What is Teaching?

It is customary to describe the role of universities as involving three components. Teaching or forming the next generation through instruction is one. Another is the discovery of new knowledge, the development of new ideas or theory, or innovation in the application of existing knowledge. Finally, universities have a role in serving those external to the university; indeed, the whole world, including the physical world, but also the economies, the societies, and event virtual worlds.

Of course these three missions are a joint enterprise of faculty, staff, and students.

Over the past few years, there have been attempts to unbundle the three missions of education, research, and service. For example, ten years ago there was a clear attack to remove research from teaching, by massive open online courses, the birth of Coursera and EdX and others. These were instruction-only enterprises. They also stripped higher education of its service orientation to the larger world.

The bundling of the three missions has been maintained by universities that have a clear research mission. In such domains, faculty who teach are often heavily involved in research. For example, land grant universities in the US have maintained their mission to serve the states in which they are located. Jesuit colleges and universities have explicit missions to serve outside populations especially those relatively disadvantaged.

This is a post about work to enhance the bundling of the research and teaching missions of a university.

I became a lab research assistant in a social science computer room as a college sophomore. I worked for a faculty member in sociology who was building a statistical analysis platform for empirical social scientists. I needed the money. I did not seek the job as a way to learn anything new. But it sneaked up on me. I began doing minor tasks under the direction of the faculty member. I helped other students navigate the lab equipment. I was given increasingly complex tasks. They were immense fun. I got hooked on the whole research enterprise. I stayed over the summer and coded various modules in the software. I helped the faculty member in some analysis. I received an insight into the humanity and intellectual passion of faculty – something I never received in the classroom.

More and more Georgetown faculty are attempting to integrate their research lives with their instructional lives. Of course, those involved in the oversight of PhD students often achieve strong overlap between their own research and that of the PhD mentees. The mentor might be conducting a multifaceted research program, years or decades in its conception. PhD students identify a component of that research program that becomes a key feature of their dissertation.

But in reviewing the curricula vitae of my colleagues for promotion and tenure nominations, it’s clear that not just predoctoral students but also undergraduates and masters students are collaborators with Georgetown faculty. Joint articles with students seem to be more and more common. Ongoing collaborations with graduates are less rare than previously. From the research statements of the faculty dossiers, it’s clear that such strategies of the faculty have achieved an integration of teaching and research that benefits the faculty member’s productivity.

In the podcasts, Faculty in Research, it is clear that our most productive faculty have achieved an integration of research and teaching that makes the two missions not competitive but synergistic. They credit teaching with enhancing their research agendas; they credit working with students in research activities as a tool of enhanced creativity. They see the research mentoring of students as an important extension of their educational role.

From the student perspective, it seems clear that such collaborations generate a richer learning experience than could ever be achieved in the classroom alone. They can offer the student insight into the moment of discovery or the moment of creation that is the magic elixir of all faculty scholarly activity. The joy of those moments can seal into the student’s memory the key lessons of self-teaching and probing inquiry that serve their full lifetimes.