Disciplinary Variations in Community Engaged Scholarship

Fifteen years after Diamond's The Disciplines Speak raised awareness about how different disciplines define and enact scholarship, institutional leaders continue to describe, promote, and support outreach and engagement in a "one-size-fits-all" manner, despite anecdotal evidence that there are significant disciplinary variations in community engaged scholarship.

This study's over-arching goal was to examine disciplinary variations empirically. NSCUE researchers conducted an interpretive content analysis of 173 faculty members' promotion and tenure forms from one research-intensive, Carnegie-engaged, land-grant institution in the Midwest. Analysis focused on identifying patterns in the data related to disciplines, making use of Biglan's Classification of Academic Disciplines as the theoretical framework, which categories disciplines in three ways: pure/applied, hard/soft, and life/non-life. The Biglan framework was used to examine three dimensions of faculty members' community engaged scholarship: types of scholarship, intensity of activity, and degree of engagement.

The study revealed statistically significant findings, including:

  • Faculty members in applied and life disciplines were more likely to report types of community engaged scholarship than their colleagues in pure and non-life disciplines.
  • Faculty members in hard disciplines were more likely to report some types of community engaged scholarship, while faculty members in soft disciplines were more likely to report other types of community engaged scholarship.
  • Faculty members in applied and life disciplines were more likely to report higher intensities of activity.
  • Faculty members in life disciplines were more likely to report higher degrees of engagement.

The study's findings demonstrated that there are significant disciplinary variations in faculty members' approaches to community engaged scholarship and provided an evidence-base for moving beyond "one-size-fits-all" approaches to describing community engaged scholarship.

Please contact Diane Doberneck at connordm@msu.edu with questions, comments, or requests related to this study.

View the presentations, handouts, and articles from this study: