Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences

Leaders: Barbara Nolan, Robert C. Taylor Professor of English, University of Virginia
Janice DeCosmo, Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Education, affiliate faculty member in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences, and Director of the NASA Space Grant Consortium and the Undergraduate Research Program, University of Washington

Presenters: Fred Adams, Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of Delaware
Joan Bennett, Professor of English and Director, Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, University of Delaware
James Dean, Professor of English, University of Delaware
Nicole Hurd, Assistant Dean and Director, Center for Undergraduate Excellence, University of Virginia

Recorder: Mary Leming, Assistant to the Director, The Reinvention Center

Research in the humanities, including undergraduate research, does not generally mirror research in the sciences in terms of methodology, ease of collaboration, or likelihood of external funding. This session considered ways that universities have arranged for students in the humanities to collaborate with faculty members in pursuing research projects.
Participants considered the following questions:

• How do we encourage students to identify projects that will include creative questioning and hypothesis-testing as well as training in research methodologies?
• What role(s) might students themselves play in promoting the values of undergraduate research in the humanities? How can the students work within the context of an undergraduate research office?
• How difficult is it to convince humanist faculty members to participate in undergraduate research mentoring? What works?
• Are there ways to organize collaborative student research projects that involve students working in teams? In such a context, what would the role(s) of the faculty mentor be?
• How might undergraduate humanities research be funded in the relative absence of the external funding agencies available to the sciences?

Main Points

Although scholarship in the humanities is based on a very different model than scientific laboratory research, there are nonetheless many opportunities for students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences to work with a faculty member on aspects of his or her scholarship or to carry out an independent research project under the faculty member's mentorship. Effective models draw on a variety of campus resources.

Each department is unique; there is no single way to involve students. If there is an office that coordinates undergraduate research campus-wide, its staff should talk to each department individually to see what kinds of opportunities might be available for students and what level of preparation students need.

The session leaders emphasized that it is important to create an institutional culture in which students expect to do research, and in which the institution is supportive of faculty efforts to work with students. As Joan Bennett said, "It is valuable to the culture of a research university for the faculty in all disciplines, including the humanities, regularly to involve undergraduates in their own research." The goals of this involvement go beyond preparing students for graduate school or the workforce. In the words of Barbara Nolan, "We're talking about teaching as many of our students as we can about the fun process of asking new questions and answering them in a rigorous way, and discovering what students are capable of. We want to bring that experience as process, as method, to students whom we want to become serious thinking citizens." Janice DeCosmo added that, "There is nothing like an authentic research question to stimulate learning."

Challenges

• How to reward faculty. Stipends are helpful but the promotion and tenure guidelines need to include recognition of undergraduate research mentoring as well. Universities should also bear in mind that faculty will participate not for the sake of cooperating with a program but rather because an individual student approached them with a question or project of interest.
• How to provide administrative support and reduce the burden on faculty of coordinating the administrative aspects of these activities. Take advantage of all available resources on campus; group together several offices that offer special opportunities to students (such as fellowship advising) to form a cohort for requesting administrative support.

Opportunities

• Make use of resources such as a campus Writing Center for students who need help with their writing.
• Tie fund-raising efforts to undergraduate research and scholarship; showcase undergraduates' activities at Homecoming to encourage alumni support.
• Get the students themselves excited; they can edit journals and can communicate the expectation of doing research to other students and thus help build it into the culture.

Examples of Effective Programs

Faculty from the University of Delaware, the University of Virginia, and the University of Washington discussed the models that provide opportunities for their students to pursue scholarly projects in the humanities.

Since 1980, the University of Delaware has had a formal university-wide Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) that from the beginning included the humanities. Developing this program in the humanities was very different, however, from developing it in engineering and the sciences. Many science faculty had assisted their own professors when they were undergraduates themselves, so in the sciences it was a case of making an established practice more effective and widespread. Over 90% of University of Delaware's faculty in science and engineering regularly work with undergraduates in their research. Although developing the program in the humanities took longer, over 60% of University of Delaware's humanities faculty now regularly work with undergraduates. Introducing research collaboration in the humanities called for a shift in the paradigm that defined the conduct of research in the humanities by American academics. Almost no humanities faculty had themselves experienced research collaboration of any direct kind--not with colleagues, not with graduate students (who served as 'go-fers' and index compilers but not, except incidentally, as fellow thinkers), and not with undergraduates. The shift came about gradually. The UROP staff spoke with faculty individually and looked at departments and scholarly projects one by one to see where a student might fit in, starting with students working on honors theses. In addition, University of Delaware is starting to use undergraduate teaching assistants in the humanities, to put together quizzes and do other non-grading tasks.

