Research & Scholarship Community Engagement Resources
Community engagement 101
- Introductory Community Engagement Workshop Video & Slides
- Trust Building in Community-Engaged Research
- Sample Questions to Guide Continually Deeper Community-Engaged Research
- Advanced Community Engagement Workshop Video & Slides
- UC Davis Public Engagement and Scholarship. Essential Tips for Collaborative Grant-Writing with Community Partners
Campus resources
- Community engagement experts may be available to work on your project. Contact Ned LeBlond, Managing Director at the Institute for Social Transformation to learn more.
- Community-Engaged Scholarship at UC Santa Cruz 2023 Inventory Report
- Proposal Development within the Social Sciences at UC Santa Cruz: Proposal Flowchart & At-A-Glance Roles
- UCSC Office of Research: Distinguishing Partnership Types
- Office of Research Sample MOU (Coming Soon)
- IRB Guide (Coming Soon)
- Sample Partner Invoice (Available Upon Request)
Partnership guidance
- University of Michigan Science, Technology, and Public Policy program; Detroit Disability Power; the Detroit Justice Center; and We the People Michigan Community Partnerships Playbook: How to Create Equitable Partnerships between Technical and Community Experts
- University of Kansas, Center for Community Health and Development, Community Tool Box: Several useful community action toolkits from coalition building, frameworks for change, leadership building, and grant development.
- UCSF guides on conducting health-related community-engaged research
- National Endowment for the Arts Guide to Community-Engaged Research in the Arts and Health
- Imagining America: Public Scholar Conversation Cards & Imagination Guide
Partnership tools
- UC Research & Innovation: Community Partnership Resources (General Resources, Community Engagement Centers, MOU Guidance)
- Imagining America Public Scholar Conversation Cards
- Campus Compact Resources to enhance scholarship, civic and community engagement
- Campus Community Partnerships for Health has many resources on its website, including information about navigating IRB.
- International Federation of the Red Cross/Red Crescent – Community Engagement in Emergencies research and tools
How can I use engaged scholarship in promotion and tenure?
Engaged scholarship involves a variety of research and dissemination activities, vital to the mission of higher education, that are intentional, mutually beneficial, and connect deeply with a community or public audiences through teaching, research, and/or dissemination.
Engaged scholarship is often multi-disciplinary, involving scholars and community partners across traditionally siloed disciplines and domains. This type of scholarship often integrates research, teaching, and/or service in ways that are hard to fit into traditional paradigms. In addition, the work can require significant relationship-building to create long-term trusting relationships or substantial investment in community work, to connect with various publics.
View the unedited recording of our first Campus + Community event, Valuing Engaged Scholarship in the Tenure and Promotion Process. (Note, we had some technical difficulties. Apologies, and thanks for sticking with us!)
Please email us if your department has updated its engaged scholarship guidelines or if your department wants to incorporate best practices in their reviews.
Promotion and tenure engaged scholarship resources
UCSC
University of California
- The Pursuit of Collective Excellence in Research at the University of California
- Overview of Community-Engaged Scholarship at Berkeley.
- UCLA Center for Community Engagement Report on Recognizing Community-Engaged Scholarship in Academic Personnel Review (2021). (PDF)
- UC Davis Office of Public Engagement and Scholarship.
Professional organizations
- American Association for the Advancement of Science. Many approaches to public engagement (nd).
- American Historical Association. Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Academic Historian ( 2017).
- American Historical Association. Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians (2015).
- American Philosophy Association (2017). Statement on Valuing Public Philosophy.
- American Political Science Association Civic Engagement Section. Professional Advice (2022).
- American Sociological Association (2016). “What Counts”: Evaluating public communication in tenure and promotion.
- British Red Cross Community Engagement Hub. Community Engagement and Accountability (CEA) in Emergencies.
- Imagining America Guidance. Scholarship in public: knowledge creation and tenure policy in the engaged university. Syracuse, NY Imagining America (2007).
- Modern Language Association Guidelines for Evaluating Publicly Engaged Humanities Scholarship (2022).
Higher education
- Community Resource Collaborative, In it together: Community-Based Research Guidelines for Communities and Higher Education (2021). (PDF)
- Campus Compact, Tenure and Promotion for Engaged Scholarship – A Repository (Aug 2022).
- Rutgers University Guidelines for Evaluating Publicly-Engaged Scholarship (2019). (PDF)
- University of Minnesota Publicly Engaged Scholarship Criteria (2007). (PDF)
- University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2016 Provost’s task force on engaged scholarship in promotion and tenure (2016). (PDF)
How can I involve my students in community-engaged work?
Student experiences outside of the classroom and in communities transform research and scholarship from theory into practice. These invaluable experiences are facilitated through a handful of venues on campus. However, there is significant capacity for research to develop meaningful relationships locally, regionally, and abroad. The resources below will help you center communities’ needs and desires while empowering students’ capacities and ethical engagement.
