I’m having a great time these days working on episodes of a podcast with Georgetown faculty about their research lives. (see SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-267910017 and on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5C7tgv1fz9cBs6nnOXbV2w?si=BoS2Ku9uSyCMBdvQHPk9Ig).
It’s really fun for me to see how different faculty choose the projects they work on. I learn about their passion for a set of questions that is so fundamental that they devote their entire lives becoming more and more sophisticated in their knowledge about them.
Many episodes also discuss how their teaching and research lives intersect and reinforce one another. However, as I reflect on the various discussions, I am impressed how stark are the differences between many traditional classes and the research lives of the faculty who teach those classes.
The typical course at a university is a highly curated collection of content. Typically, the content consists of the very best scholarship in the field. The latest consensus of the field is presented through readings and lectures using the best research products that produced that consensus. Syllabi typically arrange the content in a manner that emphasizes a cumulative set of themes. The order of the course promotes a synthesis of the content of various weeks to achieve the given learning goals. When controversies in a field exist, the course carefully presents the alternative conceptual underpinnings or alternative interpretations, each of them undergirded with the best evidence behind the alternative viewpoints. Clarity of content and purposeful organization predominate.
Missing from a typical class, is content that is of lower quality, content that offers intermediate findings, content of studies that did not replicate, content of work that was presented at professional conferences and never published. The product of failed or mediocre scholarship rarely appears in syllabi. The chaos that typically exists at the edges of knowledge in a field is often absent.
The research lives of faculty members, on the other hand, are rarely as settled and as perfectly organized as the courses they teach. The beautifully designed syllabus, delivered in highly polished class activities, bears little resemblance to the day-to-day, step-by-step process of extending one’s understanding of a field.
First, faculty read much literature that could never pass the standards of a class syllabus. They puzzle over contradictory findings and interpretations not yet resolved within a field. They listen to substandard presentations at professional meetings. They read outside their field, looking for new angles of attacking their favorite problem inside their field. There is typically a lot of chaff hiding the wheat.
Second, research lives focus on the absence of existing content. Scholars are searching for the unanswered questions. They are seeking to fill the gaps in the literature of the field. They “mine” the gap (sorry for the pun). If human knowledge is like Swiss cheese, students are given the cheese, and researchers are fascinated with the holes.
Third, the research life of the faculty is filled with failures. The “hit rate” is very low for doing an experiment with notable results, for finding a document of key importance in an archive, for creating an interpretation that sustains criticism, or for inventing a book project that merits completion and publication. The most successful scholars are masters of failing fast and often, all in a quest to disrupt the current accepted knowledge. Each of them has files filled with ideas that didn’t pan out.
It occurs to me that much of life’s challenges are more like the research lives of faculty than the experiences of students in a traditional class. Life presents the absence of content — a poorly described problem, an inarticulate question, a puzzle without an obvious solution. The successful learn how to fill the gap with newly acquired knowledge.
In this context, those class experiences that incorporate problems, devoid of obvious content regarding their solutions, can perhaps offer students a useful lasting lesson. Georgetown faculty who are working so inventively to create experience-based and research-based learning environments are doing this. They are teaching our students how to mine the gap.
Also reminds me of that wise Med professor whose most important message was. “ be life long learners half of what we teach you today will be WRONG 25 years from now “. Best advice in Med school. And TRUTH.
Sorry fake news. Now I remember he said 25% would turn out to be false. My apologies. Still big number that WAS true .
Great post. Differences between teacher and researcher hats. Add for medical faculty also “ healer “ hat too
Excellent points. In science we certainly learn just as much (if not more) from failures as we do from successes, and profs that know their fields well include those failures (stories at least) in lectures all the time. Much more difficult to include direct experience (e.g. a failed experiment in a laboratory setting) but it would be interesting to try !
Cheers
Paul
At the risk of oversimplifying a deservedly complex issue, I submit that it is often possible to reconcile tight texture and the gap : what is needed above all is to lead students to envision the fuzzy edges as part of ” infinite discourse ” which no glossy course brochure can claim to exhaust and that for them, the question must always transcend the limitations of the answer.