English Department Statement on Scholarship
1. Forms of scholarship that define the work of Luther faculty in English
English includes the study of texts, culture, and pedagogy. It also includes the creation of many different kinds of texts, including poetry, fiction, essays, journalism, factual writing, and creative nonfiction. Given this range of activities, it is natural that our scholarship takes many forms.
Scholarship includes the research necessary to teach courses with freshness, expertise, and intellectual challenge; such scholarship connects students with the scholarly conversation, as well as acquainting them with critical theoretical language and approaches. Such scholarship involves faculty immersion in the conversation of particular fields. It implies a responsibility to help colleagues keep in touch with those fields: in our department we find frequent occasions for presentations on either scholarly or pedagogical work. Sometimes a faculty member's study of a new e-learning application is particularly helpful to the department’s teaching. Sometimes a faculty member extends his or her expertise to a new area that enriches our curriculum. English studies are also central to the larger community conversation; the pattern of life-long reading, thinking, and research that informs writing and presenting on campus and in the local community—e.g. “Texts and Issues” lectures, Agora publications, public programming are an important kind of local scholarship.
Wider distribution is a natural extension of this local scholarship and is crucial to the department's integrity. As scholars, we have a responsibility to engage with the larger conversation that helps us to discover, reframe, and reassess what we know. In addition, wider distribution enables us to test ourselves in a larger arena, to establish that we can speak with authority to other experts. This wider distribution would include participation in institutes and seminars, presentation of papers at professional conferences, publication of reviews and articles in peer-reviewed journals, scholarly monographs, public readings, published essays, journalism, and creative nonfiction, and funded grant proposals. Sometimes service to professional organizations includes scholarship, as in editorial work or conference organization. These are the most visible and identifiable kinds of scholarship. But there are other forms of scholarship that should be recognized and applauded, and here Ernest Boyer’s four categories—scholarship of discovery, teaching, integration, and application—might be helpful.
2. Forms of peer review—including those beyond the Luther campus—appropriate for professional activity
Luther colleagues are peers who should help each other evaluate and revise their work, as well as affirming each other’s professional forays. Some very important publications are not peer-reviewed in a rigorous way, yet because of their importance to the college, the church, the profession, or society at large, they should be valued. More strictly, peer review implies an editor or editorial board's judgment of a work’s integrity and validity, as well as its place in a wider conversation. Such external peer review is crucial, both for validating one’s work and also for helping a faculty member find ways to revise work that is not yet considered ready for wider distribution.
3. Means to encourage and enable colleagues to apply the fruits of professional activity in their teaching
The English department cultivates an atmosphere of collegial sharing. Discussions of annual evaluation center around the individual teacher’s planning for his or her future development as a scholar-teacher and how the department can help make those plans possible. Individuals share their work with colleagues at department meetings, and colleagues respond, affirm, and give suggestions. Other department members are generous to take over classes when their colleagues are away at scholarly conferences, and those who have attended national conferences report back to the department. Many colleagues read each other’s scholarly work and offer suggestions and help, particularly in the summer.
Good scholarship makes its impact on student learning in ways that vary from discipline to discipline. In English, students can benefit directly from a teacher’s work in a specialized area of research—if that research coincides with material in courses that the faculty member has the opportunity to teach. More often, good teachers find ways to translate their scholarly discoveries into the material that undergraduates study. We can help faculty in English find more regular opportunities to use the fruits of their professional activity by being alert to special teaching opportunities where new faculty learning can help shape those offerings (in, for example, our junior-senior seminars, honors courses, special topics courses, and new Paideia Capstone offerings). We can also assist one other in conceiving professional projects that relate to the courses we regularly staff.
Student-faculty collaborative research is often seen as an opportunity for faculty to combine teaching and professional activity. Members of the English department have collaborated with students in many ways that have benefited the students themselves, mentoring them as they shape writing done in their classes for submission to a variety of conferences and competitions. When those papers have been accepted, instructors have traveled with students to conferences where they have had an opportunity to meet important writers and critics and to participate in current discussions in our field. In some disciplines this faculty support of student work can have a reciprocal effect, providing the basis for scholarly activity by faculty; in English, however, this is rarely true. A student might create bibliographies or gather or categorize materials, but a student’s study and creation of texts almost never applies directly to a faculty member’s scholarship. Therefore, while an institutional commitment to student-faculty collaborative research will improve student learning in all disciplines, we must note that in English a faculty member’s efforts in this area may well reduce the quantity of his or her own scholarly work
As this discussion implies, the greatest difficulty for our department members is finding the time to do the scholarship to which we are committed. Historically we have been deeply involved in college governance and administration, and in the year-by-year shaping of the wide-ranging, interdisciplinary Paideia program. Governance and administration involve us in institutional research, teaching in Paideia stimulates ongoing research beyond our individual fields of expertise, research to renew and update our English courses is more or less continuous, and writing instruction—one of the most labor-intensive tasks in education—is central to teaching in English and Paideia I. Therefore, the question for most instructors in English is less a matter of how to apply our scholarship to our teaching than how to free time for new scholarly or artistic initiatives.
4. Expected depth and range of achievement in scholarship at third year review, tenure review, and application for promotion for full professor
Given our discipline’s study and creation of highly complex texts, it is predictable that we would resist simple formulas for judging successful scholarship. We evaluate our peers on their pattern of scholarly activity, rather than discrete achievements. The quality of scholarly performance is more important to us than quantity: an article in a journal with a low acceptance rate may be so impressive that it represents the same achievement as two or more articles in minimally-reviewed journals. We are also aware of differences in the time needed for different kinds of research. The difficulty of travel to archives may make some kinds of research more time-consuming than others. We also wish to note that English has always been a highly competitive publication and grant-writing environment; peer-reviewed journals in our field generally are not subsidized by contributors or their institutions and acceptance rates are low (5-10 percent at the leading journals). In other words, the department’s own assessment of a candidate for tenure or promotion is very important in situating and evaluating the scholarly work.
Still, there are identifiable patterns of expectation. During the first three years in the Luther English department, faculty members should be learning to be effective teachers, advisors, and colleagues. New faculty members should also exhibit to colleagues and students their promise for scholarly work, and they should begin implementing a plan that will lead to scholarly production. By tenure and promotion to Associate Professor, their scholarship should include off-campus presentation and work worthy of peer-reviewed publication. (In the Dean’s September 7, 2002 response to our statement, see his comment on the above sentence: “For tenure candidates, some peer-reviewed work accepted for publication ought to be the norm.”) For promotion to full professor, a faculty member should exhibit a scholarly life active enough to have generated a number of peer-reviewed publications. A Luther professor should be recognizable as the peer of professors at other institutions.
5. Distinctive forms of scholarship at a liberal arts college of the church
The Luther English department has a long tradition of commitment to some of the distinctive features of church-related, liberal arts education—interdisciplinary learning; a focus on the whole person, including a concern for the ethical and the spiritual; a commitment to civic life; a concern for religious institutions. Scholarship in these areas
sustains our life in community and should be encouraged and rewarded. Such scholarship will likely be broader in its audience, more flexible in its modes of presentation, and less prescriptive in its forms of peer review than our more conventional scholarship within the discipline of English.