Research and Teaching: Beyond the Divide
Review: Research and Teaching: Beyond the Divide, by Angela Brew
Basingstoke UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
What do research universities have to offer undergraduates? What unique features of these institutions provide undergraduates with excellent learning opportunities? In the mid-1990s, the Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University was struck, and their 1998 report, Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities was issued. This report challenged large research universities to craft undergraduate programs and policies that built on research universities’ unique features: large-scale and extensive facilities (such as laboratories, concert halls, and information technology infrastructure), breadth of programs (from laboratory sciences to performing arts to professional programs), and of course research. The report described numerous programs where students were directly engaged in what Boyer called the “scholarship of discovery,” the generation of new knowledge that encompasses traditional research and creative work, and urged a broad expansion of the effort to engage undergraduates in this work.
Parallel to these U.S. efforts in the mid-1990s, some British educators were beginning to write about the incorporation of research into university courses, what they often termed “research-led teaching” or “research-enhanced learning.” Angela Brew is an academic who has worked in the UK and is now Associate Professor in the Institute for Teaching and Learning at the University of Sydney. She has developed her thoughts on engaging undergraduate students in research in this important book, part of the Universities into the 21st Century series from Palgrave Macmillan. In it, she discusses the traditional paradigm for teaching and research, where each inhabits a different sphere in a professor’s life. For example, a scholar’s disciplinary research culture (where knowledge is generated) is typically perceived as distinct from the teacher’s departmental teaching milieu (where knowledge is transmitted). She argues that this scenario, replicated in countless university departments around the world, should be transformed into one which embraces all members of the university into a scholarly community so that all are asked to partake in knowledge generation as well as its dissemination.
Why should teaching and research be brought together? Angela Brew’s answers to this question are several. First, that students are facing an uncertain world where global economic, environmental, political and social issues pose real threats to the well-being of humanity, and we are duty-bound to prepare them to ask and seek answers to critical questions in a rigorous, thoughtful manner. Second, that the hierarchical nature of universities needs to be dismantled in favour of a more egalitarian, collaborative culture that thrives on everyone being engaged in the search for knowledge. Finally, the movement towards student-centered learning is only growing stronger with each passing year, as it becomes clear that the work of teaching involves designing experiences so that students will engage in their learning effectively. “Thus, we are increasingly seeing teaching which is student-centered, negotiated, discursive and reflexive. A view of knowledge as built up in communicative acts implies a shift from an emphasis on teaching towards an emphasis on the facilitation of learning.” P. 24.
Her critique of the divide between teaching and research can be summed up in the following sentence: “Interestingly, what is called scholarship when applied to academics, tends to be relegated to the domain of ‘study skills,’ ‘generic skills,’ or ‘graduate attributes’ when applied to students.” She argues that we are training our students to take on the attributes of scholarship, but not asking them to engage in it in any substantive way. Students have the capacity to generate authentic questions, and are able to learn the methods of scholarship while attempting to answer them. Yet, all too often, this capacity is not recognised or acknowledged, and students engage in assignments which do not contribute to the scholarly enterprise, and which are restricted to private communications between teacher and student rather than being exposed to broader engagement and critique by a community of scholars.
One example highlighted in this book concerns a history of science course taught at University College London by Hasok Chang. He knew that the history of chlorine was complicated, and had never received a complete treatment in the literature. Brew reports that he decided to create a new model of undergraduate research by requiring all of his students, over a period of three years, to engage in independent research projects based on a common theme, the history of the element chlorine. At the end of each year, these projects (literature reviews, lab notes, data, copies of materials, reports, bibliographies, etc.) are compiled and handed over to the next group of students, who then build on the work of the previous cohorts and continue the research. Prof. Chang makes a point about the serious nature of this work by indicating that material from previous student research will serve as a source for exam questions. Brew then describes two examples of individual projects that “went considerably beyond existing secondary literature.” Now at the end of this project, Prof. Chang has compiled and edited the results and will publish it, acknowledging the full authorship of the students whose work was included, in a book titled “An Element of Controversy: The Life of Chlorine in Science, Medicine, Technology and War.” (pp. 89-90, quoting H. Chang (2005), Turning an undergraduate class into a professional research community, Teaching in Higher Education 10(3), 379-94).
Her final chapters consider how one might transform teaching so that we can engage students in authentic research at all levels. In “Part 3: Going Beyond the Divide,” Brew brings together the strands of thought developed in earlier chapters to present alternatives to the current divide between teaching and learning. She argues for the creation of a robust university research culture that engages and rewards everyone -- from undergraduate students to support staff, professionals and senior researchers -- for participating in the university’s culture of inquiry. In this way, the university’s scholarly community can be enhanced and broadened, and our community better prepared for the challenges to come in the 21st century.