What does Engagement Look Like?


Engaged Scholarship encompasses creative intellectual work that is related to the faculty member's academic discipline or current role at NKU. The faculty member generates, synthesizes, interprets, clarifies, applies and/or communicates new or existing knowledge, methods, understandings, technologies, materials, uses, insights, or creativity works. To quality as engaged scholarship, the work must meet the definition of outreach or public engagement and must also meet the definition of scholarship. To qualify as scholarship, the work must:


  • Require a high level of discipline-related expertise

  • Be conducted in a scholarly manner with clear goals, adequate preparation, and appropriate methodology

  • Create new knowledge or be innovative

  • Be replicable or elaborated upon

  • Be appropriately documented, and if not published or presented as a professional conference, there should be a reflective critique that addresses the significance of the work, the process that was used, and what was learned

  • Be peer reviewed in some manner
  • Have an impact on the discipline or some community of people


As presented in the NKU Glossary of Outreach and Engagement. Published in Aligning for Public Engagement, Laying the Foundation. Adapted from Diamond, R.M. Aligning Faculty Rewareds with Instituational Mission, Anker Publishing (1999), p. 78; and Glassick, C.E., Huber, M.T, & Macroff, G.I. Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate. John Wiley & Sons, (1997), p. 24.