Advancing Institutional Change to Encourage Faculty Participation in Research-Practice Partnerships

Abstract

University faculty have the talent, creativity, and training to tackle the serious challenges confronting our education system today, but the incentive structure in universities is often at odds with real-world contributions. What tensions are experienced by faculty who may be interested in partnership-oriented, engaged scholarship? How can these tensions be addressed? This chapter explores the tensions, particularly in the context of education research-practice partnerships, and provide examples from universities that are taking steps to lessen the tensions and encourage faculty participation in partnerships. By adopting new structures and incentives, these universities are providing a pathway to engaged scholarship that may ultimately increase the power of research to address the problems that educators face each day. However, university leaders who are implementing institutional change must grapple with long-established norms and traditions, and show how new ways of assessing the value of research will benefit universities as well as their communities.

A major barrier to the flourishing of research-practice partnerships in education is that university faculty—among the key actors on one side of the partnership—face challenges to participation because most universities are not structured to encourage and reward partnership-oriented research. These challenges place the interests of faculty committed to partnerships in tension with university norms and structures that discourage participation. Simultaneously, universities often encounter external pressures to encourage more engagement with their communities, yet many other faculty see such engagement as inconsistent with their roles. This chapter lays out the structural barriers and inherent tensions that constrain faculty engagement in education research-practice partnerships (RPPs). Then, through examination of contexts in which RPPs have operated successfully, it illustrates the steps that universities can take to allow, encourage, and incentivize faculty participation in education RPPs. It concludes by identifying conditions that give reason to anticipate that universities can change to provide such support, and that the time is ripe for doing so.

Research-Practice Partnerships as Contexts for Engaged Scholarship

A palpable wave of education RPPs has crested across the country over the last 15 years. The National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships now boasts over 50 members nationwide, typically pairing universities with large school districts, although some are headquartered at research firms and some involve state education agencies. Most have taken the form of the research consortium pioneered by such veterans as the Consortium for Chicago Schools Research and the Research Alliance for New York City Schools, but in fact a variety of partnership arrangements exist (Coburn & Penuel, 2016; Farrell et al., 2021). For university faculty who study education, RPPs offer an opportunity to produce research that is useful and gets used, because studies that are co-designed with school systems and that address questions whose answers are of interest to education leaders have increased likelihood of research use, compared to studies stimulated purely by academic concerns (DuMont, 2018; Tseng, 2022; Turley & Stevens, 2015). Such opportunities are especially salient because of the apparent increase in faculty who desire to produce work that actually makes a difference in the lives of educators and learners (Beaulieu et al., 2018). Despite these advantages, however, participation of faculty in RPPs is far from widespread, even in universities that participate in partnerships. Many faculty members have the talent, training, and creativity to contribute meaningfully to partnerships, but structural barriers in their universities limit or even prevent them from participating. As Welsh (2021, p. 188) commented in concluding a recent review, “there is an urgent need to consider how RPPs can be incentivized and supported in the academy.”

Not only do faculty members who want their research to matter in the real world benefit from the opportunities afforded by RPPs (Phillips, 2019; Turley & Stevens, 2015), but universities stand to gain as well (Gamoran, 2018). Practically every university has an engagement mission; for private universities, the mission often includes service to the local community, and for state universities, the mission invariably includes service to the state. Harnessing the capacity of faculty members to conduct research in the context of partnerships can help universities fortify their worth at a time when they are often attacked as being biased, out of touch, and not worth their considerable costs (Gamoran, 2018, 2020). Consequently universities themselves have incentives to encourage engaged scholarship, although they face countervailing pressures as well.

Tensions of Engaged Scholarship

Researcher participation in collaborative education research ventures goes by many names, including publicly engaged scholarship, community-engaged scholarship, partnership-oriented scholarship, and collaborative community-engaged scholarship (Eatman et al., 2018; Warren et al., 2018). Common to all these terms is the notion that researchers appointed at the university pursue their studies in collaboration with leaders in education service settings, such as school districts, state education agencies, and community-based organizations. Researchers are often motivated to pursue engaged scholarship because they want their research to make a difference (Hart & Silka, 2020). In a recent overview, Eatman et al. (2018, p. 534) found that “scholars of color have historically been at the forefront” of engaged scholarship. According to these authors, scholars of color often view entry into the academic world as a means to an end, where the goal is to serve their communities of origin. Participation is constrained for all faculty members by a number of barriers in the university, including the norms of their disciplines, the reward structure within the university, the press of multiple responsibilities, and limits on resources that support RPPs and the researchers who participate in them. These barriers may be especially daunting for scholars of color who are often tapped for extra service obligations beyond the usual for other faculty members (Louie & Wilson-Ahlstrom, 2018).