Fred Adams, chair of the University of Delaware Philosophy Department, who often works with undergraduate assistants in the field of the "philosophy of mind," and Jim Dean, a medievalist from the English Department, who has also mentored many undergraduate researchers, each offered a brief account of how they have invented ways to work with students, what the students have contributed to their research, and what they believe the students have learned.

Building on an apprenticeship model, Professor Dean often directs senior theses and feels that completing a thesis is one of the best learning experiences students can have. Although willing to take on students whose interests are not the same as his, he finds it particularly fruitful for both student and professor when the interests coincide. For example, he is studying the representation of the afterlife in Chaucer's work, and has a student who is interested in the same topic. He asked the student to see what he could find about the afterlife in other readings and is considering doing a joint publication with the student. The process of working with a student in this context is labor-intensive; he spends at least an hour a week with the student, and usually more. His approach can be very hands-on: One day he took the student to the library, sat him on the floor in a particular section, and had him pull books off the shelf and look at them. In some cases he suggests ways in which a student's interests can be redirected to be more useful to him. He encouraged a student who first approached him about studying the medieval background to The Lord of the Rings to shift her focus to Tolkein's career at Oxford, with the goal of bringing together Tolkein the medieval scholar and Tolkein the imaginative writer.

Professor Adams, unlike many humanists, has co-authored papers with colleagues and so the idea of working collaboratively was not unusual. The first student he worked with was doing an independent study, and the second was an undergraduate TA in a senior seminar who "kept asking hard questions." He worked on a paper with the TA, although time constraints on the student's part prevented him from actually becoming a co-author. Another student, working with him through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities program, compiled a list of recent articles on the philosophy of mind. They met regularly throughout the summer, reading through one article at every meeting, and the student wrote and presented a paper at a conference.

Some pointers from the University of Delaware experience:

• One of the most effective ways to expose students to include creative questioning, hypothesis testing and training in research methodologies is to have the students collaborate with faculty on the faculty member's own research. This cannot mean being simply a 'go-fer'; the experience must eventually prepare the student to undertake, if desired, a project such as a senior thesis in which the student is the "primary investigator" and the faculty mentor becomes the assistant. At all stages, the experience must be worthy of academic credit in the discipline of the faculty sponsor.
• Students are the ones who "sell" the program to their peers and to individual faculty. The Undergraduate Research staff, with the help of a designated faculty member in each major department, stimulate student interest, advise students on how to plan for research and find appropriate mentors, fund extensive summer fellowships for research, provide funds for research expenses, provide venues for undergraduate researchers in the humanities to meet and learn from one another while work is in progress, and arrange public events for students' presentation of research.
• It is easy to get humanist faculty members to sponsor an eager student for the first time; they will do so out of altruistic good will. To avoid burnout, however, the program must ensure that the resulting experience enriches the research life of the faculty member. One key is to draw a strong distinction between undergraduate research, from which faculty research is required to benefit, and independent study, which is primarily extra teaching. The University of Delaware provides a token amount of money ($500-$750) as an institutional "thank you" to the faculty sponsors of fully-funded summer students in the arts, humanities and social sciences (although not in the sciences or engineering, whose faculty receive summer salaries).
• Collaborative research projects involving student teams tend to look like classes. They take so much work from the faculty, even when the faculty member's research project is benefiting, that they probably should be "counted" as classes if the number of students is over three.
• Summer scholarships are valuable in all fields because they ensure that a faculty member will have a student for a long and intensive enough time to gain a return on the investment in the student's special training. Humanities research scholarships can be funded if the money for them is raised in the context of a university-wide Undergraduate Research Program. If the program succeeds in bringing in a sizeable amount of external funding (corporate/foundation, state) for undergraduate research scholarships in engineering and the sciences, and if colleges and departments contribute their fair share of overhead money from science grants in addition to individual faculty contributions from their own research budgets, then the institution's central budget can afford to provide equal opportunities for the humanities students, especially if the university wishes to use the lure of undergraduate research opportunities to attract highly capable students in all disciplines. At the University of Delaware last summer, over 40 students were funded in the "Arts, Humanities, and Social Science Scholars" program with full Undergraduate Research scholarships ($3000 for ten weeks). About a dozen more worked with partial scholarships (averaging $1000). Fully-funded students are not allowed to hold other employment, but in certain cases they are allowed to take a summer course if the faculty advisor deems it appropriate. Summer scholars participate in informal weekly meetings and a final day of presentations.
• During the academic year, scholarships are not necessary except for students with high financial need. For these, it is valuable to create a special "undergraduate research" job category within college work-study to allow students to earn aid money doing research. It's important to have a fund for supply money so that faculty will not be deterred from having students travel to libraries and other research sites or purchase materials if needed.

