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.
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