Mismatch Between Disciplinary Norms and Engaged Scholarship

Faculty members in research universities typically identify with the disciplines in which they were trained. Disciplines, in turn, award prestige to researchers who build upon disciplinary knowledge through theoretical and empirical contributions, and publish those contributions in selective outlets including journals and books. Engaged scholarship, by contrast, is not motivated by disciplinary knowledge. Instead, it applies disciplinary knowledge to address problems in the real world. Disciplinary knowledge may play an essential role in engaged scholarship by pointing at where to look for responses to social problems, identifying possible mechanisms through which problems can be addressed, and providing concepts and methodological techniques that allow a sophisticated research response. But because the primary aim of engaged scholarship is to respond to community challenges rather than to contribute to disciplinary questions in elite publications, researchers who identify with and seek status within their disciplines may be disinclined to participate in engaged scholarship (Hart & Silka, 2020). This phenomenon appears most prevalent at research-intensive universities; as Ozer et al. (2021) noted, among 359 colleges and universities that have achieved community-engaged status on the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification System, only 28 (8%) are R1 universities. ¹

The distinction between engaged scholarship and scholarship oriented to disciplinary knowledge, while useful for understanding the way engaged scholarship may be in tension with disciplinary norms, is not a dichotomy between mutually exclusive categories. On the contrary, many research studies both contribute to the advancement of research and serve the public good. For example, The Make-or-Break Year (Phillips, 2019) tells the story of how the Consortium for Chicago Schools Research and the Chicago Public Schools worked together to identify early warning signs for students who were at risk of dropping out, target responses to identified students, and ultimately reduce the dropout rate in Chicago schools. The research behind the early warning system contributed to theory and evidence about predictors of dropout (Allensworth & Easton, 2005; Roderick & Camburn, 1999), even as it helped the school district better meet the needs of its students. But scholarship that serves both aims is typically valued in the university for its contributions to research alone, while its practical value may go unrecognized, and this has problematic consequences for the way rewards are allocated within the university.

Tension Between the Aims of Engaged Scholarship and the Reward Structure of the University

Even among faculty who are motivated to pursue engaged scholarship out of a commitment to advancing the public good, many are held back by tensions between the aims of engaged scholarship and the reward structure of the research university (Fischman et al., 2018). Career advancement within the academy rests on excellence in research, teaching, and service, and research-intensive universities tend to place most of the emphasis on research. Traditionally, this has meant publishing well-regarded scholarly books and/or articles in highly selective academic journals. Although academic publishing may result from partnership-oriented, engaged scholarship, that is not its primary goal. Instead, the goal is to jointly construct a research agenda that addresses questions whose answers will make a real difference on the practice side of the partnership (Turley & Stevens, 2015). Often, research conducted with this aim is not even counted as research within the university, even though it may rigorously pursue questions relevant to practice (Ellison & Eatman, 2008; Warren et al., 2018). Instead it is recorded as service and therefore marginalized in the reward structure (Eatman et al., 2018; Ozer et al., 2021). Meanwhile, the products of engaged scholarship that are aimed at audiences outside the academy, such as research reports to a state or local school district, policy briefs, and memoranda, often go unassessed and uncounted in the reward system, even when they are highly consequential and could affect thousands of students or more (Eatman et al., 2018). In a study of perceptions of engaged scholarship, one interview subject summed up the situation as follows:

The two situations I see are, one reason people don’t do public scholarship work even if they want to is because they figure it’s not going to have any role in tenure. And, two, I see situations in which people who do incredible or significant public scholarly work don’t know how to put it in the context of their tenure case. People say, “Oh, it’s gonna hurt me.” People don’t know how to put it in effectively. . .and it ends up. . .just getting placed under service, which is often just a list (Ellison & Eatman, 2008, p. 17).

Clearly, the academic reward system poses a significant barrier to engaged scholarship, especially in the early career (Hart & Silka, 2020). In a review of two decades of engaged scholarship, Beaulieu et al. (2018) concluded that “the current definition of academic prestige and the publish-or-perish culture are the greatest impediments to engagement.”

Commenting on this tension, Allison Atteberry, then an assistant professor of education at the University of Colorado-Boulder working to establish an RPP with the Denver Public Schools, told Education Week reporter Sparks (2019),

The incentive structures of both the [district] partner and researchers in higher education are really set against building strong relationships and creating partnerships. Districts are strapped for time and resources and they have to make decisions on the fly as fast as they can in a real-world context. And, on the flip side, researchers in universities are really focused on a slower pace of research. It’s very important that the questions that you ask are at the cutting edge of the field and publishable, as opposed to actionable. That can lead researchers to be less concerned about how that affects the partner. They don’t have a lot of incentives to be responsive. And products that often comes out are journal publications, which are not speaking to the audience from which the data was collected. I think that people realize that if we keep doing this over and over and over again, it really does damage to the relationship between us and the professionals we’re trying to support, and this group of kids that we’re trying to support.

Surmounting this tension was a major challenge for Atteberry and her colleagues as they initiated and built upon their partnership (Schultz & Yadama, 2022).

