Faculty members who take a major role in curriculum development or undertake the revision of an existing course or the design of a new one have often done so at their own risk. These time-consuming projects take faculty members away from those activities that have traditionally been most highly recognized in promotion, tenure, and merit-pay decisions: research and publication. As a result, tenured faculty often avoid such activities. The message on many campuses is clear: if you wish to advance your career, this is not an activity on which you should spend your time.

Fortunately, the climate is changing. Building on the work of the late Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and supported by grants from major foundations (the Lilly Endowment, the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, and the Pew Charitable Trusts), new initiatives at Syracuse University and at the American Association for Higher Education have focused on increasing the importance of teaching and curriculum-related activities in the faculty reward system.

As a direct result of these efforts and the willingness of many faculty and administrators to support them, the tenure and promotion systems on many campuses are being revised to include within the definition of acceptable and recognized scholarly and professional work such activities as course and curriculum design and instructional innovation.

As the American Historical Association asserts, limiting scholarship to research and publication has been a disservice not only to the institution, students, and individual faculty members, but to the disciplines as well: “The debate over priorities is not discipline-specific but extends across the higher education communities. Nevertheless, each discipline has specific concerns and problems. For history, the privilege given to the monograph in promotion and tenure has led to the undervaluing of other activities central to the life of the discipline-writing textbooks, developing courses and curricula, documentary editing, museum exhibitions, and film projects to name but a few” (1994, pp. 1–2).

Such statements provide faculty added justification for submitting course, curriculum, and instructional innovations to promotion and tenure committees as scholarly work. Statements describing the work of faculty in their fields have been developed by a number of professional associations, including the American Academy of Religion, American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business, American Chemical Society, American Historical Association, American Sociological Association, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Association of American Geographers, Council of Administrators of Family and Consumer Sciences, Geological Society of America, Joint Policy Board for Mathematics, Modern Language Association, and National Office for Arts Accreditation in Higher Education (which includes the fields of landscape architecture, architecture, art and design, dance, music, and theater). These statements can be obtained from the associations directly, and many can also be found in Diamond and Adam (1995). Other associations are completing their own statements on faculty work for their fields.

As a faculty member engaged in course or curriculum design, you face a number of specific challenges in having your work accepted as scholarly or professional by the committees on your campus. Because promotion and tenure committees usually are made up of faculty from other disciplines with different vocabularies and different sets of priorities, they will need to understand that work of this type is indeed scholarly and professional. For this purpose you can use the promotion and tenure statements from your campus (if they have been revised) and from your department, but you will need also to refer to the work that has been done nationally to describe what scholarly and professional work is in your discipline. Although the developers of the disciplinary statement mentioned above were unable to agree on a single definition of scholarship, they were able to agree that if the following six conditions exist, an activity is indeed scholarly and professional (Diamond and Adam, 1993, pp. 12):

1. The activity requires a high level of discipline-related expertise.
2. The activity breaks new ground, is innovative.
3. The activity can be replicated or elaborated on.
4. The work and its results can be documented.
5. The work and its results can be peer-reviewed.
6. The activity has significance or impact.

Your second challenge will be to document how your work meets these criteria. Here again, resources are available to help you. Designed specifically for this purpose, Preparing for Promotion and Tenure Review: A Faculty Guide (Diamond, 1995) provides specific guidelines for data collection and documentation. The book describes how the design of new courses can be documented for promotion and tenure review (Exhibit 1.2). Remember before you begin a course or curriculum project to collect any data (student learning, enrollment, retention, attitude toward the field, job placement, and so on) that you can later use as base data to show improvement and impact.

If you are a nontenured faculty member or are coming up for promotion and you are appointed to or are asked to serve on a curriculum committee or to develop a new course, remember that this effort will be extremely time-consuming and demanding. For this reason, get the assignment in writing, and prior to accepting it, negotiate the tenure and promotion ramifications. Get a formal statement that this work will be considered scholarly at the time of your review or that your tenure clock will be stopped during the period of this assignment. Such tenure and promotion issues need to be addressed before you begin, and you need to plan accordingly.

* The article is taken directly from Tomorrow’s Professor Listserv, TP Msg. #442 ‘Designing and Assessing Course Curricula’. For references mentioned in the article, please refer to source of Material: Diamond, Robert M. (1997).‘A Learning-Centered Approach to Course and Curriculum Design’ in Designing and Assessing Courses and Curricula: A Practical Guide. Published by JOSSEY-BASS, A Wiley Company, San Francisco. http://www.josseybass.com. Copyright © 1998 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. This material is used by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.