Note: This document is being presented to faculty for review and feedback before final adoption consideration by FPC. It is intended to replace “Defining Scholarship at Kalamazoo College” as the guiding document for assessing professional engagement activities of review candidates.

We define professional engagement here in a more expansive way than what has been traditionally termed “scholarship.” We believe a more embracing definition is important, especially as faculty have become more diverse in background and training. They bring new areas of academic interest; new methodologies, epistemologies, pedagogies, and types of dissemination; and new understandings of student needs and experiences. As an institution, we must reward the full range of faculty activities, both traditional and non-traditional, and make invisible work visible in order to recognize both what faculty are already doing and as steps towards more transparent and equitable workload distribution.

Mission and Definition

We begin by underscoring the guiding mission of the College: Kalamazoo College seeks to prepare our graduates to better understand, live successfully within, and provide enlightened leadership to a richly diverse and increasingly complex world. This centering charge speaks to what we value and thus how we might choose, develop, and assess our various engagements as researchers, public scholars, writers, artists, musicians, conductors, and more.

In light of this mission and for the purposes of reappointment, tenure, and promotion reviews, we define professional engagement as work that impacts an area of inquiry, a creative practice, and/or a community issue through individual or collective publication, exhibition, performance, programming, or contributions to professional organizations. Such work can be understood as addressing important questions with the aim of advancing scholarly knowledge and/or meeting artistic, social, disciplinary, and/or educational needs.

This definition offers the potential to support and reward a spectrum of individuals and projects, enrich departments, and, in this nurturing of our passions and commitments, serve a wide range of academic and non-academic communities through our example as fully-engaged professionals.

What We Value and Why

At Kalamazoo College, we highly value and seek to support professional engagement because it speaks directly to the mission as well as the K-Plan that serves as the foundation and focal point of the College’s curriculum. We also do so because it fosters intellectual growth and vitality, assures that faculty members remain current with aspects of their fields or disciplines, provides opportunities for collaborative scholarship with students, and, as a result, enhances the reputation of individual faculty. Though projects may change and the pace of activity associated with them may vary, we see scholarly or artistic engagement as ongoing. Because such engagement strengthens teaching and the passions that provide the impetus and foundation for our collective teaching, the College expects its faculty members to keep themselves professionally involved in the creative work of their discipline by the regular pursuit of knowledge and the development of their skills. We offer the following as examples of professional engagement, understanding that faculty may involve themselves with some but not all activities and some with greater depth than others:

• Demonstrated impact in one’s field, through publications (books, journal articles), exhibition, performance, professional presentations (invited lectures, conference papers, or posters), the writing and receipt of grants, or reports arising from professionally-related activities such as consultation;
• Engagement in research and community-based action projects with and for a general (non-academic) audience that result in books, articles, and/or formats that are more broadly accessible to and valued by the public, such as exhibits, websites, community programs, evaluation data and reports, training materials, guidebooks, policy documents, and feasibility reports;
• Productive engagement in or application of one’s disciplinary expertise (e.g., action research, software development, statistical analysis, clinical work) in order to enrich the collaborative product or service;
• Collaboration with and/or training of students on artistic, scholarly, research, or applied projects that go beyond regular courses and demonstrate breadth and depth of intellectual interests and competencies;
• Development of and/or leadership in training, advising, and teaching workshops to improve instruction and advising skills, classroom technology, innovative pedagogies, DEIA issues and solutions, etc.;
• Engagement in professional organizations or other entities that call on disciplinary expertise, for example as an editor, conference organizer, member of a national committee developing disciplinary curricula and/or grading AP exams, and/or a reviewer of conference, journal, and/or grant submissions in one’s area of expertise; and
• Acquisition of new skills or the pursuit of secondary fields of scholarly interest or new lines of inquiry, creative work, or performance; keeping current with critical developments in the discipline; attending conferences.

The type and amount of professional engagement is variable, is determined, as appropriate, by the professional field and specific faculty situation, and must be clearly articulated by the individual faculty member (in collaboration with their department and/or division chair) in their personal statement. Given the variability of how different disciplines, community organizations, and local/national associations might address the impact of these contributions, FPC has developed a philosophy that articulates a holistic view toward reading a candidate’s file and looks to the candidate to frame the relative importance of their chosen forms of professional engagement.

How We Assess Professional Engagement

Because we value professional engagement for the long-term vitality of faculty members, their programs, their students, and the institution, the Faculty Personnel Committee expects a body of work that documents continued professional engagement by the time of tenure or promotion review. To be able to assess and measure impact of the way this engagement addresses a meaningful question, problem, or concern, we look for the candidate, in conjunction with their department, a representative from their division, and/or an advocate, to offer clear individual aims that speak to standards of review relevant to their work, and to include appropriate types external validation by those who have seen and reviewed this work.  When possible, we encourage candidates to place their professional engagement within the context of criteria provided by professional organizations, especially in relation to a teaching-focused, liberal arts college, e.g., the Modern Language Association, the American Chemical Society, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the College Music Society, or the College Art Association.

Importantly, then, different forms of and venues for professional engagement demand different methods of assessment. In many disciplines, scholarly articles and books that undergo peer review and subsequent publication are evidence of a process of professional vetting by experts in a field. On the other hand, community-based research or programming that addresses a particular local or regional need may call for the expert assessment of community partners, statistical measures to judge both quality and impact, and/or formal feedback from local leaders in order to consider effect upon students as well as evidence of institutional capacity building between Kalamazoo College and various organizations (governmental, non-profit, educational, etc.). In such cases, outcomes may be best known and assessed by those with whom the project has been developed and by those who have a particular (and sometimes non-academic) expertise. We also recognize that professional and creative work may be reviewed by our peers and be externally validated in other venues, such as producing a report for a non-profit organization, recording a video for a project that is subsequently reviewed by one’s peers at a conference, participating in a juried art show, leading a seminar or a workshop that is evaluated by one’s peers with an evaluation form, developing a computer program or manual for an organization (for-profit or not), and so on.

While we understand that some projects are of greater magnitude (e.g., a book manuscript represents more breadth and depth than a single journal article; the completion and sustaining of a county-wide or regional initiative is of a different scale than a partnership addressing a short-term need of a single non-profit; etc.), we underscore that, especially given expectations regarding teaching and curricular development, advising and mentoring, and college service, one can demonstrate a sufficient record of professional engagement in a number of ways and through varied modes of assessment.