Pressures of Time and Money

Successful RPPs rest on relationships of trust between researchers and practitioners. Establishing trust takes a considerable investment of time on both sides (Turley & Stevens, 2015). As Ozer et al. (2021, p. 1301) reported based on their own experiences and those of others, “it can take years to develop reciprocal partnerships to enable strong research designs; data-sharing; and collaboration on analyses, findings, publications, and policies.” From the university side, time spent on establishing the partnership and all it entails means that researchers have less time to pursue studies that address theoretical challenges in their disciplines (Eatman et al., 2018; Riggs, 2013). Hence the investment of time in the partnership puts them at a disadvantage when it comes to producing the markers of traditional academic scholarship. Of course, it has other advantages, not only the chance to make a difference in the real world but access to data that may be useful for academic publishing as well as engaged scholarship. For early career researchers, especially, it is risky to invest the time it takes to build the partnership. Even more senior researchers may feel that investing the time it takes to build the partnership exceeds their tolerance for risk when it comes to the payoff, academic or practical, of their efforts.

Time is not the only resource in short supply among university researchers. Funding may also be constrained (Turley & Stevens, 2015). At least two sorts of funding barriers make it difficult to pursue research-practice partnerships. First, until recently, obtaining funds to pursue research studies within partnerships was challenged by the usual insistence of funding agencies that the implications of the research extend beyond the specific case at hand. Partnership-oriented scholarship had to be justified, not in its own terms, but for its ability to generalize to a wider range of contexts. More recently, funders such as the William T. Grant Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the Institute of Education Sciences have promoted the funding of partnership-based research. ² Yet even as funding may have increased, so too has interest in partnerships grown, as witnessed by expansion in the membership of NNERPP. Consequently the competition for funding may be as intense as ever, if not more so.

Second, if funds to support partnership-based research are a challenge, funds to support the infrastructure of partnerships can be even more difficult to obtain (Ozer et al., 2021). Typically, research funders support research studies, but partnerships cannot be sustained by specific study support alone. Instead, they need funding for leadership, technical support, and other infrastructure purposes that allow the partners to collaborate, establish trust, build research agendas, and serve as a source of information for the community (London et al., 2022). These activities are not free, and yet they are essential for a partnership to emerge and thrive.

In engineering and biomedical research, “tech transfer” (the transfer of knowledge from the academic to the private sector) is valued and financial capital may be available because of the potential for monetary return on investment. In the social sciences, by contrast, the potential to monetize discoveries is limited. As a result, education RPPs lack access to entrepreneurial resources that may be more prevalent in other fields, even though their research may hold much promise for social impact (Gamoran, 2018).

Resolving the Tensions: Can Universities Change?

Despite the challenges, recent evidence suggests that universities can change to remove barriers and even encourage engaged scholarship, in the social sciences in general and in education in particular. At least two sources of pressure appear to be creating momentum for this change. First is the need for universities to show their value to their states and communities. As I have argued elsewhere, “institutions that turn their attention to serving the public good may be best poised to thrive and deliver lasting value” (Gamoran, 2018). Many critics across the political spectrum accuse universities of being isolated and out of touch, and engaged scholarship is one way to counter that claim. Second, faculty members themselves are frustrated by the insularity of their disciplines and the seeming arbitrary academic reward system in which contributions to disciplinary knowledge are valued and contributions to the public good are disrespected (Eatman et al., 2018; Gamoran, 2018; Hart & Silka, 2020).

These two sources of pressure—institutional need to serve communities, and faculty interest in pursuing research that matters for communities—may fuel strategies to overcome structural barriers. At the university level, presidents, provosts, and deans are sensitive to the need to show their social contributions, but they may need to win over faculty governance systems that are more sensitive to discipline-based criteria of value. Individual faculty members, meanwhile, may advocate among their colleagues for greater appreciation of the value of partnership-oriented research.

In many universities, including research-intensive universities, faculty members seek ways to reconcile the reward system with their commitments to engaged scholarship (Ozer et al., 2021), and to overcome the challenges posed by the need for time and money. Examples are now emerging from a number of universities that exhibit promise for the future.

To identify case studies of universities pursuing such changes I examined instances reported in the published literature as well as overviews of engaged scholarship activities. Most centrally, however, I gathered published reports from recipients of the William T. Grant Foundation’s Institutional Challenge Grant, a program that is also supported by the Spencer Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. This funding opportunity challenges universities to create partnerships with non-profit organizations or government agencies, and to jointly develop and execute research agendas aimed at reducing inequality in youth outcomes. It also calls on participants to build the capacity of the partner organization to use evidence in its decision making, and it challenges the university to create institutional change to encourage and incentivize faculty participation in partnership-oriented, engaged scholarship. With the first grant awarded to Cornell University in 2018, participants are now beginning to provide testimony on the challenges they have encountered and their strategies for success (Bobonis & Medelius, 2019; Dunifon, 2021; London et al., 2022; London & Glass, 2022; Ozer, 2021; Ozer et al., 2021; Schultz & Yadama, 2022; Vélez et al., 2021; Yadama et al., 2021). ³ These cases provided evidence on strategies for overcoming the structural barriers and misaligned incentives that create tensions for engaged scholarship in the context of partnerships.

Addressing the Normative Culture of the University

Faculty committed to engaged scholarship often struggle because of the misalignment of their own professional values and those of the university, an institution in which prestige, power, and resources depend on the advancement of academic disciplines. Yet recent examples demonstrate how some university leaders and faculty members have managed to create a culture in which engaged scholarship is valued. Key elements of cultural change in these examples include articulating shared values, celebrating accomplishments, and creating new roles to support faculty participation in partnerships.

