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| navigate: home: magazine: fall 2000: article | |
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Trends in higher education Redefining and rewarding scholarship through UniSCOPE and Faculty Senate Committee on Outreach Activities By Celena E. Kusch | ||||||||
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Traditional university scholarship appears in a few highly recognizable forms: research is published in peer-edited journals and books; teaching occurs in resident undergraduate and graduate courses; and service is demonstrated through participation in University committees, professional and scholarly associations and public service related to one’s disciplinary expertise. For the thousands of Penn State faculty members who are producing scholarship that breaks the mold, however, their work can look dramatically different. Outreach research might produce new government policy directives or a change in consumer habits; outreach teaching may engage just a handful of adult learners through courses held in a barn, at a child care center, within a company conference room or even in cyberspace; and outreach service could bring faculty into contact with the needs of K–12 children or local community development organizations. Outreach, or what many in higher education are calling the “scholarship of engagement,” involves forging partnerships between faculty and the nonacademic communities who rely directly upon university expertise. Such partnerships create meaningful opportunities to apply new knowledge in a timely and synergistic manner within those communities. In order to promote this model of engaged scholarship, university leaders throughout the country are calling upon departments and colleges to encourage their faculty to explore innovative ways to demonstrate the relevance of their scholarly endeavors in facing society’s current challenges and needs. According to Dr. Theodore R. Alter, associate vice president for outreach and director of Cooperative Extension, the public mission of the land-grant university and its outreach activities “enhances individual and collective human capacity to be engaged in society.” “Through this democratizing function,” Alter explained, “faculty have the opportunity to learn from engagement in order to generate not only knowledge, but also wisdom about what is important in society. Outreach is not a one-way model. The act of bringing together different people with different ways of learning, different ways of knowing and different contexts in order to learn from each other is real scholarship. We need to focus our work on those problems and challenges that are really important. By developing wisdom through the scholarship of engagement, we can identify what those challenges are.” While such efforts are widely applauded outside the university, often outreach forms of scholarship can be invisible within the university system for recognition and rewards precisely because they do not fit the traditional models for teaching, research and service. Dr. Patricia A. Book, associate vice president for outreach and executive director of the Division of Continuing Education, points to current trends in the way institutions define those missions as a sign of the growing recognition of outreach scholarship. “In recent years, the national dialogue in higher education circles about teaching, research and service following Ernest Boyer’s work on scholarship has been changing to broaden our thinking about scholarship and to focus more on the outcomes, that is, learning, discovery and engagement. This change of terminology is both an indicator of change and an important measurement of how much faculty members are beginning to embrace that change, especially in institutions like ours that have so many faculty actively engaged in outreach activities.” Book further suggested, “In the tripartite mission of teaching, research and service, service gets valued least, so we must take care to avoid simply equating outreach or engagement with service. It is important to include all outreach activities — outreach teaching, outreach research and outreach service — within the review process and to give this important and integral work the recognition it deserves. We must also attend to assessments of the quality and impact of these outreach activities so that peers can review this work with comparable rigor to other faculty activities.” At Penn State, two separate faculty organizations have accepted the challenge of finding ways to improve recognition of outreach activities University-wide. Both groups, the University Scholarship and Criteria for Outreach and Performance Evaluation (UniSCOPE) learning community and the Faculty Senate Committee on Outreach Activities, are releasing reports of their findings and recommendations this year. “Both the UniSCOPE report and the Faculty Senate Committee’s work have significantly contributed to and advanced our understanding and dialogue about outreach activities at Penn State,” Book added. UniSCOPE
The UniSCOPE learning community grew out of the Keystone 21 project, which also provides administrative support for the group. Penn State’s Keystone 21 is one of 13 university-based projects nationwide that form the Food Systems Professions Education Initiative of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The two goals of the program are to prepare food systems professionals for the 21st century through the development of new formal and nonformal educational programs and to strengthen the ability of land-grant universities to meet the challenges posed by rapid social change by encouraging new forms of teaching, research and service.
“One of the objectives of the Keystone 21 project is to create dialogue around the issue of faculty reward and recognition,” said Alter, who also serves as Keystone 21 project director. “Nationally, we need to see a real institutional change in higher education if we are to embrace greater engagement in agricultural and food systems or any other field. If we are to bring about a transformational change in the way we operate internally and with respect to all of society, rewards and recognition must not be a barrier.”
Within the Keystone 21 faculty advisory committee, Alter proposed the idea of creating a learning community of scholars to address questions of institutional change. Then faculty decided to explore the issue of recognizing and rewarding new forms of scholarship. They invited a group of faculty and administrators from across the University to initiate and participate in creating a learning community on the topic.
