and departments.

Because we were interested to know how CES was articulated in policies, especially because there was no definition explicated in the university policy as described previously, we coded all references to public dimensions of faculty work. By public dimensions of faculty work we mean any instance in which the text is describing a person or entity that is beyond the institution, such as nonprofits, businesses, communities, or the public (Alperin et al., 2019). During coding, we used the DCE framework (Saltmarsh et al., 2009) to examine the ways in which the descriptions conceptualized community engagement. The DCE framework draws attention to the many ways in which community engagement can be described, including relationships, knowledge production, epistemology, political dimensions, and outcome.

To explore how, if at all, terms reflected the DCE framework, we asked: Is community engagement named, defined, and/or described? In our next round of coding, we looked for and applied four codes based on the DCE framework, including (1) conceptions of knowledge,(2) products or artifacts, (3) purpose or reach, and (4) relationship. In many instances, a single paragraph or sentence included one or more codes. Finally, after coding all documents through an iterative process, we further refined the four codes into three, which we called definitional characteristics: output, outcome, and process. Definitional characteristics are categories of ways that CES was described in the policies (see Table 3).

Data Availability

All data, including the codebook for this study, are available in Janke et al. (2022) via CivicLEADS (Civic Learning, Engagement, and Action Data Sharing). CivicLEADS provides infrastructure for researchers to share and access high-quality data sets, which can be used to study civic education and involvement.

University-Level Policy Document

On the whole, CES was described overwhelmingly by means of the types of activities a scholar might engage in or the type of artifacts they might produce (outputs)—and it was not often described as ways to engage partners (process) or achieve community purposes and public values (outcome). For example, 10 of 12 items described in the policy (see Table 1) included activities and artifacts such as “consulting and providing technical assistance and/or services to public and private organizations” and “writing position papers for the general public.” The policy expressed just two purposes (outcomes): “Changes in professional practice, institutional processes, or public policy” and “illustrations of ways in which the activity enhanced the University or the community.”

Determining whether the university policy indicated any sense of CES as a process was difficult. We identified two instances that could be labeled as process descriptions: “Collaborating with schools, businesses, advocacy groups, community groups, and civic agencies to develop policies” and “Providing leadership in or making significant contributions to economic and community development activities.” In both of these instances, “collaborating” and “providing leadership” describe ways in which partners work together (i.e., relationship or relational process) to contribute to the community. However, commitment to reciprocity and mutual benefit, hallmarks of DCE, or epistemology, the primacy of community members in the co-construction of and sharing of knowledge, are not made explicit. In sum, the university policy set an initial example for the rest of the campus that CES may be represented by describing outputs—primarily, listing activities and scholarly artifacts.

Definitions Document

The definitions document was purposefully inclusive of descriptions that characterized CES in terms of processes and outcomes, more so than outputs. The DCE was, in fact, used to help draft the document and two of its authors (John Saltmarsh and Patti Clayton) had been consultants to UNCG during the time of the policy changes. As a result, a combination of outputs, outcomes, and processes are included throughout the definitions document as descriptive characteristics (see Table 2). For example, the full description of the term community-engaged research and creative activity is comprehensively described in the definitions document in this way:

The collaborative generation, refinement, conservation, and exchange of reciprocally beneficial and societally relevant knowledge that is generated in collaboration with, communicated to, and validated by peers in academe and the community. Community engaged research and creative activity produces products informed by (multi)disciplinary knowledge, including, but not limited to publications, exhibitions, and programs that simultaneously meets campus mission and goals as well as addresses issues of societal concern. It is research or creative activity that involves systematic inquiry, produces results that are publicly observable, allows for critique, and is available for others to use and develop. Community-engaged research and creative activity demonstrate methodological rigor through the use of methods that are appropriate to the goals, questions, and context of the work. Community-engaged research and creative activity is undertaken in collaboration with community partners who help set research questions, determine methodology, join in creating research projects, and/or engage in other activities that bridge academic and community contexts.

Other terms were similarly, thickly described, including community engagement, community-engaged scholarship, community-engaged teaching, community-engaged service, community, and reciprocity. Whereas the university policy uses bulleted lists to describe terms, the terms listed in the definitions document are described in one or more paragraphs through comprehensive explications of the outputs, outcomes, and processes of community engagement to ensure the definitions articulate the full values and principles of the Democratic Civic Engagement framework.