In a case study of their own experiences, Hart and Silka (2020) recounted how faculty in environmental studies at the University of Maine created a new space to pursue research aimed at finding real-world solutions to environmental problems. Their partnerships included public and private sector stakeholders. One of their first steps was to create a “statement of core values” (p. 67). Importantly, these faculty members were not trying to transform the entire university, but rather to make the university more hospitable to their own commitment to partnership-oriented, engaged scholarship. As the authors noted (p. 67):

Some researchers expressed concern that we wanted all faculty to become involved in stakeholder-engaged, solutions-driven, interdisciplinary research. To reassure those with different priorities, we often quoted our colleague Dave Secord, who led an interdisciplinary program at the University of Washington: “We’re not trying to change the whole university; we’re just trying to create more room within the university for this kind of work.”

The pattern of localized cultural change that characterizes a subset of the institution—often a school or college—appears in several case studies. At Cornell University, for example, the College of Human Ecology has made great strides toward engaged scholarship (Dunifon, 2021). Likewise at two University of California campuses, Berkeley and Santa Cruz, faculty who pursue research in partnerships are concentrated within units: as Ozer, Langhout, and Weinstein explained, despite being an early leader in public engagement, at least in its teaching mission, “Berkeley (like Santa Cruz) now lags behind other Carnegie-classified [community-engaged] campuses as a whole while specific units maintain deep strengths in and commitments to public scholarship” (p. 1297).

Sometimes, efforts to support engaged scholarship at one level of the university (department or college) can gain momentum from new strategic aims at another (college or campus). At Boston College, for example, the School of Social Work’s partnership with United Way was bolstered by the campus goal to bring research evidence to community issues (Schultz & Yadama, 2022; Yadama et al., 2021). Likewise, the University of Toronto’s collaboration with the Puerto Rico Department of Education received a boost from the interest of the Department of Economics in supporting partnerships. As a result of this initial collaboration, the College of Arts and Sciences has initiated a policy research lab to connect faculty and public agencies and facilitate RPPs (Bobonis & Medelius, 2019).

Celebrating the accomplishments of publicly engaged scholars is another meaningful aspect of culture change within the university. When the School of Human Ecology at Cornell won the first Institutional Challenge Grant from the William T. Grant Foundation, “it was prominently noted” (Dunifon, 2021). Soon after, the School was named an Engaged College by the Cornell-based David C. Einhorn Center for Community Engagement. It was the first school to receive this designation and it was regarded as an honor. This sort of recognition helps create legitimacy for publicly engaged scholarship and the faculty members involved. Hart and Silka (2020) provided another example from their experience at the University of Maine. There, the George C. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions hosts an annual award celebration that recognizes outstanding research teams and community partners. Likewise, both UC-Berkeley and UC-Santa Cruz offer annual, campus-wide awards for engaged scholarship (Ozer et al., 2021). Leaders who bring university staff and community organizations together provide another form of recognition for the value of partnerships. For example, when Turley and Stevens (2015) created the Houston Education Research Consortium at Rice University, they had the support of top university leadership to broker the relationship between the university and the school district. In these examples, university leaders who see value for the university in public engagement aim to re-orient the university’s norms to support faculty who wish to pursue research in the context of partnerships.

Another common strategy to try to shift the culture of the university to embrace partnership-oriented scholarship is to create a new role, typically at the college level, to provide leadership to foster faculty participation. Whereas schools of education commonly employ staff leaders charged with managing outreach activities, such as relationships with alumni or directors of professional development, this new role entails a shift in priorities. While still responsible for building and sustaining relationships with school districts or other outside entities, a focus on partnerships is the hallmark of this new role. For example at Cornell, Rachel Dunifon, the dean of the School of Human Ecology (and leader of Cornell’s Institutional Challenge Grant) created a new associate dean of outreach and extension to lead public engagement and engaged research. As Dunifon (2021) explained, “this appointment elevates the College’s outreach and extension work, integrates it with the College’s strategic planning and leadership structure, and increases the impact and visibility of engaged work within the College.” Creating leadership to support collaborative, community-engaged scholarship not only addresses issues of infrastructure, but also helps provide legitimacy for the work undertaken by faculty.

Conversely, writers on successful partnership cases at Berkeley and Santa Cruz identified the lack of a central infrastructure to provide leadership and coordination as “a key missing piece” in their attempts “to grow the number of partnered initiatives to address social problems, and to advance institutional change efforts” (Ozer et al., 2021, p. 1304). Whereas Berkeley previously had a center for community-engaged research, its focus was on the teaching mission rather than on the research itself. In the absence of such leadership and coordination, partnership leaders found it difficult to advance institutional change beyond their own partnerships. Explaining the need for such leadership, the authors commented, “Infrastructural support would go beyond visibility and resource-sharing to engage strategically to promote institutional changes regarding alignments with course offerings, pursue external funding opportunities, fuel intellectual and ethical discourse across partnerships, and productively address equity issues” (p. 1304). Both the presence of such support at Cornell and the noted absence at Berkeley highlights the potential for new leadership roles to create space, visibility, and institutional support for RPPs.

