Elevating Engaged Scholarship in Landscape Architecture: Strategies for Recognition in the Merit and Promotion Process

Participatory Action Research (PAR) supports community-engaged scholarship (CES) by fostering deep collaboration, mutual learning, and actionable outcomes through the active involvement of stakeholders as co-researchers in addressing real-world challenges. In landscape architecture education and practice, engaged scholarship connects university-based research, teaching, and service to broader community needs, advancing institutional missions. Despite its value, this work remains time-intensive and is often undervalued in merit and promotion processes that privilege traditional academic metrics like publication and citation counts. To better support CES, some universities have begun expanding definitions of scholarship and evaluative criteria, though challenges remain in validating and recognizing their broader impacts. This paper unpacks multi-level strategies for supporting CES across institutions of higher education. At the campus level, we examine initiatives such as institution-wide dossier statement guidelines on public impact and participation in the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification as signals of formal commitments to engagement. At the college, departmental, and unit levels, we highlight reforms including revised authorship conventions to recognize collaborative and participatory research, expanded definitions of scholarly output, and the integration of CES into promotion guidelines and mentorship structures. At the individual level, we share techniques for framing alternative project metrics within review narratives and documenting public and scholarly impact in ways that align with both disciplinary norms and institutional expectations. Through these strategies, the paper offers practical insights into the challenges engaged scholars face and provides recommendations for how units and institutions can pursue opportunities for developing more inclusive and supportive evaluation frameworks.