First, we think research, broadly defined, is a valuable part of an
undergraduate education. Even at a rudimentary level, engaging in research
implicates students in the creation of knowledge. They need to understand
that knowledge isn’t an inert substance they passively receive, but is
continually created, debated, and reformulated—and they have a role to
play in that process.
we recognize that research is situated in disciplinary frameworks and needs
to be addressed in terms of distinct research traditions.
research is a complex and recursive process involving
not just finding information but framing and refining a question, perhaps
gathering primary data through field or lab work, choosing and evaluating
appropriate evidence, negotiating different viewpoints, and composing some
kind of response, all activities that are not linear but intertwined.
learning to conduct inquiry
is itself complex and recursive. These skills need to be developed throughout
a research project and throughout a student’s education.
the hybrid nature of libraries today requires students
to master both traditional and emerging information formats, but the skills
that students need to conduct effective inquiry—for example, those mentioned
in your mission statement of reading critically and reasoning analytically—are
the same whether the materials they use are in print or electronic.
Too often, traditional research paper assignments defeat
their own purpose by implying that research is not discovery, but rather
a report on what someone else has already discovered. More than once I’ve
had to talk students out of abandoning a paper topic because, to their
dismay, they find out it’s original. If they can’t find a source that says
for them exactly what they want to say—better yet, five sources—they think
they’ll get in trouble.
In reality, students
doing researched writing typically spend a huge percentage of their time
mapping out the research area before they can focus their research question.
This is perfectly legitimate, though they often feel they’re spinning wheels.
They have to do a good bit of reading before they really know what they’re
looking for.
she has students seek out both primary and secondary sources, make choices
among them, and develop some conclusions in presentations that are far
from standard literary criticism. One lab focuses on collecting and seeking
relationships among assigned literary texts and other primary sources from
the second half of the twentieth century to illuminate American society
in that time period.
For this lab, groups of students must find ten primary
sources that relate in some way to literary texts under discussion and
then—here’s the unusual bit—write three new verses of “America the Beautiful”
that use the primary sources to illuminate a vision of American society.
Instead of amber waves of grain and alabaster cities, they select images
that reformulate the form of the song to represent another vision of the
country. At the end of the course, her final essay assignment calls upon
all of the work the previous labs have done, asking students to apply the
skills they’ve practiced through the semester. While students in this course
don’t do a single, big research project, they practice skills that will
prepare them to do more sophisticated work later.
What are our assumptions about how students get research done in the humanities? How do those assumptions affect our instruction, and what really is our students' approach to research?
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