Presentation:

The humanities have long been using inquiry-based learning, small seminars, and a student-centered paradigm--all practices that have recently come into vogue in science disciplines as a way to build undergraduate research programs. Paradoxically, however, disciplines in the humanities have had difficulty in defining “undergraduate research” and in incorporating it as an element of the undergraduate education they offer. Session leader Dasenbrock proposed that undergraduate research be defined as the process whereby students, guided by a faculty mentor, engage in a structured experience that leads to the production of knowledge. The classical image of undergraduate research is of a student in a lab conducting an experiment or making a discovery that is eventually reported on at a conference or published in a journal. The willingness of scientists to work in teams toward collaborative knowledge production allows students to participate in the by-product of research. In contrast, humanities disciplines are committed to an isolated, faculty-driven system of knowledge production. This system of knowledge production in the humanities is currently at a crisis because university presses in recent years have increasingly been cutting back their publications, and faculty members seeking tenure no longer have the traditional outlets for their work. At this juncture, therefore, humanities disciplines are well positioned to rethink their definitions and modes of scholarship and to broaden them to include electronic scholarship, editing, and other activities built or potentially built around research teams. Finding ways to bring the teaching values into the realm of scholarship may contribute to this process of rethinking.

Discussion:

Undergraduate research in the humanities and social sciences is important because students learn by doing, and research can push them beyond the level of simply producing a seminar paper. Undergraduate research also helps address information literacy, allows students to consume research more critically, and helps students define career goals by showing that there is a critical conversation in which they can participate. The forms of undergraduate research in the humanities should include elements of discovery, interpretation, and application, and typically culminate in an honors or senior thesis. However, since this individualistic form of knowledge production does not lend itself to collaborative research opportunities with faculty mentors, humanities disciplines should articulate levels of scholarly activities in which students can participate in preparation for producing their own original research. These activities-- the labor of producing knowledge in the humanities-- could include library searches, background research for a chapter, editing, and technology-based projects. Humanities departments should also look outside of themselves and identify other programs or sites that can assist in this effort. Learning communities, for example, that emphasize inquiry-based teaching and learning and can help educate students about how to generate research questions, how to critically consume resources, how to structure a presentation, and how to develop an intuition for the social relevance of a project. Although much of what faculty members and students do together has elements of research and in its totality may be viewed as research, it typically is not described as such. Unlike the sciences, the humanities have not yet developed a culture of self-description that includes research as part of what we do with undergraduates.

Problems for implementing undergraduate research more fully include lack of student preparation. Many students do not declare majors until their junior years; thus they have only a short period of time to develop the necessary skills to engage in in-depth study of a subject. This lack of early training disadvantages students when they try to write a senior thesis the following year. Further, a faculty-mentored research project will often take longer than one semester, and if students do not have credit hours or time to commit to a long-term project, they lose the experience of seeing the research process through all of its stages. Finally, students are often rewarded in their grades for simply absorbing and reproducing knowledge. Too often classes are not rewarding the skills and mental characteristics important for good, creative research. Problems can also arise from faculty members themselves who do not want to engage in a conversation with inexperienced students who have not yet been critically trained.

There are several ways in which faculty members can counteract some of these problems: By team teaching with librarians; by investing the time to actively mentor students, thus enabling them to perform to high standards; by proposing research projects that include meaningful learning experiences for undergraduate assistants; by designing seminar papers/projects that require creativity and critical thinking; by creating assignments that require group activity; and by encouraging an attitude toward the learning process that builds critical thinking abilities. Faculty members should also be sensitive not to impose certain methodologies or ideological projects on their students.

Session participants gave examples of successful undergraduate research programs that paired students and faculty in mentoring relationships. The University of Toronto has a small program in which second-year students compete for places on a research team designed by a professor. During their third year, students can then apply for opportunities to take their own research abroad. Like many other programs, the University of Toronto program does not take GPA into account in the application process.

Recommendations:

For Individual Campuses

• Core courses should be designed by interdisciplinary teams (including, for example, librarians) to build basic research skills and prepare students to do research at higher levels.
• Humanities departments should work to find sites where intergenerational collaboration among professors, graduate students, and undergraduates can take place. Such collaboration can be beneficial in counteracting the agonistic model of competition that often exists in the humanities. Some of these sites might include native language preservation, WPA-type projects of 1930s, and technology projects.

For The Reinvention Center

• The Reinvention Center should initiate discussions with professional societies about the nature of individualistic versus collaborative research in the humanities and social sciences. As the university press publishing crisis continues, faculty members and professional societies will be required to redefine research, which may open possibilities for collaborative models. Professional societies can encourage this redefinition by reserving sections for collaborative work.
• The Reinvention Center should compile a set of success stories for faculty members that show ways of engaging undergraduates in research activities.

Resources/References:

Website

The Research Opportunities Program (299Y1) at the University of Toronto provides an opportunity for students in their second year in the Faculty of Arts and Science to work in the research project of a professor in return for course credit. http://www.artsandscience.utoronto.ca/current/rop/index.shtml