School-Level Policy Documents

Although a policy may use a community engagement or broader public-dimension term, it may or may not include enough information or context to allow one to deduce whether CES is demonstrated through outputs, outcomes, process, or some combination thereof. For this reason, nearly half of the schools (three of seven) included CES terms but were coded as having no definitional characteristics. Of the four schools that described the terms, two did so using the full complement of outputs, outcomes, and purposes, similar to the definitions document, while the other two described outputs or processes but not outcomes (see Table 4). This shows a range of ways that faculty writing the school policies chose to articulate CES (or not) and, further, that they chose not to simply adopt the wording introduced by the university policy.

Three of the four policies are clear that collaboration and reciprocity are distinctive, differentiating features of CES. For example, the College of Arts and Science policy states:

Community engaged scholarship is also distinct from other kinds of research in that it is undertaken in collaboration with community partners who help set research questions, determine methodology, join in creating research projects, and/or engage in other activities that bridge the researcher’s academic context and the community context of the partner(s).

That three units wrote somewhat similar statements, specifically stating collaboration and reciprocal processes as distinctive features of CES, suggests they consulted another text apart from the university policy. This distinction echoes the descriptions of CES shared in the definitions document, suggesting that faculty used it to shape their statements.

Department-Level Policy Documents

Over two-thirds of department policies reviewed (26 of 41) described community engagement beyond the naming of a CES term. That means that 15 departments named, or used a term, such as “community engagement” but did not further describe CES at all.

Figure 1 shows the types of characteristics used across the policies. To understand the range of ways that departments described CES, we coded each policy depending on the number and type of definitional characteristics. Understanding the number of characteristics helps us see how expansive or focused the descriptions, and the type of characteristic helps us see which definitional characteristics were most and least relevant to policies.

Figure 1

Frequency of Definitional Characteristics across Policies.

Over one-third (10) referenced one characteristic, nearly one-half (12) referenced two, and just under one-third (8) referenced all three descriptive characteristics. Therefore, descriptions tended to be multidimensional, more so than unidimensional. Those that chose to describe one characteristic tended to describe collaborative and reciprocal processes, more so than outputs and outcomes. This suggests that faculty must have looked elsewhere beyond the preceding university policy for ideas of how to articulate and draft language describing CES, such as the definitions document. For example, the School of Health and Human Sciences copied from the university policy, verbatim, the example list of outputs one might see in each of the categories of teaching, research, and service (see Table 4), and the Public Health Education Department also included a similar list (see Table 5, row 2). Other department policies, such as those shared in Table 5, followed the lead of the definitions document, emphasizing the importance of a more multicharacteristic approach and, especially, processes.

Over half of the departments that described CES in some way (18 of 26) did so as a process through which community members serve a role in the activity or partnership. Approximately half of the department policies

Relationships and Epistemology as Core Descriptions of Process

At the most basic level, our efforts to understand how CES was defined in the various unit policies was to understand whether and how the faculty who sought to legitimize CES as a form of faculty work had succeeded in codifying support into actual policy. We started, initially, from the desire to determine whether the descriptions upheld DCE principles of collaboration, mutual benefit, reciprocity, public purposes, and epistemic inclusion. From the hindsight of nearly a decade, and the growth of attention to and scholarship about the intersections of CES, full participation, and epistemic justice, our research team applied a critical lens on this study. Beyond simply creating a list of categories that might be used like a checklist or rubric for determining whether a statement of CES is upholding the definitional characteristics of CES, we considered what are the ethical implications of articulating (or, more importantly, not articulating) the process dimensions of CES—namely, reciprocal relationships and epistemic inclusion. Do policies that seek to fully recognize CES go far enough if they list activities and artifacts and espouse public purposes and visions—but do not go on to also address elements of the partnership process that are required for epistemically inclusive engagement?

