Reimagining tenure and promotion for creative faculty: the Creative Scholarship Pathways Framework

ABSTRACT

Faculty members interested in creating creative scholarship face advancement obstacles due to few known tenure and promotion standards. This study involved qualitative semistructured interviews with U.S. communication and media creative faculty members producing scholarship spanning multiple mediums. Interviewed scholars primarily expressed their scholarship's contributions involved local community engagement. Yet creative scholars perceived departmental leadership preferred to rely on artistic and professional standards to evaluate the quality of their work rather than engaged criteria. Participants felt such criteria too narrowly constrained them and delegitimized the value of their work. The results provide evidence that creative scholars struggle when communicating their work's value and documenting their scholarship achievements. Guidance is provided through the formalization of a Creative Scholarship Pathways Framework conceptually made up of four evaluation concepts rooted in the engaged and creative scholarship literature: (1) collaboration, (2) outreach, (3) peer review, and (4) innovation.

KEYWORDS:

• University reward systems
• tenure and promotion
• sociology of knowledge
• engaged scholarship
• creative scholarship
• artistic scholarship

Acknowledgements

This work was made possible thanks to support from the Broadcast Education Association and the Council of Communication Associations. I would like to thank the participants who agreed to be interviewed for this study. This study would not have been achievable without their cooperation.

Notes

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Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Council of Communication Associations; Broadcast Education Association.

Notes on contributors

Serena Miller

Serena Miller (Ph.D., Michigan State University) is an Associate Professor of Journalism Innovations, Methodology Associate Editor for Review of Communication Research, and a former Associate Editor for Journalism Studies. Miller's earliest research focused on media sociology and news content characteristics, especially research areas such as news quality, alternative forms of journalism, and journalism education. Her quantitative and qualitative approaches addressed fundamental questions such as who should be classified as a journalist and what should be categorized as journalism. Today, she also studies metascience, social science theory building, quantitative methods, public engagement, and targeting concepts in need of conceptual and empirical specification.