Posted June 2025
Note: This guidance is subject to change.
BACKGROUND
In January 2024, the Council on Academic Personnel (CAP) issued campuswide Guidance on Community Engaged Scholarship for Appointment, Promotion, and Appraisal. During the 2024–25 academic year, Humanities Dean Alexandra Minna Stern formed the Humanities Task Force for Community Engaged Scholarship.
After a year-long process, the task force produced this document to provide guidance on cross-disciplinary criteria for evaluating public-facing, community engaged scholarship and teaching in the humanities. The guidelines have been reviewed by the Dean’s Office, the chairs and directors of Humanities Division departments and centers, and the UCLA Center for Community Engagement.
PART I: DEFINITION
The UCLA College Division of Humanities values nontraditional scholarship and teaching that reach beyond the academy to local, global, diverse, and multilingual collaborators and audiences. Community-engaged humanities teaching, research, and artistic and creative work are carried out in partnership with non-academic organizations and community scholars and practitioners. They span a broad range of themes, methods, languages, and forms in scholarship and teaching.
While foregrounding ethical forms of knowledge production, curation or dissemination, they thrive on mutually beneficial partnerships that innovate or revise academic knowledge. Students, staff, and alumni may be involved in these partnerships.
Community engagement in the humanities includes multifaceted, publicly engaged activities, connecting scholarly expertise with the needs or interests of nonacademic groups at local, national or global levels. Public humanities scholarship and teaching bridge the gap between non-academic publics and academia in intentional, collaborative terms. They ensure that academic activities are accessible to communities outside of the university, while non-academic groups are informing faculty, students, staff or alumni with community-based experiences, knowledges, and practices.
Intrinsic to who we are as faculty of a top-ranking public research university, community engaged and public humanities contribute to all five goals of UCLA’s 2023–28 Strategic Plan. They enhance our ability to strengthen public trust between the university and its partner communities. Therefore, a fair and consistent evaluation of publicly engaged scholarship and teaching during the academic review process is essential to UCLA’s mission. Conversely, failure to account for them risks undermining the university’s primary purpose, which is “the creation, dissemination, preservation and application of knowledge for the betterment of our global society.”
PART II: VALUES
Publicly engaged humanities research, artistic or creative work, and teaching embody the following values (in bold). These values inform activities listed below (not in bold) and more.
• Democratize Knowledge and Share Benefits: Create and share new forms of knowledge that decenter traditional academic authority; document and interpret together histories, traditions, and practices; empower local and global communities; strengthen dialogue between diverse stakeholders; enrich cultural understanding; share revenue and credit in publications, performances or other types of engagement.
• Strengthen Civic Engagement and Drive Social Impact: Engage pressing societal issues such as language preservation, cultural heritage and policy reform and advocate for policy changes; amplify historically marginalized voices and redress other social inequalities; share public platforms at events, exhibits, or conferences.
• Enhance Teaching: Integrate real-world, community-based projects into departmental curricula; provide students with innovative, hands-on learning experiences that connect academic theory to community-based practice; introduce new ideas and multiple languages in the classroom; organize accessible workshops, reading groups or collaborative teaching initiatives in alignment with community priorities.
• Promote Equity and Inclusion: Highlight and recognize the contributions of community scholars/practitioners in interrogating strictly scholarly knowledge.
• Expand Scholarly Practice: Recognize diverse formats, including podcasts, exhibitions, and digital archives, beyond published research; reach audiences beyond the traditional boundaries of a university; enable members of a non-academic community to learn skills relevant for their interests and needs.
What does community engagement look like for community partners?
Community engagement in the public humanities fosters reciprocal partnerships that elevate the voices of community experts. This collaborative approach enables projects of high impact and significance to address shared goals and challenges while creating knowledges and solutions that benefit all stakeholders. It provides community partners with opportunities to share their histories, memories, experiences, and resources while achieving tangible outcomes of their choosing.
Examples of community engaged or public humanities activities include, but are not limited to, the following:
• Collaborative Digital Projects: multilingual digital archives or interactive websites that preserve and celebrate cultural heritage.
• Exhibitions: Public-facing engagements with museums and other community centers to highlight local histories or transcultural, marginalized or international voices
• Creative Media Production: podcasts, documentary and fiction films or apps that make humanities work relevant for non-academic communities.
• Creative Expression and Performance: events that include poetry, music, spoken word, and other types of creative expression produced in collaboration with community partners.
• Policy and Advocacy Work: collaboration with community leaders to inform public policies on education, cultural preservation or social justice issues.
• Public Humanities Programming: reading groups, workshops or lecture series at libraries, museums or community centers to foster dialogue on literature, history, or the arts.
• Service Learning: collaboration with local organizations to document oral histories, preserve cultural artifacts or protect non-human environments.
• Community Writing Workshops: “collaboratories” where community members, faculty, and students co-create narratives or explore creative expression.
