I’ve written earlier about the need to integrate research and teaching, for the benefit both of our students and of our faculty. When instructors teach in the area in which they are actively doing their own scholarship, the excitement that motivates their intellectual work is instantly communicated to the students. We’re often at our best when describing what sustains our passions. Further, letting students participate in our original scholarship gives them a set of “self-teaching” skills that will arm them for moments in their lives when they have to learn whole new fields prior to new work positions.
Faculty working in the Designing the Future(s) project have constructed proposals for experimental degree programs where immersive research experiences are a dominant mode of learning (see Credit-Bearing Research for Students). Experiential learning, using real hand-on activities, is a key feature of many of the new program designs.
In deliberating about these programs we’ve learned that there already exists a lot of learning using just this format — courses built around the active research of the instructor. The stereotypical fora for this are the natural sciences where laboratories of faculty become homes of student research assistants. But it also occurs in the qualitative social sciences in community-based and action-oriented research where students are part of the project. It can also occur in the humanities where a faculty member might be analyzing a textual corpus and using students as active collaborators within a course format.
What the students can learn with such experiences is often a set of methods of inquiry — the deep, critical examination that is part of all intellectual life, the construction of alternative interpretations, and the dialectic of argument and counter-argument and of hypothesis and counter hypothesis. The life of the mind for each of our faculty members is filled with critical thinking writ large. Exposing our students to active research, led by faculty mentors, can help our students learn these lessons.
We want to find out more about the current practices of faculty in attempting to integrate their active research activities into the formal educational program. We’ll send out an email call to faculty to describe their own activities that integrate learning, teaching, and research. With this census of what we’re now doing, we’d like to invent ways to encourage all units to adopt a new integration of research and teaching.
Another topic of key importance, thank you. An email solicitation that collates faculty experience in integrating research and teaching will certainly help, but it will also be important to examine administrative structure and support for such integration, as well as research itself. Simplistically, it will be difficult to increase integration without more main campus research infrastructure and research activity. Also, that research should be peer reviewed, well cited, and (importantly) well funded, if it is to have the capacity to support undergraduates of the caliber we find at Georgetown. How do we grow this on the main campus, particularly in the external funding climate that researchers currently face, and with limits on faculty growth within our most research active disciplines ?
Best
Paul