One of the challenges in going up for tenure (or applying for jobs or grants) is explaining the significance of your scholarship to those outside your discipline. At my university, we are advised to follow a model first explicated by Ernest L. Boyer in Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate.
Boyer is known for many important things such as leading the United States Commission on Education under President Carter, and this book pushed many academic institutions to re-think what counts as scholarship and how faculty and administrators present their work to others. To be a bit reductive, Boyer discusses four categories of scholarship: application, discovery, integration, and teaching. The faculty policy manual at my university lists these categories (along with the scholarship of artistic activity) as guides for describing our research in tenure and promotion documents. What I discovered when I went up for tenure is that the scholarship of integration is the one category used least often, so I am writing this post to bring it a bit more attention. Some readers just might find it to be a useful way of presenting their work to others.
To back up a bit, I should define the first three categories. The scholarship of discovery refers to the development of new knowledge and theories, while the scholarship of application takes already-existing theories and applies them to problems within the field to extend disciplinary knowledge. These modes of scholarship are often the center of graduate education. We take some classes that teach us the theories of the field and other classes that show us how to apply those theories to standard objects of study within that field. The scholarship of teaching is just that, research that centers on pedagogical issues within the discipline. These three are the most common categories of scholarship at my institution, and I suspect they abound in most other places, too. I never felt like any of these labels fit my work, though, which is why I was excited to learn about the scholarship of integration.
This category of research focuses on scholarship that is truly interdisciplinary, where theories generally used in one discipline are applied to objects of study that are typically part of an entirely different field. Now, I am well aware that many people question the existence or validity of interdisciplinary scholarship in general. I have long heard arguments that all scholarship is disciplinary, that nothing really crosses lines anymore. When I hear that, I think of the first time I sent an article to a peer-reviewed journal after graduate school; it was reviewed by a pediatrician and an art historian (it was in the medical humanities). If writing for those two audiences does not mean crossing disciplinary lines, then I do not know what does.
People have been asking me for years where my work falls. Is it rhetoric? Parts of it. Is it gender studies? Parts of it. Is it medical humanities? Parts of it. Is it trauma studies? Parts of it. And what about the scholarship that combines a couple of these areas but ignores the others? Thinking of my work as representing the scholarship of integration was exactly what I needed to explain why my work did not look traditional or, in some eyes, acceptable. This might not be new to a lot of people, but what surprised me came after my tenure dossier had moved up the administrative ladder. More than once, I was told that I was the first person that some administrators and committee members had ever seen to use the scholarship of integration. The provost even invited me to speak to new faculty members at a workshop about the tenure process partly because of how I discussed my scholarship in my documents.
I would imagine many readers feel comfortable thinking of their scholarship in Boyer’s most traditional terms, but if you are someone who does not feel like your work fits the more common categories, I invite you to explore the scholarship of integration as a possible option. Let us know in the comments how scholarship is generally categorized at your school (and how you work with those categories when they are less applicable to your work).
[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user qthomasbower]
