Look no further than the first paragraph of your university mission statement or the sub-header from any glossy recruitment brochure and somewhere in the middle of that familiar discourse about ‘dynamism’, ‘widening participation’ and ‘standards’, there is sure to be a confident claim that undergraduate teaching is ‘research-informed’ or ‘research-led’.
And yet...
Over the last ten years, a number of studies designed to collect evidence of this so-called special relationship have concluded that the research-teaching nexus is at best only ‘loosely coupled’ and often non-existent.(1) In truth these findings may not come as a great shock; most of us know that, for staff, research and teaching are not just ‘loosely coupled’ but often locked into fierce turf wars, a situation compounded by national funding strategies and by prevailing institutional structures. What should be two complementary areas of academic practice are divided into warring camps, complete with their separatist agendas, committees and cultures. At the student level, an increasingly instrumental approach towards getting the best possible grades often militates against opting for research-based modules that require independent thinking and risk taking.
Jan Hewitt is a senior
lecturer in English
Studies at the
University of Teesside.
Her current publications
are on popular regional
fiction in the late
nineteenth century.
New initiatives to ‘re-engineer’ this troubled relationship promise to improve things at several levels.(2) At the macro-level, governments and institutions are now being encouraged to develop strategies that will build productive links between research and teaching rather than simply celebrating their relationship and then effectively letting them go their separate ways. At the micro-level, several new opportunities are also presenting themselves, including the role of research-based learning.
At its most straightforward, research-based learning involves researchers bringing their specialist knowledge and enthusiasm to undergraduate teaching, but it can also involve undergraduate students as active agents in the research process; instead of simply absorbing the work of others, they are given the opportunity to do their own research. Within this model, research is not the preserve of a special cadre of academics but for everyone.
For a number of years, we have experimented with this approach in an interdisciplinary module that explores changing gender ideologies in the late Victorian and Edwardian era.(3) It is a final-year module that asks students to undertake small research projects exploring the complex interface between texts and contexts. During the first six weeks of a twelve-week teaching programme, students are introduced to the main economic, social, political and cultural developments of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, with a small number of primary and secondary texts forming the focus for class discussion.(4) From the very outset, students are asked to identify their own individual research projects and during the second half of the module the overall emphasis shifts from collective class discussions to individual research, finally leading to research projects of between three and four thousand words.
It’s an ambitious style of undergraduate teaching and not without challenges. Where can students gain access to a wide range of relevant primary texts? (Collections in local archives and libraries are not always relevant to specialist modules). Many undergraduate students have little experience of using archives and struggle to find material in the short time at their disposal; in these circumstances, levels of anxiety and frustration can often assume worrying proportions. Over the years, we have tried to address these problems by creating ever-larger Module Readers packed with primary texts, yet these remain limited in scope and expensive to produce. Faced by such challenges, it is hardly surprising that many students avoid the pressures and uncertainties of genuine research by framing projects based on safe canonical texts with plenty of secondary material to fall back upon; after some initial enthusiasm, an exercise that should lead to the production of a research project too often ends up in the form of a long essay. Finally, there is the real problem of maintaining a creative tension between individual research and collective discussion: it is hard to avoid a situation, in other words, where students see wider class discussions as simply irrelevant once they have selected their individual topics.
The astonishing growth of online digital resources offers a potential solution to many of these problems. In 2006, Google’s controversial claim that it would digitise the complete collections of all major copyright libraries in the USA and Britain attracted high levels of media attention, largely because it threatened to create a copyright war with contemporary authors and publishers. Prior to this high-profile press release, however, many earlier projects like Project Gutenberg had gone largely unnoticed by headline writers. Yet the work of these pioneering projects had sparked a quiet revolution that now promises to transform text-based humanities subjects like English and History. Google is only one among many players in this rapidly expanding field. Some projects are run by large commercial firms like Thomson-Gale; two of their most impressive collections - The Times Digital Archive and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online – are accessible only through expensive yearly subscriptions, but nonetheless offer revolutionary new resources for research and teaching in the humanities. Other projects are funded by national and local government, whilst projects like Gutenberg are powered by global networks of volunteers. Last but by no means least, thousands of smaller projects are digitising collections based on specific places, people and themes.(5)
As we encountered these new resources as part of our own research, we were struck by their potential for teaching. At one level, of course, it was the easiest thing in the world to identify useful collections of primary texts that could then be used to support research-based learning amongst our students. At another more ambitious level, we began to wonder if it might be possible to digitise our own material.
Digitised texts carry two principal advantages for all users: they are accessible to anyone via the internet and can be analysed in powerful new ways using keyword searches. The process of digitising texts is relatively simple and cheap, particularly if they are already microfilmed; film can be loaded onto machines that are calibrated to digitise each frame automatically, and if the texts are printed rather than hand-written, they can also be scanned by Optical Character Recognition Software (OCR); this process creates the background text that allows users to search by keyword. However, the results of OCRing can be mixed, depending on the ‘readability’ of the original print; some of the newspaper pages we digitised, for example, were captured almost completely (90%) and some hardly at all (10%). The important point to register, however, is that digitising and OCRing are surprisingly cheap, costing less than 10p per page, but the real problem comes when OCRed texts need to be proofed; at current rates, this costs somewhere in the region of £1.20 per page, making it far too expensive for most academic budgets.
With the help of a National Teaching Fellowship Award from the Higher Educational Academy, we began experimenting with different digitisation techniques and have just published 10,000 pages of nineteenth century newspapers online.(6) We commissioned a commercial software firm to design an editing package that will allow volunteers (academics, students, members of the general public) to proof and correct texts online and the site is now being piloted and tested at www.n-e-n-a.co.uk. The current project happens to concentrate on newspapers, but can easily be applied to other texts (novels, plays, poetry, letters, original manuscripts, images etc.) Its great potential is to use the power of the Web to recruit user-volunteers who contribute to the proofing process because they see the advantage of creating a valuable collective resource.
A smaller grant from the English Subject Centre funded the first application and evaluation of this online resource in a revamped version of our final-year module. Drawing on this new technology, the module was re-designed along the following lines and run during the last academic year (2005-2006):
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We re-structured the module around five key research themes, each well supported by existing online resources or by digitised newspapers created by ourselves.(7)
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Students worked in small research teams of five, so that each member could take responsibility for coordinating the work of one of the five research themes.
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Each theme ran for two weeks, beginning with a lecture and ending with a two-hour class. The lecture was used to introduce concepts and sources and thereafter students worked in groups, allocating specific tasks to individual members.
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Groups used a VLE (Blackboard) to communicate with each other and to post findings in a Coordinator’s Report three days before each class.
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At the start of each class, Group Coordinators made short PowerPoint presentations of their findings which, together with their posted reports, formed the basis of class discussion.
•
Students could still chose their own individual research topics, but these had to be linked to the work of their groups, and this helped to forge a stronger link between collective and individual work.
Not everything worked perfectly. The module was challenging on several fronts, most notably its heavy use of ICT, its emphasis on research and the central role of group work. Two students had panic attacks in the first week and fled to more conventional modules, but then things settled down as a new rhythm of research and reporting got underway. Levels of enthusiasm began to rise, but this sometimes led to overlong presentations that left little time for wider class discussion. Finally, despite all our best efforts, one or two students still fell back on secondary texts and settled for long essays.
Yet overall, the results were really encouraging. Everyone engaged with the ICT elements in the module, including digitised primary sources, online discussions and PowerPoint presentations.(8) Most students enjoyed their experience of collaborative learning in research groups and recognised the benefits of this approach in their feedback at the end of the module.(9)
Most importantly of all, many of them began to appreciate the experience of working on the edge of their knowledge, with all the uncertainties and excitements that research engenders. It is an experience that is captured in the online exchange of one particular group about an episode of serialised fiction that appeared in the North-Eastern Daily Gazette in 1888. All they knew was that the story was written by someone called Dora Russell.
“Just thought I’d share this”, wrote one member on Blackboard. “Whilst browsing through The Gazette... I thought it would be interesting to google Dora Russell.”
“As it turns out,”, the same student went on, “she was quite an interesting lady. She believed that education was just as important for girls as boys, attended Cambridge... She had a variety of great jobs and whilst she did eventually marry Bertrand Russell, they continued to have relationships with other people...”
She went on to give details of a bohemian lifestyle that seemed to her astonishing for the period. Other group members warmed to the theme.
“I think this is a fantastic idea”, replied one, “and was totally impressed when I had a look. What a woman! Reminded me ever so slightly of Virginia Woolf, so I can now see where it started. This also links with... ”
Over the following days, we could monitor this discussion and see how they made links between literary and documentary texts, partly from our own module and partly from texts studied in previous modules. It wasn’t easy, but we refrained from intervening as we saw them re-reading the serialised story from different perspectives. They began to wonder, for example, if popular fiction in the 1880s might have challenged prevailing assumptions of Victorian respectability as much as reinforcing them.
