When Natasha Pei got a Research Assistantship (RAship) with the Poverty Reduction hub of CFICE in 2013, she never could have predicted the impact it would have on her career trajectory. She attributes her success, in large part, to the community-first skills she gained as a result.

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“When I first started studying social work, I thought I was going to get into child protection services,” explained Natasha. “Learning about systemic issues facing society through my Master’s, combined with my community engagement work with CFICE, broadened my horizons about how I could contribute to addressing the larger, structural barriers people face every day.”

While many RAships entail completing literature reviews, assisting with data entry, and occasionally contributing to academic articles, Natasha’s RAship with CFICE was focused on studying and building the skills necessary for creating deep and meaningful partnerships between communities and academics.

“Like many students starting in community engagement work, I was eager to share what I’d learned in university to help solve community issues,” said Natasha. “My experience with CFICE taught me how to listen to and learn from the expertise in the community, and how to develop long-term relationships that lead to far greater change.”

The experience gave Natasha skills that set her apart from her fellow Master’s students.

“I was a core member of the team,” Natasha recalled fondly. “I helped organize meetings. I liaised with multiple community and academic partners from across Canada, presenting our research information back to the community members to discuss implications with them. Where other students were reading about community engagement models like collective impact, I was actually part of collective impact projects. It was a lot of responsibility but it was a great experience.”

Pei graduated her Master’s of Social Work degree with a job waiting for her at Tamarack Institute’s Vibrant Communities, a core partner of CFICE’s Poverty Reduction Hub. And her CFICE experience didn’t stop there.

“I transitioned straight from being an RA for CFICE’s Poverty Reduction hub to being the hub’s community co-lead! It was great because I brought continuity to the projects, and I’ve been able to apply what I’ve learned, both in my position at Vibrant Communities, as well as with my ongoing work as part of CFICE.”

Patricia Ballamingie and Natasha Pei at the CFICE Community Impact Symposium, January 2017.

Through her co-lead position, Natasha has continued studying effective ways to maximize the benefits of community-campus engagement for the community. She has also witnessed firsthand the impact of using a community-first approach in engagement, especially in her position as Community Animator with Vibrant Communities.

“You can actually see the difference this work makes for our community partners. So often in social work, you put your heart and soul into helping people escape poverty or homelessness. With this job, I am in the privileged position of helping people pass knowledge back and forth so people can build the work from each other, and do work more effectively to move policy and systems, as a result of our conversations.”

When asked how CFICE’s community-first ethos has changed her expectations and methods as a community partner, Natasha responded, “When we’re engaging other community members, asking them to share their experience and expertise, we take the time to truly listen to and learn about the issues that they are facing. We are prepared to meet them where they’re at, rather than imposing our own assumptions.”

Natasha encourages other students to learn community-first practices as well.

“For students working with communities, it’s incredibly important to start by looking inwards, to value the community’s perspective, and then identify how your role can best contribute to bigger relationship and overall goals.”

Become more community-first!

To learn more about how to make your work more community-first, check out our list of actions for all community-campus engagement practitioners!

Engaging in community-first campus-community engagement (CCE) is an opportune way for faculty to achieve their goals as researchers and teachers. Charles Levkoe, an academic co-lead for CFICE’s CCE Brokering Working Group and Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Food Systems at Lakehead University, offers a good example of what can be accomplished with a community-first approach.

Listen to the podcast below, or continue scrolling to read the full story! Download a PDF of the podcast transcript.

Prior to entering academia, Charles worked in several community organizations, including non-profits and an agroecological farm. This activity was highly rewarding but also demanding. One of the biggest challenges however, was not having the time to ask the bigger questions about ‘why we do what we do’.

These bigger questions, in part, are what led Charles to pursue a career in academia. His passion for and experience working as part of various community organizations are what gave him the motivation and skills to put community first when engaging with communities from the other side of the community-campus engagement partnership. According to Charles, being community-first is all about maintaining a close relationship between professors and community partners that is ultimately mutually advantageous.

Charles has had the opportunity to take a community-first approach to all of his research, focusing on the needs and interests of the community. This approach is often extremely demanding; however, if done correctly, it can lead to greater impact. Being community-first allows both parties to build lasting partnerships, which can extend far beyond the short-term intentions of the initial research initiatives.