At its most foundational level, it is the process—why and how partners work together—that differentiates CES from traditional forms of scholarship. This was an important insight we developed in coding for definitional characteristics. In many ways, processes are what distinguish CES from other forms of scholarship. Is it precisely because of the elements of relationships and epistemology that CES is distinct from, while often confused with, community-based scholarship, public scholarship, and applied scholarship, although it has elements of each. From the perspective of relationships and epistemology, community-based research can be done in ways in which knowledge is extracted without collaboration from communities, without their say in how it will be interpreted and used, or whether it will be shared with the community. While CES is by nature community based, community-based scholarship is not necessarily community-engaged. From the perspective of relationships and epistemology, CES refers to moving beyond the wall of the academy to collaborate with community partners to cogenerate knowledge whereas public scholarship typically refers to knowledge generated within the academy and shared externally with the public. Finally, from the perspective of relationships and epistemology, applied scholarship is designed to document and solve a specific problem or provide innovative solutions to issues affecting an individual, group, or society through the practical application of research methods to social problems. While community-engaged research by its nature has application for addressing community issues, it differs from applied research, which is typically conducted without relationships of equality with community stakeholders or community input. (For a recent review and further articulation of these terms see Blanchard & Furco, 2021.)

Epistemology and Equity

Community-engaged faculty are likely to be among the most marginalized within traditional academic culture, along with faculty of color, women, and assistant professors (Antonio, 2002; Antonio et al., 2000; Baez, 2000, Bellas & Toutkoushan, 1999; Ellison & Eatman, 2008; O’Meara, 2002; Sax et al., 1996; Turner et al., 2008; Vogelgesang et al., 2010). Faculty of color are more likely to experience stress and dissatisfaction pretenure (Turner et al., 2008), be advised away from CES toward more traditional forms of scholarship, and are more likely to depart their institutions before standing for review (Antonio, 2002).

Relational ways of knowing through collectivist and relationship-centered identities and cultures challenge the individualist and objectivist norms developed in the white, patriarchal, Eurocentric academy. Feminist (Belenky et al., 1986; Naples, 2003; Ward, 2010) and decolonial and Indigenous epistemologies (Smith, 1999) are grounded in the primacy and positionality of the knower and their experiences and relationships as connected and interdependent with knowledge. This kind of an epistemological stance runs counter to and critiques dominant approaches to scholarship and the way that scholarship is validated and legitimized in the academy. Dominant approaches not only marginalize certain forms of scholarship but also the scholars who produce it. For this reason, chairs and senior faculty mentors often suggest that turning away from CES will improve a pretenure faculty member’s case for promotion and tenure, encouraging them to wait until after review to commit time to less highly regarded scholarship or “service” work (Burlingame, 2015). It is in this way that faculty reward policies can create epistemic exclusion. Epistemic exclusion occurs for faculty of color, because they are “more likely than others to have diverse approaches to their scholarship and to study populations and topics that do not fit neatly within these disciplinary norms.” The traditional system of legitimacy “prevents faculty of color from being valued as legitimate and credible knowers/scholars (Settles et al., 2021, p. 495). Drawing attention to individual biases as well as structural/institutional practices, epistemic exclusion research suggests that “seemingly objective” (p. 504) forms of evaluations disproportionally and negatively affect faculty of color.

Finally, processes grounded in relationships and epistemology are marginalized due to current metrics and measures—it is much more difficult, and academically counter-normative, to document, describe, review, and evaluate process than it is to evaluate outputs or outcomes. UNCG’s university policy is evidence of this; it lists many activities and artifacts, essentially overshadowing indicators of outcomes or processes. Alperin et al.’s (2019) research suggests that the types of outputs and outcomes produced by CES are valued the least in promotion and tenure guidelines They also found that promotion and tenure policies tend to provide specific metrics describing research outputs, which reflect traditional scholarship, and while many universities use the term “impact,” it is primarily in relation to research, describing traditional scholarship, and minimally addressing authentic CES, if at all. Alperin et al. also found that CES is sometimes considered a service activity, which in the context of what is valued at a research university is less consequential than research and teaching. For institutions of higher education that do encourage multiple forms of scholarship, the outlook is more positive for community-engaged scholars. Faculty at such institutions are significantly more likely to report that (1) community engagement (and teaching scholarship) counted more for faculty evaluation, (2) a broader set of criteria was used to assess scholarship, and (3) report a higher percentage of tenure and promotion cases that emphasized their work in these areas (O’Meara, 2005). Expanding the definition of scholarship in promotion and tenure policy is a crucial aspect of recruiting, supporting, and retaining an expanded diversity of scholars in our institutions and higher education more broadly.