5. Faculty Evaluation

Faculty are evaluated in several basic areas, according to their job descriptions:

• research and creative activity
• teaching
• service/leadership
• community-engaged scholarship
• interdisciplinary activity

Not all faculty are necessarily engaged in all of these areas at all times.  However, with only very few exceptions, all faculty are engaged in teaching.

According to state policy, faculty are evaluated on an annual basis.  For more information, see: Annual Evaluation

Faculty members on the tenure-track undergo reviews for reappointment, tenure and promotion to associate professor, promotion to full professor and tenured faculty performance, according to contract.  For more information, see: Reappointment, Promotion and Tenure.

Consistent with University policy and the principles of academic freedom, the College supports ad encourages full freedom, within the law, of inquiry, discourse, teaching, research, and publication for all members of its faculty.

1. Research and Creative Activity

Research and Creative Activity are assessed both in terms of productivity and impact.  Departments should provide guidance to their faculty, regarding how these two aspects should be weighted.  Impact can be demonstrated in a number of ways, for example, peer-reviewed publications, juried exhibitions, patents, software, digital resources including internet-delivered projects, performances, presentations of scholarly papers, plenary addresses, community-engaged scholarship, research awards, and successful grantsmanship, as defined by the department (this is not an inclusive list). The Department should also look for evidence that the work is of high quality and supports the department, college, and university mission of contributing to the advancement of knowledge across all disciplines.  That mission includes advancing the University’s guiding commitments to access, social mobility, diversity, equity and inclusion.  Research or Creative Activity that contributes to the advancement of knowledge concerning issues facing diverse populations, that designs programs to support researchers from historically underrepresented and marginalized groups, that initiates or performs innovative scholarship that advances the understanding of equity and inclusion in a respective field of study, or that has the potential to improve the quality of life for historically underrepresented and marginalized groups is considered a valuable contribution to the mission of the College.

2. Teaching

Teaching is evaluated as it relates to classroom teaching, direction of theses and dissertations, academic advisement, and extension programs. The following areas can be assessed, as appropriate:

• evidence of competence and currency in subject matter, of proper organization and design of courses taught, of ability to teach students from all backgrounds and identities effectively, and of ability to present the subject matter in an interesting and clear manner that is appropriate for students at the level for which that course is designed;
• effective direction of student research;
• expertise in development of curriculum;
• evidence of effective mentoring of students from all backgrounds and identities;
• evidence of effective advising of students from all backgrounds and identities;
• evidence that teaching contributions are effective in light of the Department’s teaching mission.

Teaching effectiveness can be evaluated, using the following evidence:

• course evaluations;
• peer evaluations;
• construction of syllabi, assignments, classroom activities, etc.;
• students mentored or supervised, and the product(s) of those students’ work
• pedagogical innovation.
• participation in departmental, college, or university initiatives seeking to ensure equitable outcomes for students.

Departments are cautioned to use course evaluations as demonstrating only one particular aspect of a faculty member’s teaching effectiveness, and not to rely solely on these numbers to assess a faculty member’s effectiveness.  Departments should develop a protocol for monitoring and reporting course evaluation inequities based on race and/or gender.

3. Service/Leadership

Service/Leadership provides critical and necessary support for the College to accomplish its mission of teaching, scholarship, and community engagement, maintain a healthy system of faculty governance, and enact its commitment to equity and inclusion.  University service and leadership include evidence of sustained and significant contributions to program and curriculum development, support and assessment; faculty governance at the department, college or university level, and student support both co-curricular and extracurricular.  The nature of a faculty member’s service and leadership is expected to evolve and advance over the course of their career.

University service and leadership may consist of committee or individual work, and may occur in connection with a wide range of campus constituencies.  At the community level this is most often based on professional expertise in areas related to the University’s public-service objectives, and is discussed more fully under community engagement. At the professional level, service and leadership consist of the work performed in support of academic or professional organizations, including leadership roles.

