Exploring alternative forms of scholarship for nurse educators' success

Abstract

Background: Teaching-intensive universities require faculty to have increased teaching workloads. Nursing faculty have additional burdens that faculty members in other disciplines and departments do not experience, making it difficult to produce scholarship as it has been traditionally defined in research-intensive universities. Teaching-intensive universities should begin to rethink nursing faculty expectations for meeting their universities' missions of scholarship, especially those required for tenure.

Purpose: This article discusses alternative forms of scholarship and to generate ideas beyond the gold standard of writing peer-reviewed manuscripts and conducting empirical research studies for teaching-intensive universities. It also explores challenges that hinder nursing faculty from scholarly work and offers various scholarship ideas for nursing faculty and nursing administrators to consider for promotion and tenure criteria.

Recommendations: Nursing administrators and faculty can change the current culture through a reconceptualization of Boyer's scholarship model in which more innovative forms of scholarship are embraced to support nursing faculty in balancing the multiple demands on their time according to their respective institutional needs. The outcome is increased work-life balance and retention of nursing faculty. Deans' support and faculty advocacy for human resources and financial investment in faculty workload boundaries are key factors for future changes in practice.

Keywords: Academic nurse educators; Boyer's model of scholarship in nursing; Faculty workload; Promotion; Scholarship; Teaching-intensive universities; Tenure; Tenure-track.