Reading across these cases, the centrality of interdisciplinarity to finding a home for partnership work in universities is striking. Whether the external partner is a school district, a community organization, or a social service agency, the university participants are invariably linked not only by their shared commitment to engaged scholarship, but also by their collaboration across disciplines. Why might this be the case? One strong possibility is that when it comes to real-world problems (as opposed to disciplinary theories), a single discipline will not suffice. Just as social problems are multifaceted—for example, achievement gaps are not just a matter of schooling, but also reflect housing, employment, and the nexus of education, justice, and child welfare—research to address these challenges is more likely to succeed when it draws on ideas and tools from multiple disciplines. As a result, researchers who are committed to research that serves the public good may also tend to be open to interdisciplinary collaboration.

Another possible confluence that may support cultural change in universities (or specific units of universities) may be the connection between engaged scholarship and the pursuit of racial and economic justice. For the William T. Grant Foundation’s Institutional Challenge Grant, this connection is present by design, as applicants are required to pursue a research agenda focused on reducing inequality in youth outcomes. By some indications, however, the connection may be inherent. Dunifon (2021) explained that engaged scholarship “dovetails with another critical priority area for the College: racial and social justice. . .The two priorities—engaged learning and research, and racial and social justice—reinforce each other and constitute the College’s key areas of focus going forward.” Similarly, Ozer, Langhout, and Weinstein expressed their vision of public psychology as one that “advances equity in the broader society via sustained and reciprocal partnerships within and outside the academy” (p. 1295). This connection between engaged scholarship and research oriented to social justice may also be aligned with Eatman et al.’s (2018) finding that scholars of color have often played the leading role in engaged scholarship on their campuses.

Although education RPPs are intentionally organized to leverage diverse expertise (Farrell et al., 2021), figures have not been reported on the racial or ethnic composition of their leadership teams or research staff. Among the Institutional Challenge Grants, 5 of 12 leaders from the university side and 7 of 12 leaders from the partner agencies identify as persons of color. These relatively high proportions compared to the representation of persons of color in university and non-profit leadership more generally may reflect unique features of the Institutional Challenge Grants, notably their focus on equity outcomes and their mandate to reshape university structures and incentives to encourage faculty participation in RPPs. In education, Diamond (2021) argued that RPPs need to confront the contradictory roles that schools have played in both advancing and impeding racial equity:

In sum, RPPs have the potential to forge relationships that lead to new possibilities for racial justice. However, they also run the risk of reproducing the very inequities that many claim to challenge. To avoid the second scenario, we need to confront racial injustice directly and build RPPs that are committed to dismantling it.

Pursuing equity-oriented research through an RPP is a central aim of the University of California-Santa Cruz collaboration with community partners under the auspices of United Way. London and Glass (2022) explained that centering the partnership on community needs is not just a matter of producing useful research, but allowing multiple voices to have a say in what counts as evidence and how evidence is used:

Securing the inclusion and legitimacy of community-generated research questions and knowledge are not just fixes to the research process. They also entail substantive re-orientations at virtually all levels of the research university, including its funding sources, to enliven and warrant its public good missions. Most challenging, true equity-oriented research must upend traditional power dynamics where university researchers are viewed as apex knowledge producers. Democratizing the knowledge production process to recognize the valued and essential contributions of both the researcher and the community partners is essential for creating equitable research collaborations.

In these examples, meaningful cultural change undergirds the university’s effort to engage with the wider community.

Revising the Reward Structure to Remove Barriers to Engaged Scholarship

Several writers have identified the difficulty of incorporating engaged scholarship into the criteria of career advancement for university faculty as the primary barrier to incentivizing engaged scholarship in the university (Beaulieu et al., 2018; Hart & Silka, 2020; Ozer et al., 2021). Most case reports focus on promotion to tenure, although advances at other career stages also warrant attention. Meeting this challenge requires, first, reaching consensus on what makes engaged scholarship appropriately counted as a research contribution (as opposed to service); second, on what artifacts should be examined to assess the contribution of engaged scholarship; and third, on how those artifacts can be judged.

The distinction between research and service is critical, especially in research-intensive universities, because even though both, along with teaching, are criteria of career advancement, in practice the former weighs far more heavily than the latter. Engaged scholarship is research rather than service when it centrally involves the construction of new knowledge. As Ozer, Langhout, and Weinstein explained, citing Oakes’ (2018) presidential address to the American Educational Research Association, public scholarship involves “distinctive partnered modes of engagement to solve tangible social issues. Public scholarship is further distinguished from public engagement in actively engaging public stakeholders for knowledge building” (p. 1294). Viewed in this light, provision of technical assistance or professional development would be a service activity, but a study that generates new knowledge is a research activity, even if its contribution is to advance understanding or help make decisions in a local context rather than to advance disciplinary knowledge. This understanding hearkens back to a definition offered a decade earlier by Ellison and Eatman (2008, p. 6):

Publicly engaged academic work is scholarly or creative activity integral to a faculty member’s academic area. It encompasses different forms of making knowledge about, for, and with diverse publics and communities. Through a coherent, purposeful sequence of activities, it contributes to the public good and yields artifacts of public and intellectual value.