Resources to involve students
Engagement in practice at UCSC
Critical service-learning approaches
Community-engaged pedagogy
- Shelton, A. J. (2016). Implementing community engagement projects in classrooms. Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice, 16(1).
- Greenberg, M., London, R. A., & McKay, S. C. (2020). Community-initiated student-engaged research: Expanding undergraduate teaching and learning through public sociology. Teaching Sociology, 48(1), 13-27.
- Vance-Chalcraft, H. D., Smith, K. C., Allen, J., Bowser, G., Cooper, C. B., Jelks, N. T. O., … & Laslo, M. (2024). Social justice, community engagement, and undergraduate STEM education: participatory science as a teaching tool. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 23(2), es3.
- Trott, C. D., Sample McMeeking, L. B., & Weinberg, A. E. (2019). Participatory action research experiences for undergraduates: forging critical connections through community engagement. Studies in Higher Education, 45(11), 2260–2273.
- Gruber, Anne Marie. (2017) Community engagement in higher education Online information sources.
- Bandy, J. (2011). What is Service Learning or Community Engagement?. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching.
How can I publish my community-engaged research and scholarship?
Engaged scholarship generates a variety of products, some of which have not traditionally been recognized in the tenure and promotion process because they are not published in peer-reviewed venues.
Although public scholarship like opinion pieces or news articles that interview and quote scholars are generally recognized as important contributions to society, there are less well established assessment standards for the scholarly products of engaged research – including reports, briefs, websites, maps and story maps, theories of action, social media campaigns, community-based convenings, community-based art and creative works, collaborative art and performance, engaged technology and tech solutions, and others.
In addition, engaged scholarly products may include multiple co-authors and co-conveners, including community partners who contribute to the work in significant ways. Please email us if you have a resource you’d like us to include.
Publishing resources
View the Campus Compact Toolkit on Publishing Engaged Scholarship.
Publishing your findings
- Forester, J. & Sims Bartel, A. (2022). Writing and Publishing Community-engaged Scholarship: Advice for Junior Faculty on Promotion, Publishing and Craft. Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education, 14(2), 34-52.
- Gruber, J. S., Rhoades, J. L., Simpson, M., Stack, L., Yetka, L., & Wood, R. (2017). Enhancing climate change adaptation: strategies for community engagement and university-community partnerships. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 7, 10-24.
- Hebert-Beirne, J., Hernandez, S. G., Felner, J., Schwiesow, J., Mayer, A., Rak, K., … & Kennelly, J. (2018). Using community-driven, participatory qualitative inquiry to discern nuanced community health needs and assets of Chicago’s La Villita, a Mexican immigrant neighborhood. Journal of Community Health, 43, 775-786.
Co-authoring articles with community partners
- Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Engaging Community Partners
- London, R. A., & Claassen, J. (2023). Playing for keeps: A long‐term community‐engaged research partnership to support safe and healthy elementary school recess. Sociological Forum 38: 1063-1081.
- Wong, M., Bejarano, E., Carvlin, G., Fellows, K., King, G., Lugo, H., … & English, P. (2018). Combining community engagement and scientific approaches in next-generation monitor siting: the case of the imperial county community air network. International journal of environmental research and public health, 15(3), 523.
Books and resources about community-engaged research
- Fine, Michelle, and Maria Elena Torre. 2021. Essentials of critical participatory action research. American Psychological Association.
- Hoffman, Andrew J. 2021. The engaged scholar: Expanding the impact of academic research in today’s world. Stanford University Press
- McLaughlin, Milbrey and Rebecca A. London. 2013. From data to action: A community approach to improving youth outcomes. Harvard Education Press.
- Special Journal Issues Compiling Engaged Research
- Social Sciences, ”New Trends in Community-Engaged Research: Co-producing Knowledge for Justice,” 2022. [Open access]
- Social Sciences, “New Trends in Community-Engaged Research, Volume 2: New Voices, Critical Approaches“, 2023. [Open access]
- Urban Education, “Research Confronts Equity and Social Justice-Building the Emerging Field of Collaborative, Community Engaged Education Research,” 2018.
National and state organizations to support engaged research
- LEAD California – a statewide nonprofit organization supporting half a million university and college students, administrators, faculty, staff, and community members who, with our resources, expertise, training, and connections are creating innovative ways to ensure a healthy, just, and democratic society.
- Imagining America – The Imagining America consortium (IA) brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers to imagine, study, and enact a more just and liberatory ‘America’ and world. Working across institutional, disciplinary, and community divides, IA strengthens and promotes public scholarship, cultural organizing, and campus change that inspires collective imagination, knowledge-making, and civic action on pressing public issues.
- International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE) – The Association promotes high quality trans-disciplinary research across a wide range of approaches and forms and builds the capacity of scholars, practitioners, and community partners to engage in such research.
- Urban Research Based Action Network (URBAN) – URBAN is a multidisciplinary, distributed network of scholars and practitioners committed to articulating and strengthening the collaborative methods and impact, sharing findings, raising the visibility, developing career pathways and increasing the acceptance within the academy of community-based research.