Dr. Drew Hyman, professor of public policy and community systems, serves as chair of UniSCOPE. He praised the dedication of the faculty volunteers who come from many colleges and campuses, noting, “This is truly a grassroots faculty group. When UniSCOPE started, we all agreed to meet once a month for six months. We’re now going on several years, and everyone has been very faithful in attending meetings and wrestling with these issues.”
Alter reflected on the extraordinary support the Penn State faculty has given the community, saying, “I thought it would be a six-month project, but it has taken on a life of its own. The UniSCOPE faculty have generated an extremely promising report and have continued to bring other members of the University community into their dialogue. Those results show that a learning community can make things happen.”
The UniSCOPE report is titled “UniSCOPE 2000: A Multidimensional Model of Scholarship for the 21st Century: A UniSCOPE Learning Community Challenge to the Penn State Community of Scholars.”
Hyman explained its goal, saying, “The intent of UniSCOPE is to provide a framework for creating an equitable system for recognizing and rewarding the full range of University scholarship. UniSCOPE puts different forms of scholarship into a common context and provides a framework through which everyone throughout the University system can view and develop criteria for comparing the different forms of scholarship.”
The UniSCOPE report establishes what it calls “a multidimensional model that conceptualizes each of the three mission areas of the University — teaching, research and service — as the forms of scholarship.”
“UniSCOPE also recognizes that the functions of scholarship — discovery, integration, application and education — are inherent in these three forms of scholarship and views outreach scholarship as an integral component of each. Finally, the types of scholarship, the media for delivery and the audiences for scholarship can be seen as a continuum. These five dimensions are used to create a multidimensional model of scholarship,” the report states (see Fig. 1).
By examining the many dimensions of faculty work — including a variety of functions, audiences and media for delivery — the report helps faculty and administrators recognize, compare and evaluate the product and impact of various activities, even when they don’t fit into traditional molds.
“The concern of many faculty and administrators is that nontheoretical research and types of scholarship get eclipsed by the traditional research product of the refereed journal or book,” Hyman explained. “Often faculty get the message that it is all right to do applied research and creative works, but once you’re done, you must additionally write the peer-reviewed journal article for the work to be recognized. At the same time, we don’t require the authors of theoretical articles to demonstrate applications in the real world for them to be recognized. I view that as a double standard. (See Fig. 2.)
“The intent of UniSCOPE is not to say that we shouldn’t be publishing,” Hyman added, “but to recognize that other rigorous academic work is being done at the University, and each type should be recognized equitably for its primary product. We consider this a work in progress, and our UniSCOPE will precipitate a University-wide process leading to greater recognition of applied work, Continuing Education, Cooperative Extension, Technology Transfer, creative works in the media, Distance Education and other forms of outreach scholarship for their own inherent results. The end result would be a more vibrant and diverse University and more involved and satisfied faculty.”
Alter praised the findings of the report, saying, “The thing that is really laudable about the UniSCOPE project is that they view outreach as an integral part of all scholarship. It lies within the continuum of scholarly practice in teaching, in research and in service.
“This idea of a continuum of scholarship from knowledge generation to knowledge application is not a new idea,” Alter added, “but you don’t see it expressed in quite this way in the literature. In many fields, you can trace the intellectual trail of the continuum of scholarship, but it is not expressed well nor, more importantly, is it applied to the current work of faculty. UniSCOPE definitely provides a new way of understanding scholarship.”
According to Dr. Rodney A. Erickson, executive vice president and provost, the UniSCOPE report provides an extraordinarily lucid statement about outreach. “I find the UniSCOPE report compelling, because it draws heavily on everyday examples of teaching scholarship, research scholarship and service scholarship and the ways in which outreach is woven through each. It clearly delineates the differences between outreach and service, a relationship that has traditionally been poorly understood. These kinds of examples are a key to promoting better understanding of outreach among faculty and staff.” Faculty Senate Committee on Outreach Activities
The second and older of the two groups to address outreach scholarship at Penn State was established by the University Faculty Senate, the University-wide governing body. The duties of the Faculty Senate Committee on Outreach Activities are to recommend policy and advise the University on outreach activities. The committee is charged with the task of identifying University outreach, establishing evaluation methodologies to ensure quality and creating recognition measures to reward outstanding performance, particularly in the areas of noncredit instruction, service and other programs beyond the sphere of resident education.
Book, who serves on the committee, explained the essential role of this committee in the current academic climate, saying, “Penn State faculty are actively engaged in outreach activities, but in many cases, they perceive the reward for this work to be personal reward as opposed to institutional recognition. Penn State leadership has been wonderfully supportive in being key advocates for outreach scholarship, but implementation of these changes needs to permeate the University at all levels.
“The Faculty Senate provided leadership to carry the conversation further by establishing the Committee on Outreach Activities. Through the committee’s work, the Senate has adopted changes in the promotion and tenure guidelines to include outreach teaching, outreach research and outreach service so that these activities are clearly a legitimate component of faculty activity. The committee is continuing to explore ways to document and evaluate outreach activities in the faculty review process in a way that is credible and rigorous,” Book added.