Thus, engaged scholarship is research rather than service when it yields artifacts of knowledge. But what are these artifacts? For traditional academic work in the social sciences, the artifacts of knowledge are books and journal articles. Engaged scholarship may also be documented in articles and books; for example Ruth López Turley, director of the Houston Education Research Consortium, has published articles in academic journals detailing the contributions of research at the Consortium to the work of the school district (Turley, 2016; Turley & Stevens, 2015). However, assessing the contribution of engaged scholarship requires an expanded notion of the artifacts of scholarship (Tremblay, 2017, 2020). Such artifacts may include reports, briefs, digital media, and presentations to specific audiences for whom the findings of the research may be consequential for their work (Ozer et al., 2021).

Judging the quality of partnership-oriented scholarship. A key challenge with expanding the indicators of scholarly activity is to resolve ambiguity on how they should be assessed. Traditional academic products may be judged through quantitative measures such as citation counts and the prestige or selectivity of the publisher, and qualitatively through external letters that attest to the contribution of the body of work to advancing research in a particular domain. A parallel logic may be applied to the products of engaged scholarship (Gamoran, 2018). For example, the contribution of publicly-engaged research may be assessed quantitatively by counting how often insights from the research are mentioned in traditional or social media and in the deliberations of decision-making bodies, and qualitatively by soliciting testimonials from potential targets of the research as to whether the research was consequential for their work. These notions respond to Welsh’s (2021) call for evaluating the quality of education research through its use in RPPs.

Massey and Barreras (2013) introduced the term “impact validity” as a criterion for judging whether research has the potential to contribute to social and political change, and Warren et al. (2018) have applied this term as a way to examine the contribution of community-engaged research. Impact validity is intended as a complement to traditional notions of internal and external validity. It includes not only the potential for directly affecting policy change, but also the possibility of influencing policy indirectly by serving as a tool for advocacy. Partnering with stakeholders is one condition that can help researchers achieve impact validity. Another, described by Speer and Christens (2013), is pursuing “strategic engagement” by understanding and taking into account the sources of power while partnering with community-based organizations. The conception of impact validity emphasizes the potential for policy influence because it recognizes that policy decisions have many sources, including resource constraints and leadership turnover as well as values, preferences, and priorities that reflect multiple constituencies and may shift over time. But the potential for impact may be evident in whether research is brought into deliberations about policy, even if research does not actually drive policy.

Research intended to serve the public good is not uniformly or inherently high quality research, so measures of rigor need to be developed, where “rigor” is not a code word for a particular research method or design, but “a quality of mind in which evidence and insights are carefully specified and intertwined” (Gamoran, 2007). As Tseng and Gamoran (2017) argued, rigor and relevance in scholarship can complement one another. Engaged scholarship, like disciplinary scholarship, is rigorous if it is systematic and if the research questions, design, and interpretation are aligned. Theory, moreover, matters for engaged scholarship because it “provides a framework for explaining real-world phenomena” (Tseng & Gamoran, 2017, p. 1). University committees and outside evaluators could, in principle, judge the quality of engaged scholarship based on its use of theory and empirical rigor, just as they do for research aimed at contributions to the discipline (Furlong & Oancea, 2005).

One approach that incorporates both theory and methods in judging quality is the Framework for Research Worth Using, developed by Ming and Goldenberg (2021). The four dimensions of quality in this framework include relevance as well as theoretical, methodological, and evidentiary credibility. By theoretical credibility, the authors mean research that is “anchored in a coherent theory that explains how a given set of conditions and actions influence the outcome of interest” (p. 136). This use of theory differs in emphasis from that proposed by Tseng and Gamoran (2017), who stressed the application of theory derived from disciplinary knowledge to guide hypotheses in the applied context. But the views are compatible in calling for a rich conceptual framework as a basis for empirical investigation (see also Irons, 2019). Moreover, like Tseng and Gamoran (2017), Ming and Goldenberg (2021) emphasize that methodological credibility does not imply a particular methodological approach, but rather a method that is aligned with the research question, which may derive from local needs.

Yet another perspective on assessing the quality of engaged scholarship comes from the Quality Use of Research Evidence (QURE) project in Australia (OECD, 2022). This project employs surveys and interviews with partnership participants to identify criteria for judging how well research evidence is used in education practice. By “quality” research use, the investigators mean that the research examined is appropriate to the question and context, is thoughtful and engaging in implementing evidence, and that occurs in the context of adequate capacity in skills, dispositions, and relationships. Conditions that support quality use include a research-engaged culture in which leaders model engagement with evidence, support for staff capacity-building to use evidence, and resources available to support these developments.