• Participatory Action Research: research in which non-academic publics collaborate with academic researchers on collective action, critical reflection, and community-based analyses.
PART III: ASSESSMENT
Evaluating community engaged and public humanities research, artistic or creative work, and teaching requires guidelines that explain why these activities generate new knowledge or apply existing knowledge to address community-based interests and needs, and how their innovation or revision transforms the relation between a non-academic public and academia for the common good. Evaluation includes assessing impact in a holistic and informed manner.
The Task Force strongly encourages each department to articulate metrics that enable faculty to evaluate community engaged and public humanities scholar-teachers in its corresponding fields. These metrics should integrate APO and CAP guidelines. The following criteria may be used to guide faculty and departments in this conversation:
• Community Impact: evaluate tangible benefits to the community such as cultural preservation, policy change or renewed appreciation for the humanities
• Scholarly Contribution: assess how the project advances disciplinary knowledge, engages with current intellectual debates, and demonstrates innovation in research methods or activities
• Ethical Collaboration: Ensure community partners are involved as equal contributors to the project’s design, implementation and evaluation, and to the creation of knowledge; build lasting, ethical relationships that prioritize mutual benefits and respect between academia and the community.
• Scope and Complexity: Consider the project’s temporal and geographical scales (local, national, international), including effort, creativity, and coordination required to execute and sustain its design.
• Accessibility and Inclusivity: Examine how the project engages diverse audiences, including considerations for language, disability, and cultural protocols.
• Sustainability and Longevity: Analyze plans for the project’s long-term viability and its potential for future use or adaptation by other scholar-teachers or communities.
• Student Involvement: Assess the integration of students in meaningful roles that enhance their learning and professional development.
• Innovative Dissemination: Evaluate the use of diverse formats — digital, print or performative — to reach academic and non-academic audiences effectively.
• Diverse Metrics of Success: Consider disciplinary and community engaged measures of impact such as citations, fundraising, grants, peer reviews, and attendance, as well as impact on shaping policy, cultural preservation, and literary or artistic influence.
PART IV: BEST PRACTICES
For Faculty with Community Engaged and Public Humanities Research, Artistic or Creative Work, and Teaching
• For the academic review process, community engaged and public humanities scholar-teachers should document their work and influence in addition to identifying challenges and solutions. Using accessible language and metrics that capture scholarly significance and community benefit, they should contextualize their activities within the broader field. They should emphasize how they advance knowledge, support the university’s mission, and foster public trust.
• Dedicate a separate section of your self-statement or a separate self-statement to describing the specific form of your publicly engaged work (research, scholarship, digital projects, publications, teaching, programming, creative work, etc.) and explaining the significance of your activity in the broadest possible terms, yet with sufficient detail.
• Communicate with your community partner before the academic review process about a descriptive, extramural evaluation (although not all community partners may be able to provide one for various reasons).v
• Cultivate strong mentorships among community engaged and publicly oriented faculty, especially at the pre-tenure level.
• Include these guidelines in your dossier for the department and CAP.
For Departments Reviewing Community-Engaged and Public Humanities Work
In reviewing these types of work, departments should support faculty by evaluating their conceptual, methodological or practical rigor, and by assessing their social impact. External reviewers should be given guidelines that recognize many different forms and ethical considerations in the public humanities. Publicly engaged humanities should be recognized on their own terms instead of being compared with traditional scholarships. A holistic approach ensures that community engaged and public humanities scholarship and teaching are recognized in their fullness.
• Ensure that letters soliciting participation in academic reviews mention public-facing community engaged engagements explicitly, when these types of work are part of a faculty’s dossier.
• Provide community partners with expectations, guidelines or suggestions (free of academic jargon), as well as ample time for the descriptive, extramural evaluation.
• Revisit the CAP Guidance: Community Engaged Scholarship, as well as this document, with colleagues at the beginning of the faculty’s review discussion.
• Provide Senate faculty, in general, and assistant professors, in particular, with a strong support structure (training workshops, mentorship programs, etc.) for pursuing public-facing, community engaged research and scholarship.
• Offer faculty and students educational resources for publicly engaged work.
For Chairs and Deans Managing Academic Personnel Reviews
• Ensure that departments include these guidelines for evaluation of community engaged and public humanities research, artistic or creative work, and teaching in the dossier, with consistent language requesting evaluation from external reviewers.
• Provide the option of commenting on the value of community engaged and public humanities work.
• Request students, as appropriate, for feedback on community engaged teaching.
• Chairs: Ensure that there is an opportunity for the discussion of community engaged and public humanities research, artistic or creative work, and teaching in an ad hoc review, during a faculty meeting and/or vote, and in the chair’s summary letter.
• Dean: Ensure that community engaged and public humanities research, artistic or creative work, and teaching is highlighted in cases where they are minor or major components of the dossier.