According to Dr. Jacob De Rooy, associate professor of managerial economics at Penn State Harrisburg and chair of the Faculty Senate Committee on Outreach Activities, the committee’s pending report to the Senate is designed to suggest methods for increasing recognition of faculty involvement in outreach and to promote further involvement as more faculty reap more than personal rewards.
Speaking of the need for such measures, De Rooy noted, “Just before I became chair, the committee was successful in having outreach language placed into the areas of teaching, research and service in the Penn State tenure and promotion documentation. Although we did achieve that major development, we are concerned that the language is not being used consistently.
“In many cases, deans and department heads do not know how to interpret evidence of outreach teaching, outreach research and outreach service. That’s the missing link. We have standard documentation and ways of assessing and evaluating peer-oriented research and resident instruction, but we need similarly powerful yardsticks and evaluation tools for outreach research and outreach teaching. Because we do not yet have those tools, we aren’t using the broader definition of faculty roles that the promotion and tenure guidelines include. This is where the UniSCOPE report dovetails nicely with the work of our committee,” he added.
One obstacle the committee has faced in its efforts to develop those tools has been the misconception that recognizing and supporting outreach scholarship might add new responsibilities to the faculty workload. De Rooy stressed that this is not the case.
“In the Faculty Senate report, we wish to emphasize that we are not expecting faculty at Penn State to do work in addition to their existing levels of faculty engagement with outreach. Instead, we want to recognize the extensive outreach activity already being done throughout the University and to develop methods for evaluating and assessing outreach. We want to increase recognition of existing faculty outreach and to broaden our views of faculty expectations to include outreach,” De Rooy said.
As the Senate Committee on Outreach Activities findings suggest, current policies that fail to recognize outreach discourage faculty from engaging in community collaborations. There is a great need, they argue, to fit the current outreach activities of Penn State faculty into departmental expectations for teaching, research and service.
“Internally at Penn State, to allow for broader definitions of our teaching, research and service, we need to make changes in infrastructure,” De Rooy said. “People are already doing outreach work. We are calling for deans and department heads to come together with faculty members, as appropriate, and to redefine their roles and job descriptions to include outreach and possibly to replace some of their traditional roles to generate outreach-oriented research. We are not suggesting that faculty add a new layer of responsibilities; instead we are saying that maybe it is appropriate to reduce levels of peer-oriented scholarship and replace it with outreach forms.”
The pending report provides general methods to consider for rewarding outreach activity, but De Rooy pointed out the crucial role of deans, department heads and individual faculty in applying and refining those methods throughout the University. The project of specifying methods for evaluation and assessment, he added, will involve both the future Senate Committee on Outreach Activities and the Faculty Affairs Committee. A look ahead
Although the work of both UniSCOPE and the Faculty Senate Committee on Outreach Activities reflect current national trends in higher education, both groups’ reports suggest an important challenge for the future.
According to De Rooy, the future goals of UniSCOPE and the Faculty Senate Committee are “complementary, but not the same,” adding that the Faculty Senate Committee “wishes to establish methods for assessing and documenting existing faculty participation in outreach. We hope the UniSCOPE report will be helpful in defining scholarship in terms of outreach so that we may continue the work of recognizing and valuing that scholarship throughout the University.”
Hyman, too, spoke of his group’s report as just a beginning, noting, “One of the interesting findings of the UniSCOPE report is that the current promotion and tenure guidelines are amenable to the kinds of recognition UniSCOPE talks about, but most of us, myself included, lack the perspective to view the whole range of scholarship within a common context. After working with UniSCOPE, I am beginning to look at various types of scholarship in different ways, to go beyond the list of publications and resident teaching and to recognize different kinds of scholarship when I see them in a dossier, applications in the field or the media. This is the process we all need to go through to perceive and appreciate the full range of University scholarship. The goal of the UniSCOPE report is to provide a perspective the whole Penn State community can use for recognizing scholarship in the work of colleagues.”
With the combined momentum of the two groups, it seems likely that Penn State will make progress in recognizing and rewarding outreach scholarship. Alter commented on the serendipity of the two committees’ work on outreach scholarship emerging at roughly the same time, saying, “There’s an organic interest in reexamining the role of outreach scholarship that came from within the Penn State community and has sustained itself. My hope is that the work of UniSCOPE and the Faculty Senate Committee on Outreach Activities will seed a broader dialogue on the notion of scholarship, both throughout the University and nationwide.” | |||||||
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© 2002 Outreach Communications, Outreach & Cooperative Extension, The Pennsylvania State University phone: (814) 865-8108, fax: (814) 863-2765, e-mail: outreachnews@outreach.psu.edu |
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