Navigating changes to tenure criteria. Case accounts of broadening the criteria for tenure stress that while this change may occur rapidly, it is typically built on the foundations of a longer-term shift towards more openness to alternative notions of scholarly productivity. Kathy Schultz, dean of the School of Education at the University of Colorado-Boulder, found that her faculty welcomed a conversation about revising guidelines for reappointment, promotion, and tenure (Schultz & Yadama, 2022). A larger challenge was educating the wider university about the expanded criteria, but over time the notion has been accepted and indeed, research-practice partnerships have grown across campus. Yet a proposal to establish a research-practice professorship as a separate tenure-line appointment is still in the works, due to delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic (Schultz & Yadama, 2022; Sparks, 2019).

At UC-Berkeley, efforts to revise the promotion and tenure guidelines built on revisions from years past (Ozer, 2021). Because of past changes, a framework to incorporate engaged scholarship in these guidelines was already in place, but the standards for representing and evaluating engaged scholarship were not sufficiently clear. In the process of applying for the Institutional Challenge Grant, the applicants brokered a meeting with key campus leaders including the vice chancellor for research, the faculty chairs of the academic senate, and the chairs of the campus budget committee. This negotiation yielded a memo from the budget committee “with guidelines for how departments could write stronger cases evaluating the impact of community-partnered scholarship and how to better recognize and describe atypical community-partnered products to be counted as scholarship” (Ozer et al., 2021, p. 1300). Subsequently, UC-Berkeley adopted new guidelines for evaluating community-engaged scholarship which have become part of the academic personnel guidelines. The equanimous character of these deliberations rested on years of advance work and a basic agreement about the value of public impact research, which the authors described as “a Berkeley cultural value on the quality and impact of scholarship” (p. 1300). While this holds at the university level, it may not be uniformly supported across campus, with “recognition of accomplishment in community-partnered portfolios” (p. 1301) a particular area of vulnerability that is still being addressed.

Without clear guidelines on how the products of engaged scholarship figure in career advancement decisions, junior faculty are taking a risk when they pursue research in partnerships (Beaulieu et al., 2018; Fischman et al., 2018). Hart and Silka (2020) recounted how they faced and addressed this dilemma in leading collaborative research on environmental sustainability at the University of Maine. They first sought advice from prominent scientists:

Despite representing different fields and backgrounds, all recommended that untenured faculty not participate in our initiative. They felt the risks to such junior faculty during the tenure review process would be too high, and warned that participation in a solutions-oriented interdisciplinary project focused on community stakeholders would adversely affect their publication rate, evaluation by disciplinary peers, and other traditional criterial in tenure review processes (p. 68).

Hart and Silka did not heed this advice due to the strong desire of junior faculty members to participate. Instead, they took steps to help manage the risk, including “educating members of peer committees, external reviewers, department chairs, deans, and other senior administrators about the importance of this research, as well as about the important contributions made by the faculty member being evaluated” (p. 68). While this effort was not as fully embraced as they had wished, nonetheless all the junior faculty who participated ultimately received tenure, because they managed to achieve excellence on traditional criteria even as they participated in community-engaged scholarship.

Beyond tenure decisions

Although most of the attention on this topic focuses on tenure, that need not, and perhaps should not be, the first consideration when it comes to encouraging faculty participation in research-practice partnerships. First, universities can take into account the research contributions of partnership-oriented, engaged scholarship at other points in the career ladder, such as at the transition from associate to full professor. Participation in partnerships may be less risky for a tenured faculty member, but universities will still need to be deliberate in crafting evaluation criteria that incorporate engaged scholarship (Beaulieu et al., 2018). Second, many universities that have successfully mounted partnerships have provided faculty members with incentives to participate other than by affecting tenure and promotion. Hart and Silka (2020) emphasized the importance of starting small, with low-risk opportunities such as small grants for pilot projects. Other examples of incentives include a seed grant for partnership activity at Colorado, funding for pilot projects at Boston College, seed funding and teaching release at Berkeley, and a faculty fellowship at Cornell (Dunifon, 2021; Ozer, 2021; Ozer et al., 2021; Schultz & Yadama, 2022). Other winners of the Institutional Challenge Grant have used similar strategies.

There can be no doubt that designing a tenure process that values engaged scholarship is a challenge for universities that wish to recruit and support early career faculty who seek to pursue research in partnerships with school districts, state education agencies and other collaborators. Yet this challenge need not derail the efforts of a school or college to promote faculty participation in RPPs. Based on the experiences of universities that have made considerable progress down this pathway, faculty engagement can be incentivized at later career stages and with other incentives even while tenure issues remain unresolved.

Meeting the Challenges of Time and Money

Documented cases of successful university-based RPPs consistently exhibit internal commitments of funding at an early stage of partnership efforts. At the University of Colorado-Boulder, for example a new School of Education dean used her start-up funds to provide seed grants to faculty to pursue partnership opportunities (Schultz & Yadama, 2022). Likewise, Rice University faculty received internal support that enabled them to launch the Houston Education Research Consortium (Turley & Stevens, 2015). An RPP involving several colleges at UC-Berkeley and the San Francisco Unified School District drew initial support from an internal pilot grant program and an incubator for interdisciplinary social science, and a partnership at UC-Santa Cruz drew on financial as well as intellectual resource from a UC system-wide initiative (Ozer et al., 2021). Applicants for the Institutional Challenge Grant Program are required to commit to a one-for-two match of a mid-career fellow (that is, the grant pays two full-time equivalents (FTEs) toward mid-career fellows and the university contributes one FTE) to develop and pursue a joint research agenda with the partner agency outside the university.

