Building Institutional Capacity for Engaged Research: Proceedings of a Workshop (2025)
Chapter: 3 Challenges and Solutions: Synthesizing Two Landscape Reviews
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Challenges and Solutions: Synthesizing Two Landscape Reviews
Building institutional capacity for engaged research has multiple inherent challenges. To frame a comprehensive understanding of these tensions and kickstart participants’ efforts to collectively address them, two members of the planning committee presented a synthesis of two recent landscape scans. Elyse Aurbach, director for public engagement and research impacts at the University of Michigan, and Emily Ozer, a clinical and community psychologist and professor of public health at the University of California, Berkeley, and the faculty liaison to the executive vice chancellor and provost on public scholarship and engagement, explained that the scans aimed to provide examples of ongoing efforts and promising avenues for action in overcoming institutional barriers and tensions.
Ozer detailed a national scan described in the white paper Scan of Promising Efforts to Broaden Faculty Reward Systems to Support Societally-Impactful Research,1 which focused on identifying innovations in university faculty evaluation systems to recognize and reward societally impactful research. The scan, commissioned by participants in the Transforming Evidence Funders Network and published by The Pew Charitable Trusts, included several components: illustrative cases across 13 diverse U.S. universities; reviews of relevant reports, higher-education literature, and websites; and interviews with university leaders. The scan’s goal was to inform funder investments to catalyze shifts in culture and policies in universities and the broader research ecosphere.
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The second scan, explained Aurbach, was an initiative called Modernizing Scholarship for the Public Good.2 This scan was designed with two purposes: (a) to explore how various institutional contexts create more permissive, flexible, and supportive opportunities for engaged and equity-oriented scholars; and (b) to provide guidance and an action framework for university leaders to create environments that drive and support institutional change efforts. The three arms of the study’s approach included a broad advisory group, an extensive literature review, and case studies to illustrate the change process and successful initiatives. Deliverables consisted of an action framework and a database of tactics organized into specific actions appropriate for various actors in the ecosystem.
TENSIONS AND ACTION POINTS: A “MODEL OF SCALE”
A combined view of the two landscape scans clarified common tensions and allowed Aurbach and Ozer to identify several actionable avenues to address those challenges.
Actions at three levels of scale are needed to address common tensions encountered when building capacity for engaged research, said Aurbach: the individual level, the research institution level, and the meta-network level. The landscape scan presented by Ozer spanned all three scales, with an emphasis on incentive systems and funders as the primary audience; in contrast, the scan Aurbach presented, aimed at institutional change leaders, was primarily focused on the individual and institutional levels. The action points synthesized from the collective work of the scans are shown in Box 3-1.
Reform Faculty Evaluations
Ozer provided additional insights from Scan of Promising Efforts to Broaden Faculty Reward Systems to Support Societally-Impactful Research. Faculty evaluations based on traditional approaches that undervalue engaged research were noted as a critical tension point in both landscape scans, she noted. Institutions need to develop new guidelines for faculty evaluation, she said, not just in terms of promotion and tenure but across entire careers. In addition, “guidelines are not enough,” she said. “There is the bigger question about implementation [and] about enculturation—what’s happening at the center of campus [and] what’s happening in disciplines and departments.”
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2 See https://www.aplu.org/our-work/2-fostering-research-innovation/modernizing-scholarship-for-the-public-good/
BOX 3-1
Actions Needed to Advance Engaged Research by Level
Individual Level: Equip academic and community partners with skills, resources, and knowledge bases to engage ethically, effectively, and equitably
- Establish competency frameworks for engaged faculty
- Incorporate engaged research skills into graduate education programs
- Empower community partners to “speak the language of academics”
Research Institution Level: Organize research institutions to create facilitative, supportive environments
- Amplify societally impactful scholarship as part of institutional identity
- Equip committed institutional leaders
- Invest in institutional structures and networks, including by actions that
- Reduce legal, regulatory, procedural, bureaucratic, and social barriers
- Strengthen within and cross-campus/organization networks and programs to accelerate innovation and impact
- Launch and maintain catalytic funding programs and sustained institutional investments
- Develop awards and other mechanisms to recognize and celebrate work
- Formalize student curricular training and professional development opportunities
- Reform appointment, retention, tenure, and promotion practices
Meta-Network Level: Energize the meta-network to shape the broader disciplinary and funding ecosystems to prioritize and support societally impactful research
- Build societally impactful scholarship into institutional identity
- Provide funding support to accommodate the time-intensive nature of partnered scholarship
- Elevate visibility for societally impactful scholarship
- Align assessment practices to evaluate impacts of engaged research
SOURCE: Workshop presentation by Elyse Aurbach and Emily Ozer.
Beyond evaluation guidelines, the scans identified several institutional innovations developed to recognize engaged research and other “atypical” forms of scholarship, including new committees, training to teach tenure and review boards to recognize atypical forms of scholarship, and capacity building to help candidates strengthen their cases
during the evaluation process. “It’s not one-size-fits-all,” Ozer noted, highlighting that these innovations necessarily differ across university systems.
Establish Intervention Points for External Funders and Build an Evidence Base
It is important not only for research institutions to build “societally impactful scholarship” into their institutional identities but also for other actors in the research ecosystem, including funders. Beyond research institutions themselves, external funders can advance engaged research by shaping the funding ecosystem to recognize and reward societally impactful research, noted Ozer. The scan she described identified several intervention points that could be leveraged by funders aiming to accelerate and increase the impact of engaged research:
- funding for the engaged research (including dissemination and application) that accommodates the time frames and time-intensive nature of partnered scholarship;
- funding to support institutional change makers in their work prioritizing, catalyzing, and embedding engaged research practices;
- funding to support systematic institutional change at universities as they tailor strategies and infrastructure, and as they work to broaden and sustain cultural changes including faculty evaluation policies;
- funding of convening opportunities to support institutional cross-learning, cooperation, and collaboration; and
- funding to strengthen the broader ecosystem.
Ozer expanded on these points, noting that funding is needed to provide resources for research generation, support its dissemination and application, and enhance the visibility, legibility, and prestige of such research in internal and external evaluation. Furthermore, funders, collective convening power can be used to encourage more substantial investments aligned with societally impactful scholarship, especially via cooperation and collaboration among funders, and to strengthen and uplift scholarly outlets for societally impactful research.
Ozer asked participants to consider factors important for building an evidence base of institutional change—namely, systematic processes and evidence of impact specific to various conditions, university contexts, and approaches. She asked the group to consider ways to establish “a holistic, multi-method review that ‘sees’ diverse forms of scholarship and indicators of excellence.”
LIMITATIONS OF SCANS
While the two landscape scans presented may be useful for a broad understanding of ongoing efforts and promising avenues for action in engaged research, they have several important limitations, said Aurbach. Specifically, the scans do not
- cover the histories of how and why the academic systems evolved;
- identify specific opportunities for addressing multiple key areas of change, such as diversity, equity, and inclusion work or open science initiatives;
- address partnerships and how partnerships can differ across disciplines and sectors; nor
- address mismatches between mission and infrastructure that can undermine trust, effectiveness, and timeliness.
Overall, this workshop session emphasized the importance of community-engaged research, focusing on the ability of this method to enhance the relevance, inclusivity, and societal impact of research studies. Landscape scans provided the foundation for a deeper dive into the key tensions faced by engaged researchers and promising approaches for addressing those challenges to advance engaged research practices across diverse institutional contexts.
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