Being involved with CFICE has also helped Charles’s work as an academic. As an early career academic, CFICE has given legitimacy to his craft.

“With academia, you are often driven to address social needs,” explains Charles. “CFICE has given me the legitimacy to be able to say that this work means something, that it is valuable.”

Furthermore, the connections coming out of CFICE have provided a powerful network that helps Charles further drive community-first engagement.

Food Secure Canada team in 2016. ©Abra Brynne

An example of successful community-first practices in action can be seen with recent Canadian national food policy work. Charles led a team that worked closely with Food Secure Canada to help engage civil society contributions towards a national food policy to help support a healthier, more just and sustainable food system.

According to Charles, the community-first collaboration between community and academia has had a big impact on the project’s success. “Collectively, we have a lot of opportunity to move the needle on some of these issues.”

As for how other faculty members could take that first step in becoming community-first in their engagement efforts, Charles suggests starting with an issue that sparks passion within. “Being community-first is a serious time commitment, but it can be very rewarding. Take some time to think about how you can have an impact, what your interests are, and the skills you can mobilize. It’s not just a short-term endeavor, but something made up of longer-term relationships. It is all about working together to make a collective impact.”

Become more community-first!

To learn more about how to make your work more community-first, check out our list of actions for all community-campus engagement practitioners!

Podcast Sound Clips used under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0:

(Also Credit Mike Koenig)

by Kira Locken, CFICE Volunteer

Many PhD and post-doctoral students dream of becoming tenured. They dream of it, because being tenured means having a permanent job at a university. It means job security, benefits, funds for travel to conduct research and share it at conferences, and most importantly, the ability to commit to long-term projects without worrying about where the next paycheque is coming from.

The road to becoming tenured is usually long and hard. There are papers to write and publish, grant applications to complete, committees on which to serve, conference presentations to give, administrative responsibilities to tackle, continuously innovating and renewing teaching practice, and more, usually all while working as an Adjunct or Sessional instructor (i.e. an underpaid, non-tenured professor often with a 60-70hour work week and multiple jobs to cobble together a living income).

But what does tenure have to do with community-campus engagement? A lot, actually. And it largely comes down to the criteria needed to merit tenure.

Main factors in tenure process: Research and teaching successes

To get a sense of why tenure has such a huge impact on a professor’s ability to participate in community-campus engagement work, we need to understand how tenure is achieved, or more specifically, the criteria against which professors are assessed in order to merit tenure.

While universities differ in their review processes for tenure, most processes put an emphasis on a candidate’s contribution to their academic field, both as a teacher and a researcher.

At �Ӱ�ԭ�� University, professors looking to receive tenure are judged based on five main criteria. These include a review of their credentials, what courses they have taught, their research, and their ‘service’ to the university and the wider community.

These criteria, and others, are outlined by �Ӱ�ԭ�� University’s Academic Staff Association (CUASA) in their collective agreement with �Ӱ�ԭ��.

According to the ‘University Criteria for Tenure and Promotion’ on page 34 of this agreement, “It is generally accepted that contributions to teaching and scholarly studies should receive paramount consideration in any tenure or promotion decision but that recognition must also be given for valuable contributions to the university, for professional achievement, and for contributions to the community.”

What this means is that a professor’s research and teaching work carries the most weight when they are being considered for tenure.

The ‘value’ of community-campus engagement research to tenure committees

Tenure and promotion criteria, while useful in reviewing other forms of research, can often come in conflict when assessing community-campus engagement (CCE) work.

According to Dr. Peter Andrée, associate professor and principle investigator of CFICE at �Ӱ�ԭ��, a candidate’s research is measured by the number of articles they have published in respected journals. Some disciplines, says Andrée, place highest value on articles authored by one individual.

In comparison, research reports or articles written as part of community-campus engagement projects are often published in lesser-known journals, or shared through websites, and are written by multiple authors.

“That takes a lot of effort to produce, on everyone’s part, but is not really ‘counted’ as a valid academic output by most tenure committees,” says Andrée.

Community-campus engagement work is collaborative in nature.

For pre-tenure professors who deeply value CCE work (and who want a permanent job!), this may mean extra work writing and publishing additional articles in journals respected by their colleagues in order to merit tenure.

