Promotion and Tenure Guidelines

The School of Nursing & Health Studies (SNHS) fosters inclusive and accessible learning environments to provide a rigorous interdisciplinary education that connects engaging teaching with practical experience. Our mission is to advance social justice, health, and nursing practice through innovative pedagogy, research and community engagement. Our faculty and staff recognize that health is inextricably linked to socioeconomic inequalities and inequities both locally and globally, so we work to inspire our students to engage respectfully and empathically with communities to achieve the School of Nursing & Health Studies’ Vision: to support and improve the health and well-being of diverse communities.

Our faculty dedicates itself to student-centered success; innovative and interdisciplinary teaching, curricula, and public scholarship; community engagement; critical consciousness and reflective practice; local-to-global practice; and social justice advocacy. These core practices stem from the school’s professed values:

  • Access to excellence
  • Care and respect
  • Diversity, equity and inclusion
  • Action-oriented social change
  • Social justice

All faculty in the SNHS are expected to demonstrate professional growth and achievement in the core practices and values that support our school’s mission and vision through active scholarship. In addition, faculty take individual and collective responsibility to engage in the governance process as well as institutional, public and professional service.

The SNHS’s commitment to diversity extends to the forms of scholarship we value as well. We are committed to an inclusive definition of scholarship that goes beyond the traditional notion of peer-reviewed, data-based academic journal publication as being the only acceptable metric for scholarly work. As such, the SNHS adheres to the Boyer Model for recognizing and assessing diverse forms of scholarship.

Ernest Boyer, in a report for the Carnegie Foundation, challenged us to think about scholarship broadly, inclusive of novel and non-traditional forms.[1] While scholarship historically narrowed its scope after the renaissance, culminating in the Twentieth century emphasis on formal, original research using scientific and mathematical models, Boyer expanded the meaning of scholarship to include “stepping back from one’s investigations, looking for connections, building bridges between theory and practice, and communicating one’s knowledge effectively to students.” Scholarship, as he defined it, has four functions: teaching, discovery, integration, and application. This functional definition of scholarship is the basis for the process and criteria for granting Appointment, Promotion, and Tenure (APT) at the School of Nursing & Health Studies. The relative emphasis of these four functions of scholarship differs by faculty track and is evidenced under each academic rank’s “examples of evidence” in the SNHS Criteria for APT (see charts below) which is also conducted in accordance with policies and guidelines outlined in Chapter 24 of the Faculty Code for the University of Washington, and aligns with the University of Washington Bothell’s Campus Mission Statement.

TENURE TRACK
TEACHING TRACK
  1. Boyer, E. L. (1991). Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the professorate, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
  2. A description of the 3Cs framework may be found at the Academic Affairs webpage.
  3. Ibid.
  4. Ibid.

Updated March 13, 2026