IHE: "All College Professors Should Be Scholars"

[Ruralguy]

Well, I'm pretty sure it means "Peer Reviewed Scholars"

[eigen]

Well, I'm pretty sure it means "Peer Reviewed Scholars"

"Publishing specific types of works in particular venues".

[Wahoo Redux]

I've always felt that active scholarship is good for the classroom because writing and research teaches one new stuff in a way that passive learning, in most cases, simply doesn't. It's part of the reason we have undergrads write term papers.  Peer review forces one to really deal with and understand knowledge. 

Just a thought.

[eigen]

This makes more sense in disciplines where term papers are common and writing as engaging with the literature is scholarship. Less sense in a discipline where scholarship is 5 years of laborious data collection.

[mamselle]

But the lines aren't quite so distinct as that....

Five years of laborious data collection can include visiting 15 international libraries; getting photographic images and scanned digital files of many early manuscript pages and archived parchment pages; and analyzing them, translating their medieval Latin and middle French texts, and studying the secondary literature, which may be in English, German, Spanish, or Italian, as well.

Then putting it all together and looking for patterns of similarity or potential derivatives from one place to another (since books traveled--they were often used as sources for copied manuscripts in a place that had, say, lost its official breviary, or needed an update from the latest dicta in Rome) and sometimes comparing practices from several other different towns or cathedrals and following the recent literature on those...

Or, as has been done at Soissons, drawing and entering every single stone of the cathedral into a CAD file to have a fully documented building...

Just sayin'

Libraries is labs, and us humanities folks is, too intellecshuals....

;--}

M.

[Ruralguy]

Also, some people (like me) write as they go along, so "writing" isn't a separate phase from "collecting data."

In any case, maybe there's a middle ground in which someone can be an engaged practitioner/scholar without necessarily publishing or presenting prodigiously.

Of course, I am only proposing this for my own type of school. R1's and other elite schools would have to be stricter, but can think more seriously about two track faculty (but teaching track has to also be tenurable, in my opinion, just with much more excellent in teaching---that is a blah teacher who bombs out on grant writing can't just hide on the teaching track).

[Wahoo Redux]

This makes more sense in disciplines where term papers are common and writing as engaging with the literature is scholarship. Less sense in a discipline where scholarship is 5 years of laborious data collection.

I was just thinking that, no matter what discipline or technique, one generally learns more from research than even teaching.  One would, I presume, have learned a great deal after 5 years of laborious data collection which could then translate to the classroom.

[eigen]

This makes more sense in disciplines where term papers are common and writing as engaging with the literature is scholarship. Less sense in a discipline where scholarship is 5 years of laborious data collection.

I was just thinking that, no matter what discipline or technique, one generally learns more from research than even teaching.  One would, I presume, have learned a great deal after 5 years of laborious data collection which could then translate to the classroom.

Not really, in my experience. As I've said, I think it's largely field specific. But it does get tiring to have people constantly try to tell me (on these forums) that I'm wrong about that.

If I want to be a better teacher, I focus on reading literature relevant to what I'm teaching, I work to develop new material to go along with my classes, and I work to keep up with DBER and publish in relevant pedagogical journals.

If I want to forward my research (produce scholarship), I spend a little time on literature related to my research (zero overlap with anything I teach), I spend a ton of time in the lab doing the same assays over and over, and after hundreds of hours have a data set that I can put some intellectual time into writing up.

Don't get me wrong, I love my research- but it does not in any way make me a better teacher, especially relative to the time it takes. I also love training students as researchers. But often the goals of producing publishable research and training research students run counter to each other. The best way to produce research is to use the students as extra arms to get things done. The best way to train researchers is to help them take ownership of projects.

[Sun_Worshiper]

Research makes me a better teacher, but I agree that it can be context specific. I have published articles directly related to the classes I teach, which in turn improve my understanding for class material. I have also published articles that don't have much of a direct link to course material, which probably don't do much for my teaching.

To turn it around, I'll also say that teaching has aided my research. Several of my articles, including my best placed and cited, were inspired at least in part by class content.

[Ruralguy]

I would say that my "traditional scholarship," that is to say, journal articles talking about data, its analysis, and modeling, really only have peripherally informed my teaching. I don't even find it particularly exciting to talk about that kind of research of mine within my teaching. I think if I taught statistics and modeling more than fundamental physics and astronomy, then this would be different.
In this way, its like how learning guitar informed my teaching or being a parent has informed my teaching. That is to say, they have, but in subtle ways.

My scholarship in which I talk about methods for learning more about something I teach, or making teaching that subject better, yeah, that informs my teaching and the other way around (this is about as close to "DBER" as I get, although I am unclear on that because I forgot what "DBER" meant). I also have been developing a class related to a "popular" book I wrote, so I guess that is scholarship informing teaching.

More generally, it obviously depends on the nature of the research, the nature of the teaching (I might be teaching research methods, for instance!) , the relationship of the instructor to both their teaching and their research and I guess a billion other things. But I'm kind of sick of universal statements made by professors to justify their research to, perhaps, people who don't care that much about it, such as "research makes professors better at teaching" or "we have a research requirement for tenure *because* it makes our instructors better teachers." That's bs when its not qualified at all.

[Hibush]

If you are an active researcher, you are constantly asking "how can I know whether A is true and not B?" That process of logic and interpreting evidence in the context of competing models is fundamental to science. If you do that mental exercise all day in the course of your research, you get much better at it than if you don't. Does that not influence how you teach?

That is, if you were not doing active research and that mental energy when towards managing TAs and attending curriculum meetings instead, would you present material differently?

[fizzycist]

If you are an active researcher, you are constantly asking "how can I know whether A is true and not B?" That process of logic and interpreting evidence in the context of competing models is fundamental to science. If you do that mental exercise all day in the course of your research, you get much better at it than if you don't. Does that not influence how you teach?

That is, if you were not doing active research and that mental energy when towards managing TAs and attending curriculum meetings instead, would you present material differently?

For me, the answer is no. I hear this argument all the time and I think it is just not correct in most cases (in my experience in Physical Science R1 depts).

There are some aspects of the job of professor that are useful for teaching.
-Reading the DBER literature on your topic
-Giving colloquia and seminars
-Mentoring grad students on how to pass their qual/prelim/candidacy exams
-mentoring undergrad students
-going to workshops on teaching methods
-talking to other instructors about their methods is good practice.

But working with advanced grad students and postdocs in the lab and writing papers and grant proposals is not very effective preparation. Bringing in the very occasional anecdote or assignment that is relevant to your research does little, IMO, to enhance teaching. certainly not nearly as much benefit per hour as the previous list.

Maybe there are special courses - grad electives and advanced labs - where doing research is effective preparation for teaching, but for most of our depts courses it is not IMO.

On the other hand there are outstanding lecturers and instructors at my Dept who do little "research" but keep up to date on the best teaching methods, improve their courses by doing mini-"experiments" (tweak and look at outcomes), etc. And the argument that good research leads to good teaching doesn't add up and makes them feel bad. And same for the research active faculty who are mediocre instructors.