Further, gathering data and publishing research can take more time in community-campus engagement projects. This is because research is dependent on relationships between faculty and community partner organizations that can quickly change due to organizational turn-over, competing priorities, and relational difficulties. The added time it takes to do partnership-based research is not always understood by tenure committees.

Community engagement can count as teaching or service criteria

For professors who want to put their efforts into CCE work that will count towards tenure, teaching a course that requires community engagement can be an option. According to Andrée, these courses are considered quite demanding, particularly for professors who are new to the community. But they can be extremely rewarding for both students and professors.

While this effort is looked on favourably by tenure committees, “it won’t count for much if it means your research lags behind that of your colleagues,” says Andrée.

“Profs who do community-engaged teaching need to find ways to keep their teaching workload manageable,” he adds. “Some of my strategies have included inviting community partners to give guest lectures, and reducing the reading load in a course to compensate for the community engagement that I, the students, and partners are all involved in.”

Community-campus research can, at �Ӱ�ԭ��, qualify as ‘service’, provided it relates to the individual’s area of academic expertise. However, committees will not grant tenure based solely on this service, says Andrée. The collective agreement explicitly states that teaching and research are more important criteria.

Unfortunately, this emphasis on valuing certain types of research is not exclusive to �Ӱ�ԭ��.

Thankfully, tenure criteria is changing

As part of its effort to support community-engaged scholarship (CES), the Community Environmental Sustainability Hub of CFICE in Peterborough-Haliburton, under the leadership of the Trent Community Research Centre, initiated an internal report in 2015 examining the enablers and barriers for faculty wishing to engage in CES.

Some of the potential barriers experienced by faculty included a lack of suitable projects in the area, scheduling issues, the increased workload, and lack of understanding about community engagement and its relationship to research, teaching, and service criteria and tenure.

The three key aspects of CES, according to the Trent report, are community-based research, learning, and teaching, and service. These are similar to the research, teaching, and service criteria for tenure but are practiced and understood differently from non-CES in significant ways.

For example, at �Ӱ�ԭ�� University, ‘service’ involves a professor providing consultations and/or collaborations that are relevant to the professor’s disciplinary ‘expertise.’ This means that professors may participate in ‘service’ as long as it relates to the academic discipline they are involved in. In comparison, CES is scholarship that results from a professor’s engagement with their local or regional community, regardless of which discipline they belong to.

Nadine Changfoot, associate professor in political studies at Trent University, CFICE investigator, and co-author of the Trent internal report says that another barrier for faculty is university culture and its view of community based research or CES.

“I think the culture of the university, even while it’s improving in valuing community-campus engagement, for untenured professors the value is yet to be fully appreciated,” says Changfoot.

One way these challenges can be overcome, continues Changfoot, is through research into various faculty experiences with tenure and CCE in order to determine how CES can be better understood and more fully valued in a university tenure process.

CFICE Community Environmental Sustainability (PBTO-HALIB) Hub team. L to R, Back Row: David Tough, Stephen Hill, Randy Stoecker. Front Row: Marie Gage, Heather Reid, Nadine Changfoot, Helen Knibb, Jason Hartwick.

An example of this type of research can be seen in the report, “.” Published by the University of Victoria in April 2017, the report was developed to assist in peer review and evaluation of Community Engaged Scholarship. The impact rubric and guidelines contained in the report are based on a comprehensive literature review and empirical research conducted by the Office of Community University Engagement (OCUE) between August-December 2016.

According to Crystal Tremblay, who authored the report, “[It] encourages Faculties and Departments where faculty engage in CES, to consider its content in reviewing standards and policies applicable to hiring practices, merit evaluations, and promotion and tenure consideration.”

“This resource has been shared widely across the campus,” she continues, which speaks to the need for these types of resources at universities. “It is hoped that these resources help inform and strengthen guidelines for recognizing and rewarding engaged scholarship across the disciplines.”

By recognizing the value of community-campus engagement through the tenure and promotion process, universities will be able to make a greater contribution to the communities in which they exist.

As Tremblay notes, “It is time that institutions tackle this tremendous hurdle, if they want to be serious about their commitment to serving the public good.”

How to cite this article: Locken, Kira. (2018). “The Impact of Tenure on Community-Campus Engagement.”CFICE Connections Newsletter. January 29.  /communityfirst/2018/the-impact-of-tenure-on-community-campus-engagement/