More about what research means in different disciplines

Doc Brown, of Back to the Future: a researcher whose significance transcends disciplinary boundaries.

There's a really good (and freely available) project that Dr Lisa Lucas, Prof. Mick Healey, Prof. Alan Jenkins, and Dr. Chris Short conducted for the Higher Education Academy, which explores, I quote,

the experiences and perceptions of academics by locating them within specific institutional/departmental and disciplinary cultures and exploring how this may impact on their conceptions of 'research', 'teaching' and the relationships between them.

You can download the report from the HEA website.

What we talk about when we talk about research

One of the first big surprises of this project was the range of models for 'research': what they spend their time doing in microbiology looks very different from what they're doing in politics, as Rose and Richard can testify, and so on throughout the university. Jane Robertson and Gillian Blackler did an interesting study in which they interviewed students from physics, geography, and English lit., and analysed the students' use of spatial and temporal metaphors (Robertson, J. & Blackler, G. (2006) Students’ experiences of learning in a research environment, Higher Education Research and Development 25(3), pp.215-229).

Generally speaking, physics students tended to talk about research being 'out there', going 'further', and crucially, taking place at a 'higher level' then their own.

Geography students also talked about research happening 'out there', but they meant it in terms of literally 'going out into the world and gathering information', in other words, doing field work.

For English students, research involved '"looking into", "gathering", and "putting it together"' (p. 223).

I thought this was a nice way of doing research. Nadine Wills has done a lot of work about metaphors on the teachingcommons Good Practice blog, which I recommend taking a look at.

Autonomous Apprenticeship

The Sorcerer's Apprentice - when autonomous apprenticeship goes wrong...

'Autonomous Apprenticeship' is an idea I've been kicking around recently, ever since reading Carol Colbeck's study, 'Merging in a Seamless Blend: How Faculty Integrate Teaching and Research' ( The Journal of Higher Education Vol. 69, No. 6 (1998), pp. 647-671).

Colbeck points out that teaching in the sciences often follows a 'master-apprentice' model in which lecturers work alongside undergraduate and postgraduate 'research apprentices' (p. 658).

I think the benefits to both learning and research are pretty self-evident, as long as the student isn't getting exploited (all the dangers of internships - another example of the 'master-apprentice model' also apply here).

The 'apprentice' model is much more common in the sciences than in either the social sciences or the arts. Conventional wisdom has it that this is in the nature of the different fields - 'research' means different things in different disciplines, and some forms of research just don't lend themselves to group endeavors. As Colbeck puts it, the distinction is supposed to be that sciences explore 'subdividable problems' while the arts and social sciences tackle 'holistic issues' (p. 659).

Colbeck herself is having none of it. According to her research,

the contrasting methods of research training in physics and English [the subjects of her research] did not appear to be a natural consequence of [...] knowledge structures, but of taken-for-granted social norms within each discipline (p. 659).

So far, so compelling. But one 'taken-for-granted' social norm of the humanities is research autonomy: you research what YOU want to research, and your supervisor advises you. This brings me to the notion of 'autonomous apprenticeship': a model for creating group research projects in which students become 'research apprentices', but preserve a measure of autonomy not necessarily present in large science projects (this is a model that could be applied to the sciences as well as to the arts).

The 'Teaching the Talk' project that I run, which is a part of the Theatre Archive Project, is - I like to think - a good example of 'autonomous apprenticeship'. I'd love to hear about any other models that people would like to offer.

LRT on the Conference Circuit!

pre-powerpoint conference presentation

The LRT Project will be giving presentations at the IR2009 Institutional Research Conference at Sheffield Hallam University on 8-9 July, and at the LTEA2009 'Learning Through Enquiry' conference at the University of Reading on 15 July.

Book early to avoid disappointment!

Who's afraid of the Scholarship of Teaching?

I discovered a great article on the 'Scholarship of Teaching' from way back in 1999, in an online journal called 'Inventio', published by George Mason University. The article's by a lecturer in English named Randy Bass, and it's called 'The Scholarship of Teaching: What's the Problem?'. Bass begins with an elegant appraisal of what it means to have a 'problem' in research, vs. a 'problem' in teaching:

In scholarship and research, having a "problem" is at the heart of the investigative process; it is the compound of the generative questions around which all creative and productive activity revolves. But in one’s teaching, a "problem" is something you don’t want to have, and if you have one, you probably want to fix it. Asking a colleague about a problem in his or her research is an invitation; asking about a problem in one’s teaching would probably seem like an accusation.

From here, he writes candidly about his own teaching, and how a precipitous decline in his students' evaluations of his teaching (after he'd introduced a set of e-learning methods) inspired him to start looking more deeply at his teaching.

This article is full of good models for examining your own teaching, as well as some very interesting teaching techniques. And it's freely available online, not just (as most articles I talk about will probably be) through a subscription service.

The undergraduate Survey is live, and being administered by an infinite number of monkeys...

Digitally speaking, our survey administrators look like this

The LRT Project survey went live last week. We built it on SurveyMonkey, an online survey builder that I (so far) can't praise enough. Seriously, I don't want to jinx anything, but it did just about everything we wanted it to do on the design side, and its analysis looks pretty robust, if not spss-level.

In the interest of keeping noise out of our results, I'm not posting any links to the survey here, but if you're an undergraduate at the University of Sheffield in the Faculty of Science or Social Sciences, you've received an email about this and I suggest that you follow the link and take the survey-you could get £50 out of it if you're the lucky winner.

If you aren't an undergrad in Science or Social Sciences, but you know someone who is, encourage them to fill the survey out. And if they win the prize, don't let them forget who it was that convinced them to go for it.