Boyer: Scholarship Reconsidered at Boise State

About the Workshop

To date, the ASSERT program has supported ~70 faculty from every college and nearly every academic unit on campus through a series of retreats, workshops, and coaching sessions. Over the last 5 years, we’ve learned a lot about our colleagues and their academic homes. Common themes are that our faculty are amazing people with great ideas; most feel isolated on campus; and many share concerns about being constrained by our university’s interpretation of and culture surrounding Earnest Boyer‘s model of scholarship, which is foundational to our tenure and promotion policies at Boise State.

Although Boyer wrote Scholarship Reconsidered 30 years ago, its central tenets remain very relevant today. And while the Boise State P&T policies refer to Boyer, we believe these policies utilize a limited interpretation of the model. The gap between its original intent and its current implementation is that we freely adopt words like innovation, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary on campus without having the structural and/or cultural frameworks in place to ensure that our faculty can germinate and then pursue bold scholarship.

Today, more than ever, faculty are looking for ways to ensure that their scholarship aligns with their values and the different parts of their faculty lives are aligned. Re-envisioning Boyer’s model gives voice to those concerns and provides a path forward for faculty struggling with these issues and provides the space to be innovative and to take intellectual risks.

This workshop outlines the promise of Boyer and provide a more holistic framework for the future of Boise State. The topic is highly relevant in light of our institutional strategic planning process, discussions about creating new schools, program prioritization, and our search for a provost (and future searches for a VPR, deans, etc.) because these decisions should be made with our North Star on who we are and who we want to become as academics at the forefront of the discussion.

Workshop participants left with a broader interpretation of Boyer’s model that enable them to write and enact policies, processes, and practices that reward the full breadth of what it means to be a faculty member today.

This workshop was hosted in collaboration with Boise State’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL).