Humble Magic? Teaching Research Skills
Sometimes the most rewarding pedagogical experiences arise during the most unpromising modules.
I remember being moved by an hour-long discussion of W.B. Yeats’s poem, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. I was moved to the extent that by the end of the seminar, when we re-read it I was choking with emotion. But that’s modern poetry in a third-year seminar! When I was asked to convene a first-year research skills module I didn’t expect it to be nearly as rewarding. It can be a huge challenge to plan and teach first-year skills courses in a way that is compelling. They can easily become the neglected child of university education, both for tutors and students.
So I entertained ideas about how to overcome this difficulty. In the end, I decided to try and orient the ‘skills’ module towards a broader study of research in the Humanities. I wanted to reflect on what the students and I should understand by the term ‘Humanities’. In practice, this involved us looking at its historical development, and also considering the various problems the area faces (for a start, its definition). The students and I started off by exploring the wider institutional framework surrounding what we were doing in the classroom. As term progressed, we tried to understand the continuum between first year study and the most advanced research being funded today. What surprised me most was that by Week 11, we had begun to see ourselves as part of a larger community in ways I really hadn’t expected when the module began.
Students considered unquestioned assumptions about the shared environment we were working in.
I had feared it would be a bit dry to spend time in class dwelling on the larger institutional and governmental structures that guide research and teaching. But something as simple as reminding the students that the government department responsible for universities is Business, Innovation, and Skills (rather than Education) turned out to have a subtle transformative effect on our interactions. Almost all my students were actually unaware of this fact. Once it was brought to attention directly, students began to ask searching questions about the nature of institutional education, concepts of ‘value’ in Higher Education, and the phenomenological and ontological differences between school and university education. My goal was not to politicise students one way or another, but to consider the political underpinnings of unquestioned assumptions about the shared environment we were working in.
Of course, I did want to teach them about Boolean searches. Some of my students looked up ‘Humanities’ AND ‘Crisis’, whilst other groups went for ‘Humanities’ AND ‘Decline’. Both brought up a wealth of material from across the twentieth century. We realised current concerns have a long history. This led to a memorable and animated discussion about whether there is always already a sense of crisis and decline when talking about the Humanities. It was balanced though by another activity I set, in which we searched the awards database for the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Students found projects, searched for academics, and followed their research. Whilst this put into play a more hands-on understanding of where the discipline ‘is’ today, it also raised questions about whether it actually makes sense to talk about separate disciplines. Investigating individual databases, going into physical archives and browsing historical journals, we traced the development of nascent research projects from an initial search term to a coherent idea that might inform a future dissertation. There were multiple moments where a quiet, humble magic was involved. It was if I were seeing students build boats and set sail upon a new sea with their own maps and stars to guide them.