The faculty member’s commitment of time and the quality of service work or leadership should be considered.  Service and leadership that supports the College’s mission of advancing equity and inclusion should also be recognized.  Service and leadership in support of these commitments includes but is not limited to programmatic or individual work to support students from different backgrounds and identities, work that develops and supports teaching that embodies a commitment to equity and inclusion, work that supports the development of university policies and practices that strive for equity and inclusion, community work that supports historically underrepresented and marginalized groups and organizations that work on their behalf, and work that supports equity and inclusion efforts within the discipline or profession.  Faculty are often called upon to counsel and informally mentor students, staff, and other faculty, sometimes in moments of crisis. Efforts by faculty members to create an institutional culture and a working and learning environment that offers acceptance, support, and respect for a diversity of individuals as they pursue their academic, research, and professional ambitions is an important service that supports the university’s mission.  

4. Community-Engaged Scholarship

Introduction

The University’s mission is to “discover, create, transmit, and apply knowledge to address the needs of individuals and society. This mission is accomplished through instruction, through research, scholarship, and creative activities, and through public service.”

In 2012, UNC Charlotte’s Faculty Council adopted language in the Academic Personnel Procedures Handbook (Section VI.C: Areas of Performance to be Reviewed) to “integrate community-engaged scholarship within the institution as an optional component to the criteria used in reappointment, promotion, and tenure decisions.” This is consistent with the university’s recognition as an Engaged University by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.  Consonant with this mission is the College of Liberal Arts & Science’s commitment to promoting the goals of equity and inclusion.

To advance these university goals, the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences has adopted the following definition of community-engaged scholarship, and recommends the following steps for departments and chairs to use in evaluating faculty records to support the use of community-engaged scholarship as a criterion in reappointment, promotion, and tenure decisions of faculty members who choose to engage in this type of scholarship.

Definition of Community-Engaged Scholarship

Community-engaged scholarship is scholarship that connects the faculty member with the community, whether local, national, or international, in an integrative approach to research with the purpose of developing ethical and practical solutions to social, health, economic, and environmental challenges. This work inherently combines research, service, and potentially teaching activities. Community-engaged scholarship should include the pursuit and creation of new knowledge within the context of solving community issues and needs, either as unpaid or grant-funded activity. To qualify as scholarship, the activities should include specific components such as clear goals, appropriate methods, reflective critique, rigor, dissemination of work, and review. The intent is not to replace other forms of scholarship but rather to expand the way scholarship is viewed within the college and to expand the way scholarship can stimulate knowledge discovery across disciplines, apply to significant problems, and encourage public service. (For more information about definitions of community-engaged scholarship, see the Community Campus Partnerships for Health website  http://depts.washington.edu/ccph/scholarship.html, or Barker, D. (2004). The Scholarship of Engagement: A Taxonomy of Five Emerging Practices. Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, Volume 9, Number 2, p. 123).

Documenting Community-Engaged Scholarship in Reappointment, Promotion and Tenure Decisions

Documentation: Faculty should include an integrated analytical description of Community-engaged scholarship as part of their personal narrative and annual review. Because Community-engaged scholarship spans multiple activities, faculty should include a discussion of their work in at least the scholarship and service sections of their Personal Narrative. Faculty should add a discussion of the teaching component when they involve student researchers. 

Community-engaged scholarship may produce intellectual work other than peer-reviewed scholarship. To document other outcomes the Appendix on Scholarship and Discovery should include evidence such as policy documents or government recommendations; practice-based and community accessible publications that arise out of collaborations; community forums developed to inform research processes; ; educate or transform structures; archival, ethnographic, and oral historical community projects; websites developed to engage broad constituencies in research based efforts; innovative and sustainable intervention programs with evaluated outcomes and documented impact, or other relevant materials.

