Bringing constituents together to support dynamic and progressive forms, topics and modalities of scholarship.
Since Ernest Boyer published the Carnegie-funded Scholarship Reconsidered study in 1989, the conceptualization, practice and consideration of scholarship has undergone significant change. The examples today are numerous and only continue to grow: digital scholarship, hashtag engagements, international research partnerships, pre-print analysis, open science, scholastic advocacy and more. This work is regularly viewed as integral to both the mission and future of higher education, but moving beyond platitudes into policy and action has proven more difficult. Scholars produce work in these spaces and organizations laud the existence of these domains. However, reward structures at discipline, institutional and accreditory levels continue to overwhelmingly reward the production of discovery scholarship in traditional forms and manners.
Emergentscholar.info is an advocacy platform for a greater understanding of, appreciation for, development of, and support with creating emergent scholarship and seeing that scholarship accepted in the scholar's environments and guilds. Many of the changes to the professoriate since Boyer's writing have created a negative impact on academic and scholastic life: increased reliance on quantified metrics in promotion/tenure/review, the adjuctification of academic labor, an increased load of faculty service responsibilities all in the face of declining public funding and in many cases student enrollment. The resulting landscape is one that lobbies for innovation but rewards scholars for following well-trod pathways through their departments, guilds and institutions. This stands in stark contrast to the opportunity for emergent forms of scholarship to positively impact academic communities in terms of institutional and geographic environments.
This website is a resource, a space to aggregate research on emergent scholarship at a meta-level. There are many institutions, organizations and scholars creating networks and information centers regarding the specifics of scholastic domains, research in those spaces and opportunities to engage. This space is specifically designed to supplement that 'bottom-up' work with a 'top-down' advocay approach, geared towards acceptance from educational administrations, discipline leadership and accreditory bodies. For a primer on the topic, please visit our What is Emergent Scholarship page, and a great launch point into our resources is the speical topic podcast series from Edutechnicalities on emergent scholarship.
Engage with the groundbreaking work on emergent scholarship through our experimental podcast series, featuring seven internationational scholars and their perspectives on elements of the emergent scholarship movement. Via the Education Resources Information Center, Ernest Boyer's full 1990 report on the state of scholarship in higher education and a call for a more thoughtful and dynamic understanding of what constitutes knowledge including mechanisms to understand rigor across these novel and disparate spaces.
Edutechnicalities Podcast on Emergent Scholarship
Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate