Teaching, Research and Scholarship, Part 4

In Part 4 of this series, I will discuss two chapters from Reshaping the University: New Relationships between Research, Scholarship and Teaching edited by Ronald Barnett and published by the Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press. The book is a collection of articles from leading figures at English-speaking academic institutions around the world focusing on what is termed the Research-Teaching Nexus.

Many of the contributors to this volume are based in the U.K. where heated national policy (and funding) discussions surround the potential separation of research and teaching into separate institutions that “specialize” in either activity, but not both. As someone who chose to teach in a liberal arts college setting in the U.S. where research and teaching are (hopefully) equally valued, I see this as problematic – but as I’ve read more about this issue I am beginning to appreciate the magnitude of the problem for all higher education institutes. We in the U.S., should pay close attention to what is happening across both oceans. The pressures are not just internal, but politics, economics and history have led us to this point.

In Chapter 8 (“Scholarship and the Research and Teaching Nexus”), Lewis Elton begins by visiting ideas from Humboldt. (His influence 200 years ago reaches far indeed!) “Humboldt’s central idea was that, in both teaching and research, ‘universities should treat learning always as consisting of not yet wholly solved problems and hence always in a research mode’… An essence of research is that it is initiated in the minds of researchers, and in a similar way, learning in a research mode must be initiated in the minds of learners. Such learning is active and questioning in a way that traditional learning, in which learners react in the main to inputs from teachers, rarely is.”

Elton goes on to define the nexus: “I therefore see learning in a research mode as creating in the learner’s mind – a connection between teaching and research. In parallel, the scholarship of teaching and learning – which consists of a deep and research influenced understanding by the teacher of the student’s learning processes – may be seen as the way to bring about that inquiry-led learning by the student. Together, these two parallel processes constitute the essence of the teaching-research nexus.”

That qualification, the need for a deep understanding on the part of the teacher, is one that I was supremely unprepared for when I began teaching. Even now, I’m not sure how deep my understanding is (although I’m trying to learn more as evidenced by some of my posts in this blog). I certainly have gained experienced over the years to know where students tend to trip over the conceptual material, their most common misconceptions, and I have developed some strategies to help them through the tricky bits. But deep understanding? Hmmm… I don’t know. That seems like a very tall order, especially given the spirit of competition in higher education, antithetical to the community that is needed for this deep understanding to be developed and shared. I consider myself challenged to mull over this some more over the summer.

The typical way we provide our version of the nexus (as anticipated by Elton) is to expose students to research outcomes, and for students to get involved in hands-on research projects. Elton writes: “The first of these is of long standing and can be motivating to students, particularly if the research was carried out by the students’ teachers.” My students are almost always interested when I make a small digression to describe my current or past research in the context of what they are learning, but this “vicarious experience” is fleeting and very limited. As to getting students exposed to hands-on research, this is the signature program of my department. To major in Chemistry or Biochemistry, a hands-on undergraduate research experience is required and is usually undertaken in one of the faculty labs. Interestingly, Elton points out that although this approach was adopted early by MIT and Imperial College, they quickly “noticed that [it] was inappropriate for most undergraduates in their early years.” I think this says more to how the experience is structured and perhaps to the priorities of research-intensive institutes in contrast to undergraduate focused liberal arts colleges. Interestingly, my department is being overwhelmed with students who want to be majors. While I’m sure the hands-on research experience is one factor, there are many others. In the meantime we are trying to find ways to manage the challenging large student numbers.

Elton ends with a call to both innovation and professional development, but what I find most striking is his caution of the difficulty in providing conditions that will strengthen the nexus. The differences may be so great that it may be “difficult to make direct comparisons [between innovative and traditional practices, especially] in the climate of ‘evidence-based’ practice, which compares the relative efficacy of different ‘treatments’ – in this case of fundamentally different approaches to a curriculum – as if the latter were no more complicated than the replacement of a medicine by a placebo. The jury is therefore likely to be out for a long time.”

In Chapter 5, Mike Healey tries to parse out and clarify the differences at different ends of the spectrum. The title of his chapter is “Linking Research and Teaching: Exploring Disciplinary Spaces and the Role of Inquiry-based Learning.” Before launching into his categorization of approaches, Healey also has some words of caution. “In constructing links between research and teaching, the discipline is an important mediator. This is because the conduct of research and the teaching approaches tend to differ between disciplines.” He goes on to provide a number of examples and citations that highlight some of the differences, which I won’t discuss here. Instead I want to highlight the following two-axis graph. (It takes the ideas from Ron Griffiths’ landmark paper in 2004 and modifies them slightly.) This is from Figure 5.2 Curriculum design and the research-teaching nexus. (I picked a figure from a Google Image search that matched the text.)

The bottom left quadrant (Research-led) is where the teacher-as-researcher’s interests dominate and the main mode of instruction is transmission of information. Certainly in the 2-3 minutes where I discuss a research vignette in my introductory classes, it’s me talking and the students are the audience. That being said, I’m not trying to teach them content; rather I’m using it as a motivational tool or as a hook, to make connections.

The bottom right quadrant (Research-oriented) is what goes on to some extent in our Research Methods class, but also in going through historical examples illustrating the various “faces” of the scientific method in other classes that I teach. There is a historic undercurrent in my classes, I think because of my interest in the history and philosophy of science. Healey writes: “the curriculum emphasizes as much the processes by which knowledge is produced as learning knowledge that has been achieved, and [instructors] try to engender a research ethos through their teaching.”

The top left quadrant (Research-tutored) is not common here in the U.S., and is how the Oxbridge system works. What is interesting here is that apparently at Oxford, when these “tutorials” (the term “teaching” is not used) are “used inappropriately to teach, they have a less positive impact on learning.” Healey quotes research by Trigwell and Ashwin suggesting that when the tutors “teach”, the students opt to take a surface-level approach learning, rather than a deeper approach that comes through collaborative discussion. To some extent this is the approach I take with the students who work in my research lab. We have individual weekly one-on-one meetings (sometimes they drop by more often). Although in the beginning I usually instruct them what to do to get them started, I quickly try to pivot (depending on student ability) towards a collaborative approach where the student generates ideas to push their projects forward and I serve more as a consultant.

The top right quadrant (Research-based) is “largely designed around inquiry-based activities, and the division of roles between teacher and student is minimized.” A significant portion of our chemistry and biochemistry lab courses emphasize this approach and many of us design and use such activities for the “lecture” portion; although it’s hard to go the whole way into exclusively using inquiry-based activities. While student resistance (thanks to the “system” that churns out a certain type of student who is college-ready) is one of the factors, I think there are pedagogical reasons to mix things up. Healey acknowledges that “few curricula fit entirely in one quadrant” and there is in fact a mix of approaches. I can see aspects of each quadrant in my classes.

Healey also brings up the issue of potentially unbundling the two activities: “The extent to which it is necessary for effective learning that some of the research under discussion is undertaken by the specific teachers, or at least in the same department or university, is critical to the policy debate about the impact of research selectivity. There are similar arguments about the extent to which teachers facilitating research-based or research-tutored learning need to be active or experienced researchers. This, in turn, raises the question of how far the skills of facilitating learning and discovery research are co-located.”

My gut response is that it depends on the level of the material, in particular how introductory it would be. But that’s a content-based answer that does not necessarily address process. Let’s try a different tack. Can someone who has earned a Ph.D. in chemistry, but is not necessarily currently research-active in the narrow sense (as opposed to Boyer’s broader use of scholarship) teach chemistry at the college or university level? Clearly this already happens now with mass adjuntification in the U.S., and a Masters degree in chemistry is sufficient for the introductory level courses corresponding to the curriculum in the first two years. So I suppose the answer is yes, certainly at the introductory level. But what constitutes introductory? College students take General Chemistry their first year, then Organic Chemistry their second year (and sometimes Analytical Chemistry). The third year then brings Physical Chemistry and/or Biochemistry and/or Inorganic Chemistry. But even these three are introductory, at least for the first semester, to each subfield. It’s only when you get to a course such as Advanced Organic Chemistry (requiring a year of introductory organic chemistry) that maybe you need an active researcher in that field. But then again, maybe not.

Why? I’d hazard a guess that it might depend on whether there is a good textbook for the subject material. I happen to think there are some for Advanced Organic that do a decent job, although as an undergraduate we read a lot of papers in my advanced organic courses. I never took Advanced P-Chem. It wasn’t offered. I don’t offer it either even though I do teach the year long (introductory?) P-Chem sequence. I’m not sure a student would sign up for advanced P-Chem even if it was offered. The horror! I did not have to take advanced P-Chem in graduate school, although I did take one quarter of grad-level Quantum, and that was enough, thank you very much. But someone with the Ph.D. training, who keeps up with the literature, could well teach an advanced undergraduate course in chemistry with research papers and not use a textbook. Having experienced the (grueling) process as a peon researcher, one could certainly teach with an emphasis on research-process. The only thing you can’t do if you don’t run an active research lab is bring students into your lab to experience research first-hand. If this is an important part of their undergraduate education, then you need at least some of the faculty to run active research labs – but not all of them. This is in fact already the case, and there is some unbundling, or specialization of labor so to speak.

Certainly in the natural sciences, one could teach in three of the four quadrants as long as one had the appropriate training and experience. The Oxbridge top-left quadrant is also very expensive and few institutions will have the luxury to have the majority of faculty engage students in this way.  (Scarily, we provide very little training for teaching although that’s changing – a subject for a different post.) Being an active researcher in the narrow sense may not actually be necessary, not to mention expensive. The increasingly competitive arena of higher education, however has exacerbated the issue, and economics and politics have come to drive a wedge making it increasingly challenging to sustain the nexus broadly across institutions. (There will always be a small rich elite that is less subject to such currents.)

But to get back to Elton’s categories: (1) You may not need the active researcher to transmit extant research to the students. Any instructor who keeps up with the literature can do so. (2) Do the students need to actively work in the lab of a scientist engaging in active research? We hear the term “research-rich curriculum” thrown around with regularity. Instructors could design activities that simulate to some extent the processes involved in research, as an offshoot of work that a different active researcher is involved with (but who isn’t doing the actual teaching). Have we come to some temporary détente where we keep doing what we are used to doing as long in the hope that the money keeps flowing?

Healey sees a bright side. Quoting previous work by Elton, he argues that “student-centered teaching and learning processes are intrinsically favorable towards a positive nexus, while more traditional teaching methods may at best lead to a positive nexus for the most able students.” I think he is saying that if faculty increasingly move into the top right quadrant, they might be able to make an argument that linking teaching and research is good for mass education. Unbundling, as the college classroom diversifies, is a bad idea even though it may seem economically “cheaper” in the short run. One should never let a good crisis go to waste.

(Interested in other aspects? Here are links for Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, of this series.)