The University of Virginia's Faculty Senate established the Harrison Undergraduate Research Awards in 1999. The Awards, which provide $3,000 to each student and $1,000 to each faculty mentor, have been increasingly granted to students in the humanities. In the first year, 6 out of 25 awards given were in the humanities and social sciences; in the second year, 13 of 25 were in the humanities and social sciences; in the third year, 20 out of 40 awards were made in the humanities and social sciences. The call for applications is inclusive of all disciplines. The guidelines stipulate that: "In the course of carrying out a research project, an awardee will be expected to create a bibliography of relevant background materials, read and research the topic, establish contacts with professionals in the field, produce a final product (e.g. final paper, creative project, presentation) that summarizes her or his findings, and present at the Harrison Awards Symposium… Applicants are urged to think creatively in conceptualizing their research projects. Proposals focusing on any of the undergraduate fields represented at the University will be considered. Applications that integrate different areas and approaches are encouraged."

The Awards and the publicity they got began changing the culture among students as well as faculty. The students assumed that undergraduate research - in all disciplines -- was part of the culture and they expected to be able to participate. The students also took responsibility for publishing a journal and organizing a symposium. On their own, the students solicited and chose abstracts, practiced presentations, got printing estimates and requested and received (despite a major budget crisis) from the Provost's Office the $3,000 it would cost to publish a journal. Five of the six published articles were in the humanities. The students' leadership gives this vitality and credibility within the student body. It is now part of the "institutional memory" of first and second-year students. Every Wednesday, two students present their research in progress at a lunch forum called "Brain Food," with the expectation that a Brain Food presentation will lead up to a seat at the symposium.

The recently formed Center for Undergraduate Excellence gives an institutional home to the undergraduate research initiative, advising students and giving them space to work in for preparation of the journal and the symposium. The Center also houses Fellowships Advising (for Rhodes, Marshall, and other outside as well as institutional fellowships such as the Eckels Scholars) and interdisciplinary majors, who are required to complete a thesis. Like participating in a research or scholarly project or applying for a fellowship, creating interdisciplinary majors causes students to think in the long-term about why they are doing what they are doing. In the words of Dr. Hurd, "Reflection is a great instructional tool."

At the University of Washington, the Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities was created in 2002 in order to increase the numbers of undergraduates doing research in the humanities and arts and to engage faculty in those disciplines in research with undergraduates. Although the University of Washington had an active undergraduate research culture - nearly 400 students participate in the annual undergraduate research symposium and the University awards 125-150 research training grants each year in a campus-wide undergraduate fellowship program - fewer than 25% of humanities students had benefited from these activities.

The University decided to try an immersion approach, creating a summer-long intensive institute in which students would work closely with faculty on selected topics centered on an interdisciplinary theme. They publicized the institute widely and received 62 applications for 20 spots. Nineteen students were ultimately selected. Four faculty members, from Art History, Classics, Music and Digital Arts, and Near Eastern Studies, all of whom had supervised undergraduate mentees before, were chosen as leaders. Since humanities faculty do not receive summer salary from research grants (unlike their counterparts in the sciences), the University paid each Institute leader one month's salary for the eight-week program. The funds came from a combination of sources: The Office of Research, the Summer Quarter office, and the Humanities Center, whose mission is to encourage interdisciplinary work. The Undergraduate Education office staffed the program. The Mary Gates Endowment paid the student scholarships, and students received full-time academic credit for their participation in the Institute.

