Faculty practice: Making it work for promotion and tenure

Faculty practice: Making it work for promotion and tenure

Faculty practice is the vehicle used by nurse practitioner faculty to maintain clinical competence, national certification and enhance teaching. However, the role of faculty practice as scholarship has remained elusive for most NP faculty.

This presentation will focus on the scholarship of application and integration as it applies to faculty practice. The scholarship of application is “the application of knowledge in a scholarly fashion” or in today’s vernacular “translating research into practice”. Scholarship of integration is “what do these findings mean across and within disciplines” or interdisciplinary, collaborative work and /or community engagement. 

Glassick, Huber and Meroff (1997) proposed six standards for evaluation of these two forms of scholarship. These are: clear goals, adequate preparation, appropriate methods, significant results, effective presentation and reflective critique. These standards will be discussed and this presentation will offer exemplars on “how to use faculty practice” via the scholarship of application and/or integration in making it work for tenure and promotion.

An argument will be presented that supports replacing the old benchmarks of scholarship of discovery and “publish or perish” with the scholarship of application and integration and the new benchmark of “participate or perish.” With the advent of the doctor of nursing practice, health care reform, reductions in state and external sources of funding, institutions of higher education may have to reconsider the definition and evaluation of scholarship.