How can we address the concerns of faculty who have met the traditional criteria for tenure and are concerned about less rigor in CES?
Convincing faculty members that community-engaged scholarship can be both rigorous and collaborative is challenging in that traditionally research needed to be objective, with distance between the faculty member and the “research subject”. Community engagement removes this distance in an effort to deepen knowledge on a subject from the contributions of both the faculty member and the community, and to improve the relevance of the outcomes to the community. Movement away from the predominant paradigm of the objective researcher, for example, and recognizing all research has some bias is occurring, but slowly. There are several ways to address this concern. One is to clearly demonstrate how CES meets the standards of scholarship as articulated by Charles Glassick: (clear goals, adequate preparation, appropriate methods, significant results, effective presentation, and reflective critique). Continuing to connect community-engaged scholarship to this assessment framework, in incorporating