The full collection of student papers will be published in a magazine and will soon be available on the Web site. Several of the students are preparing their work for publication in other journals. Their topics include: "Ancient Egyptian Magic: Text, Representation, and Religious Innovation"; "Autopoiesis: Science and Systems in Technological Art"; "The Politics of Remembering: Making Memorials in Modern U.S. Society"; "In the Muses' Birdcage: Textual Innovations of the Alexandrian Library"; "Text as Weapon: The 4th Century Athenian Treatment of Spartan Literacy"; "Nietzsche as Icon: Visual Representations of Nietzsche in Germany, 1895-1922"; and "Cursed by Hollywood: The Death of Egyptian History in The Mummy (1932, 1999 film versions)".

The Institute demanded more time and work from the students than they had expected - some described it as "boot camp for the humanities." At the end, the students were extremely pleased with their final products and glad they participated, but all remarked in their final comments on how surprised they were at the amount of time they dedicated to this work. It was hard for them to grasp that this kind of scholarship is something you do full-time and that they could not also hold jobs off campus or participate in other time-consuming activities. The materials for next year have been reworked to convey this time commitment to the students. Another surprise was that although the students were selected for strong writing in their application essays, they needed more help in their writing for their research papers than the faculty and program staff expected. Next summer the program staff is planning to have a TA from the Writing Center to work with the students, and will also engage a research librarian to assist with bibliographic work.

In order to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration with scientists, themes for future Institutes have been planned along the "science meets the humanities" thread. The Summer 2003 Institute will bring faculty and students together to look at the cultural implications of globalization. The Summer 2004 Institute is tentatively planned to have a science studies or environment theme and to involve both science and humanities faculty.
Session participants briefly described two initiatives related to these themes:

At SUNY Albany, an interdisciplinary, team-taught freshman seminar for honors students called Foundations of Great Ideas "examines the notions of order and chaos from a number of different disciplinary perspectives within the sciences, social sciences and humanities." The course format includes a weekly lecture attended by all students as well as separate small discussion sessions. Each participating faculty member gives a certain number of lectures and leads one of the discussion sections, with assistance from an undergraduate student preceptor.

Stanford University's Writing Center sponsors an ongoing monthly forum called "How I Write," in which faculty and graduate students from a variety of disciplines give informal talks about the process of writing. The focus is not on content but rather on technique and work styles, such as "how a writer generates ideas, sustains large-scale projects, combines research with composition, overcomes various impediments and blocks, and cultivates stylistic innovations."

Follow-up Issues

Several unanswered questions emerged at the end of the discussion, as potential issues for follow-up on the part of the Reinvention Center.

One issue is how to include a wider range of students, beyond those in honors, and how to reach those who are not self-starters and might not approach faculty on their own. In some cases problem-based learning approaches can bring inquiry to the students in the classroom, but it is also important to make students aware of the opportunities open to them.

Another issue is how to develop more opportunities for genuinely collaborative work in the humanities. There are very few models available, as institutions are just beginning to experiment with this concept.

Resources

Web sites:
University of Delaware
Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program: http://www.udel.edu/UR/
Arts and Humanities Scholars Handbook: http://www.udel.edu/UR/humhnd.html#do
The Handbook includes numerous examples of student projects.

A Field Guide to the Philosophy of Mind: http://host.uniroma3.it/progetti/kant/field/
A University of Delaware student presented a paper at this conference.

University of Virginia
Harrison Undergraduate Research Awards: http://www.virginia.edu/facultysenate/harrison2001call.html

University of Washington
Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities: http://www.washington.edu/oue/summer_institute/si.html

Stanford University
Writing Center, How I Write: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/undergrad/urp/howiwrite.html

SUNY Albany
Foundations of Great Ideas: http://www.albany.edu/presidential_scholars/current/uni101.htm