Practice and Promotion: Exploring the Scholarship of Faculty Practice

Clinical practice is an important component for nurse practitioner (NP) educators and is a foundational element in providing quality NP education. Faculty practice may be utilized to maintain clinical competency, meet licensing and certification requirements, and/or provide opportunities for direct clinical education of NP students. NP faculty engaged in practice related to their academic position, often struggle to incorporate the scholarly aspects of clinical practice into their academic institution’s promotion processes. This presentation will provide an overview of one university’s efforts to conceptualize the mission of practice and the development of the evidence criteria as they relate to academic promotion.

Many academic institutions have a tripartite system of teaching, research, and service that overlies the promotion/tenure process. Based on the 2014 NONPF Faculty Practice survey, faculty practice was incorporated into the research (4%), teaching (21%), or service (41%) missions of the respondent’s promotion process. For 34% of the respondents, practice was identified as a separate mission. For faculty and institutions in which practice is either a component of other missions or a separate mission in itself, the criteria and evidence for practice-related scholarship can be challenging to codify.

At the presenter’s institution, practice is a separate mission that is paired with the teaching mission for faculty seeking promotion in the academic series. Informed by the Boyer model (Boyer, 1990) and the institution’s promotion guidelines, three broad elements have been developed for evaluation of the practice scholarship of faculty seeking promotion. These elements: Practice Scholarship, Effectiveness/Competence, and Service are further differentiated into one or more criterion, with descriptions for each faculty rank (instructor to full professor). The presentation will give examples of the three elements, criterion descriptions, and examples of the scholarly evidence that support the elements and criteria at the different professorial ranks.

The scholarship of practice is an area of academic life in which NP faculty participate, but also struggle to adequately define and demonstrate their scholarship within university promotion systems. This presentation will seek to share one school’s efforts to provide guidelines and clarity in elucidating scholarly faculty practice.