Until...
“I don’t know if I cracked into the correct Dora Russell”, the original instigator finally reported in the midst of this mounting enthusiasm. “She seems to be a great figure to expand on at some point, but it isn’t the Dora Russell from the paper. The Gazette was printed in 1888 and this Mrs Russell wasn’t born until 1896! Ooops!”
For us, that embarrassed ‘Ooops!’ is tantamount to ‘Eureka!’ for here were five undergraduates making a productive mistake. Their discovery of the ‘wrong’ Dora Russell, a late Victorian writer of newspaper sensation fiction(10), led them to construct new perspectives on the social and cultural values of the period. It ultimately prompted them to re-read academic studies on the late Victorian period and rethink their assumptions about the narrowness of its cultural values. By the same token, the productive mistake encouraged them to read what they had originally dismissed as a conventional romance with fresh eyes. Needless to say, once its productiveness was realised, the crucial gains made from this little detour were not jettisoned as somehow ‘untrue’ but used to inform and enrich later discussions and projects. Most fundamentally of all, they saw for themselves how all knowledge is provisional.
Research-informed teaching of this kind rarely if ever produces high-quality outputs that RAE panels might recognise, but it involves undergraduate students in the research process – in effect, a powerful form of active learning – that helps deepen their understanding of whatever subject they happen to studying. The expanding field of digitised sources gives everyone increased opportunities to do this kind of work and plays its own part in helping to re-engineer a more productive research-teaching nexus.
Notes
1. See Hattie, J. & Marsh, H.W., ‘The relationship between research and teaching: a meta-analysis’. Review of Educational Research, 66 (4), 1996, pp. 507-542. More recent studies have tended to confirm the picture.
2. Useful overviews of this debate are available in Jenkins, A. A Guide to the Research Evidence on Teaching-Research Relations, (The Higher Education Academy, December 2004); Jenkins, A. & Healey, M. Institutional strategies to link teaching and research, (The Higher Education Academy, October 2005); Healey, M., Jenkins, A. & Zetter, R. Linking teaching and research in disciplines and departments, (Higher Education Academy, April 2007)
3. For more details see www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/projects/archive/technology/tech13.php.
4. Some of the key texts used in class discussions were W.T.Stead’s ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’; Stoker’s Dracula; Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde; local and national newspaper coverage of the Whitechapel murders; and Elizabeth Robbins and Lady Bell’s controversial ‘New Woman’ drama, Alan’s Wife (1893).
5.
For Project Gutenberg see www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page; a valuable overview of the project is provided in Marie Lebert’s online article at
www.etudes-francaises.net/dossiers/gutenberg_eng.htm. Access to Thomson-Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online and The Times Digital Archive is by subscription, but introductory web pages are available at www.gale.com/EighteenthCentury/ and www.gale.com/Times/. Finding your way through the burgeoning number of websites containing primary texts can be daunting, but there are ‘gateways’ that offer useful handy points of entry: see, for example, the English Subject Centre’s own list of useful gateways at www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/find/links/gateways.php; see also ‘The Victorian Literary Studies Archive’ at http://victorian.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/.
6. There are a number of technical issues that need to be considered in any digitisation project, including copyright, image quality and searchability. The NENA website contains a brief guide to these issues based on our own experience.
7. Examples of existing resources might include Chris Willis’ ‘Crime, Gender and Victorian Popular Culture’ at www.chriswillis.freeserve.co.uk/index.html; the University of Minnesota Online Teaching Anthology’ at http://etrc.lib.umn.edu/uvsota/index.htm; ‘The Casebook: Jack the Ripper’ at www.casebook.org/. The list could go on. A good example of our own customised resources can be seen at Owen Mulpetre’s ‘W.T. Stead Resource Site’; www.attackingthedevil.co.uk/. Owen was a student on our module and developed a deep interest in Stead; he is now undertaking postgraduate research on Stead’s early journalistic career.
8. We designed an ICT Induction class at the beginning of the module to make sure that all students were familiar with Web resources, Blackboard Discussion Groups and PowerPoint presentations.
9.
A brief summary of the Module Evaluation will eventually be available as part of our project archive on the English Subject Centre website at
www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/projects/archive/index.php
10. For the popularity of this earlier Dora Russell see Graham Law, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000, pp. 86-88 and volume 6 of Andrew Maunder (general editor), Varieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction, 1855-1890, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004.
