I had a wonderful dinner with a set of faculty members the other night. We were chatting about Georgetown students. There was widespread agreement that we enjoyed how bright and motivated they were. Most agreed that the admissions process generates classes of well-rounded, smart students who quickly learn the rules of a class and deliver the product required by them as desired.
They also noted, however, their own doubts about whether they as instructors were doing too much to facilitate student success. The fear was that perhaps we weren’t preparing students for the real world where they won’t have a Blackboard site containing all the relevant reading, with a conceptual structure provided in lectures.
A common property of more advanced courses is that the students read peer-reviewed articles from the best minds and most prominent journals in the world. These represent the most current knowledge in a field. The best of the best. Completely cogent, well-written, sound arguments coming to a clear conclusion.
Exposing students to the best products of original scholarship makes for very efficient learning. Students don’t read all the literature, just the best. However, this organization indirectly cheats them of learning how difficult it really is to produce good scholarship.
Almost invisible to students in courses is the work of the mind that produced the reading materials. Students often do not understand how low a hit rate most scholarship faces. Human knowledge from academic scholarship is not birthed without pain. My experience is that for every beautifully cogent book, every peer-reviewed article there are scores of ideas that never work out. There are many false starts in faculty scholarship. Students see the winning entries but rarely see the thousands of failures.
Real life is noisy and unorganized. It doesn’t provide a syllabus; it doesn’t give you a set of readings to solve the problem. Sometimes it doesn’t even clearly define the problem. To be the leaders of the 21st century, we need to give all our students a sense of the rigors of original scholarship. They need to know the perseverance, self-criticism, writing, rewriting, and review that first-class scholarship requires.
At new faculty orientation this year a great idea arose in this regard. It was an encouragement from a long-term Georgetown faculty member to a newly hired faculty member. The recommendation was to let the students inside the instructor’s own research life. The long-term faculty member encouraged newer colleagues to deliberately include some of her own work in the readings of the course, when relevant.
The observation was that students want to learn how the faculty member chooses problems to research, how they react to apparent dead-ends in their research, how do they know when to drop a stream of research and devote time to another. They want a sense of the steps of producing real scholarship. It seems that two things might be accomplished through such a course component – the students get to see the passion that the faculty member brings to their own research, and the students get a glimpse of the rigors of the standards of academic scholarship.
Doing so might better prepare the students for the world that doesn’t supply them a syllabus to solve a complicated problem.
“Human knowledge from academic scholarship is not birthed without pain. My experience is that for every beautifully cogent book, every peer-reviewed article there are scores of ideas that never work out. There are many false starts in faculty scholarship. . . . They need to know the perseverance, self-criticism, writing, rewriting, and review that first-class scholarship requires.” This actually offers a pretty fair description of the outcome of every undergraduate writing assignment I have given at Georgetown over a long career. I doubt that all of our students are in the dark about the difficulty of producing a really successful contribution (if they are, we must be over-rewarding a lot of less than successful work or giving too many repeat-after-me assignment). Maybe it would be just as effective to spend more time helping them see their own experience in this light (i.e., that dead-ends, unconvincing arguments, muddiness of thought are part of the process, not pathologies or symptoms of terminal ineptitude) as it would be to give over class time to our own stumbles And how many of us would use our own stumbles rather than the work that we are sure is on track for publication? Anyway, if it were one of the faculty’s primary goals to equip our students “to be the leaders of the 21st century” by giving “all our students a sense of the rigors of original scholarship,” we would take a deep breath and institute an across-the-board senior thesis requirement. But, then. are we that confident that engaging in original scholarship actually equips anyone for leadership?
“Real life is noisy and unorganized.” True! I think it’s important for students to engage with creative arts practice as well as scholarship. Empathy, imagination and the opportunity to explore ways of thinking that are open-ended help people imagine that things could be otherwise. Why does this matter? Because utilitarian and efficient approaches to work and life don’t foster new discoveries or inventions (large and small). An intriguing study on the relationship between fiction reading and tolerance of ambiguity: http://www.psmag.com/blogs/news-blog/reading-literature-opens-minds-60021
It’s a great idea. Faculty should not hesitate to discuss their research objectives and methods and putting their own articles on the reading list. They might even consider sending out draft articles for student review.
I love this idea. I, for one, didn’t really appreciate all that went into the research I (likely) took for granted. Additionally, learning how one ends up making a meaningful contribution, through research (and teaching), might get more of our students thinking about academia as a possible career field. Though it’s labor-intensive, it’s clearly a labor of love for GU professors.