Telling Our Stories Together: How Universities and Community Partners Co-create Engaged Scholarship

The inspiration for this paper came from an informal discussion among engaged faculty scholars about the ways in which we created written scholarship with community partners. We realized that while our methods had similarities and differences, none of us had ever read an article on this subject. A subsequent search of the scholarship of engagement literature yielded little information regarding scholarship co-authored by faculty and community partners. Based on practices shared by engaged scholars and informed by an analysis of publications co-authored by community partners and faculty members in three well-known engagement journals, we developed a framework to describe how such written scholarship can be co-created. The framework features steps of the publication process (initiation, drafting, finalizing the draft, and submission and publication), and specifies a corresponding degree of collaboration (co-attribution, co-authoring, and co-writing) for each step. This framework is intended to provide context for the dissemination endeavors of partnerships between universities and communities, and to ensure that products of these partnerships are well-planned and accurately documented. It can be used in conjunction with other tools for dissemination efforts detailed in community-based participatory research approaches, also discussed here.