Of course, identifying internal funding in successful cases does not mean that such funding invariably results in the successful launch of a partnership. Not documented to date are all the cases where RPPs failed to launch despite internal commitments. Another common feature of the successful cases is that internal funding was quickly followed by successful securing of external funding from federal or private sources. So, the Houston Education Research Consortium won support from the Arnold Foundation, UC-Berkeley received Institutional Challenge Grant funding from the William T. Grant, Spencer, and Doris Duke Charitable foundations, as did the University of Colorado-Boulder, and so on. Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy relied on internal resources to develop relationships with two local school districts in Evanston, IL, but the partnership landed on firmer footing after receiving an RPP grant from the Spencer Foundation followed by an Institutional Challenge Grant. The University of Toronto’s collaboration with the Puerto Rico Department of Education was sparked by support from the university’s economics department, followed by a grant from the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) that led to its Institutional Challenge Grant. These external grants are essential to support the infrastructure of partnerships: leadership, coordination, technical support, human resource management, and other aspects of the administration of a complex enterprise (Beaulieu et al., 2018; Bobonis & Medelius, 2019; London et al., 2022; Ozer et al., 2021; Turley & Stevens, 2015).

Due to the challenges of fusing the work of two highly bureaucratized organizations, such as a university and a school district, RPPs tend to be highly bureaucratized themselves. Hence one of the most valuable logistical supports that an RPP infrastructure can provide is management of the bureaucratic details of collaboration. Researchers in RPPs, for example, often need to navigate two human subjects reviews, one in the university and another in the school district. An experienced RPP support staff member can provide crucial guidance to the faculty member. RPP leaders and support staff can help maintain relationships, negotiate data-sharing agreements, and a host of other background activities that allow the faculty members to devote most of their time to research and training. Moreover, the community partner agency also incurs costs of collaboration that need to be covered if the partnership is to thrive (London et al., 2022). Ultimately, a combination of internal and external funding seems to be a common solution to these needs. With the increased availability of external grants to support research-practice partnerships, internal funding that helps launch partnerships seems more viable.

Conclusion: The Future of Universities as Spaces for Partnership Research

Like all complex organizations, universities carry their own momentum forward to replicate roles, structures, activities, and priorities, serving their own inherent interests along with any stated mission (Scott, 2002). Long-standing patterns are difficult to shake. The academic logic of judging research based on its contribution to subsequent research is deeply entrenched due to internal as well as external pressures. How, then, can universities manage to change, not to dispense with field-defining, internationally renowned studies, but to add appreciation for research that serves the public good just as much as research that contributes to scientific advances?

Three conditions bode well for institutional change. First, although universities experience pressures to follow tradition, they are also pressured to change. These pressures may be external, as diverse audiences now demand more accountability and expect universities to take responsibility for their community or state. The pressures may also be internal, as increasing numbers of faculty, often led by faculty of color, want their research to have greater consequence, or “impact validity,” for improving policy and practice. These pressures create a countervailing momentum for change. They are compatible with increasing interest in interdisciplinary scholarship and with the social justice aims that many universities are adopting.

Second, extramural funds are increasingly available to support university participation in research-practice partnerships, particularly in education. External funding is a strong motivator for research-intensive universities, which are highly dependent on external sources of revenue. This alone is likely to bring greater openness to partnership activity on the part of university leadership. In a recent essay, three foundation leaders reflected on the role of funders in sparking and sustaining partnership-based research (Tseng et al., 2022). The writers disavowed the outdated notion of “research-based knowledge as a product that simply needed to be disseminated from researchers to decision-makers” (p.2). Instead, they explained that relational approaches to evidence production, such as RPPs, offered a more promising avenue for evidence use (see also DuMont, 2018). Funders that adopt this perspective have a keen interest in encouraging universities to value relational approaches, even if that means developing new ways of thinking about how to assess research contributions. With these aims in mind, a number of funders including the William T. Grant Foundation, the Pew Charitable Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and others have launched the Transforming Evidence Funders Network to improve the evidence ecosystem involving funders, universities, research firms, and their policy and practice partners (Bednarek & Tseng, 2022; Tseng et al., 2022). These developments offer reason for optimism about resources available to support universities open to encouraging faculty participation in partnerships.

Third, based on recent examples, at least some leading research-intensive universities have recognized the appropriateness of expanding definitions of what constitutes academic research and how research contributions may be judged outside the most traditional markers. University leaders and faculty alike are increasingly realizing the possibilities for partnership-oriented, engaged scholarship to make a real difference in the lives of educators, learners, and communities, and this, too, is creating momentum for change. Opportunities for sharing knowledge, whether through publications or through affinity groups such as the National Network for Education Research-Practice Partnerships, can help this along.

Overcoming long-held beliefs and institutional norms and culture is a challenging endeavor. However, enough examples are accumulating to demonstrate that such change is possible. With continued efforts, such examples may continue to grow.