External Letters: In addition to the documentation submitted by the faculty member the chair and Department Review Committee (DRC) should identify appropriate external reviewers who can offer critical evaluation of the engaged scholarship as part of the normal process of consultation with the Dean on identifying the pool of potential external reviewers. Letters to these external reviewers would be similar to those evaluating traditional scholarship but must emphasize in particular the specific ways in which the faculty member’s scholarly contribution to a program, project, or product proved essential to its success and resulted in identifiable results that contributed to the public good.

Evaluating Community-Engaged Scholarship

To evaluate faculty members’ community-engaged scholarship, department chairs and review committees must follow standards of the university. To that end, reviewers can use the following criteria to evaluate community-engaged scholarship depending on the stage of the current project:

• Clear goals and questions
• Adequate preparation including a review of relevant scholarship and grounding in the community
• Appropriate methods of data collection and evaluation
• Contributions to the community, including but not limited to work related to equity and inclusion, and the scholarly discipline
• Effective presentation with demonstrable community engagement
• Scholarly critique and evaluation by peers

Examples of Community-Engaged Scholarship

These examples are intended to be suggestive only and not definitive for the wide range of possible contributions one might make in this area.

1. A faculty member of history, in collaboration with a local museum, oversees the collection of over 100 oral histories of local elder millworkers.  The faculty member then performed archival research and used this in developing several exhibitions with the museum relating to the industrial history of the region.  Documentation of the project includes letters from the museum board indicating the faculty member’s specific and key role in the project, as well as information on the exhibit and its impact, including duration of display and attendance numbers.
2. A faculty member of geology, specializing in hydrogeology, collaborates with the local government and communities to take several years of measurements of water levels in local streams and lakes.   The data collected is used by the collaborators to predict the effects of major new land development on the local aquifer.   Documentation of the project includes letters from local government officials describing the faculty member’s specific and key role in the project, as well as any official government documentation and reports created presenting the results of the study.
3. A faculty member in sociology has established a partnership with a local hospital to evaluate an intervention improving the care of transgender patients. The hospital works with the faculty member to design the intervention, provides access to aggregate statistics, and allows recruitment of patients and medical staff for in-depth interviews.  Documentation of the project includes the intervention protocol, workshop materials used to train medical staff with new protocols, and a website that publishes protocols and study results in accessible language. Additionally, a letter from the hospital describes the faculty member’s specific role in the project.

5. Interdisciplinary Activity

Faculty working outside of the department or program in which they have a primary appointment contribute to the College’s missions of teaching, scholarship, and community engagement, maintaining a healthy system of faculty governance, and enacting its commitment to equity and inclusion. Departments should thus have a set of procedures by which they can evaluate the common and important interdisciplinary contributions of their faculty. Those contributions may be made across the range of faculty endeavors, including scholarship, teaching, service, and leadership. Contributions may include formal affiliation with interdisciplinary programs, departments, or centers, as well as more informal collaborations with faculty and students across disciplines within UNC Charlotte and beyond. 

Annual review processes at the departmental level should include the evaluation of interdisciplinary work. Faculty should document any contributions to interdisciplinarity in research, teaching, service, and leadership as follows;

• List any interdisciplinary programs, departments, and centers with which faculty are formally or informally associated;
• Identify/describe any interdisciplinary teaching contributions/accomplishments (e.g., courses taught for or cross-listed with an interdisciplinary program, student mentorship, thesis committees, collaborative teaching projects, interdisciplinary learning communities, etc.)
• Identify/describe the service/leadership contributions/accomplishments (e.g., committee service, interdisciplinary program administration, events planned) 
• Identify/describe scholarship contributions/accomplishments that are interdisciplinary in nature (e.g., interdisciplinary research groups; interdisciplinary journal editorial boards; interdisciplinary conferences attended/presented at; publications in journals outside of primary discipline; publications in interdisciplinary journals, interdisciplinary community-based research). In the case of publications, provide information on journal quality/impact.
• In the case of dual appointments, faculty may also request that a letter from a secondary unit detailing their contributions be included with their annual review materials.