Website promotes exchanges
in teaching, research
BY DIANE MANUEL
As she puts together notes
for a freshman lecture on ecology, Professor X is looking
for some exciting research that will help to bring the
material alive.
She turns to a new Stanford website and, presto, finds a cutting-edge
study of ant behavior that is being performed just over
the hill at Jasper Ridge.
Professor X calls Nathan
Sanders, the doctoral student in biological sciences who
is tracking invasive Argentine ants, and invites him to
talk to her class the following day. She knows ahead of
time that he'll be happy to give a presentation about his
work.
Related
Information:
This is no millennium
dream scene. Thanks to CREATE, a teaching and research
initiative that is a joint venture of the Center for
Teaching and Learning (CTL) and the Stanford Learning
Laboratory (SLL), advanced graduate students like Sanders
are the newest players in Stanford's efforts to forge
links between research and teaching.
CREATE --Creating Research
Examples Across the Teaching Enterprise --was piloted
last spring by Michele Marincovich, assistant vice
provost and director of CTL, and Richard Reis, a
consulting professor in electrical and mechanical
engineering who is director for academic partnerships at
SLL. They helped graduate students from 13 departments
develop written descriptions of their research that could
be posted on the web and used as a resource by the campus
community. In exchange, the students learned how to write
concisely and compellingly about their work --skills that
will be helpful as they complete dissertations and grant
proposals and compile teaching portfolios.
"Given the demands on
everyone's time these days, we've been concerned with the
problem of how to encourage faculty, lecturers and
graduate students to do more to integrate their teaching
and research," Marincovich says. "We've asked
ourselves, what are the things they do in their research
that they could carry over into their teaching? And --the
harder challenge --what are the things they do in their
teaching that could save them time and help to jumpstart
their research?"
As he considered those
questions, Reis thought the notion of leverage could
apply.
"If you see teaching
and research in conflict, research will win out every
time here," he says. "But if you think of
teaching and research as leveraging agents, then there
ought to be ways to infuse more inquiry and an
investigative mode into introductory classes, and perhaps
change to some extent the nature of the undergraduate
experience."
Marincovich and Reis sent
out letters in March to 25 graduate students who were
within two years of finishing their doctorates and who
also had demonstrated a keen interest in polishing their
teaching skills. Sixteen students volunteered for the
CREATE pilot program --eight from engineering departments
and physical sciences, and eight from the humanities and
social sciences --and received $100 plus a year's
subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education for
their participation.
Each student was asked to
write a statement that described her or his research. It
had to be understandable to freshmen taking an
introductory course in the field, and it also had to
explain why the work was important.
"We reasoned that
1,000 words was long enough to require some substance and
some description of what they were doing, and of what
kinds of questions they were answering," Reis says.
Equally important was the
"why."
"Many graduate
students who have dedicated two years to a particular
project often neglect to think about why anyone else
should be interested in their research," Marincovich
adds. "So we wanted them to answer the questions,
'Even if we understood your work, why should we care
about it? Why is it important and compelling?'"
To help shape and focus
their research statements, the graduate students were
encouraged to think about describing their work in four
stages of "talks."
The first couple of
sentences of their statements would constitute an
"elevator talk" --a brief response to the
question "So, what is your research about?"
that could be offered in an elevator ride between several
floors.
Students were urged to
think about the second paragraph of their statements as a
"hallway talk" --a slightly longer response to
the above question. For the fuller "office
talk" version and the more complete "seminar
talk," which would constitute the remainder of their
statements, students were encouraged to make a compelling
case for their research.
The first drafts were
farmed out for review among the students, with each one
assigned to read two papers --one in science or
engineering, and one in the humanities or social
sciences. A physicist, for example, might have to
decipher the work of a student in religious studies, or
an engineer might look at the work of a specialist in
communications. The students, who had not met each other,
returned their comments via email.
"They took a lot of
time with the reviews, and in some cases the comments
were almost as long as the original statements,"
Marincovich said.
As they guided second and
third drafts of the graduate students' research
statements, Marincovich and Reis drew on the comments of
their peers to encourage the students to make their work
more accessible to a wider audience. The title of one
medical sciences essay, for example, which started out as
"Investigating Cytoskeletal Dynamics in the
Development of Epithelial Cell Polarity," ultimately
became "How Do Cells Know Up from Down?"
Marincovich and Reis
presented the initial results of the CREATE project to 35
engineering faculty members from universities nationwide
who convened at Stanford this summer for a workshop
funded by the National Science Foundation. They also will
make a presentation to the American Association of Higher
Education.
Last month Fred Stout, CTL
training coordinator, used the CREATE template to help
six students in the urban studies track of Honors College
jumpstart their senior honors essays.
By mid-October Marincovich
and Reis hope to have between 50 and 60 more graduate
students writing research statements to add to the
growing website database. They have contacted the chairs
of six departments --civil and environmental engineering,
electrical engineering, chemistry, economics, English and
political science --to ask if their faculties could
nominate advanced graduate students for an expanded
CREATE project in fall quarter.
"We hope that by
doing this early in their careers, graduate students will
learn to recast their knowledge into something they can
teach well, and that they'll also maintain a learner's
perspective on the material," Marincovich says.
"The whole core of teaching is to make ideas
available, and we look at this as a very solid
pedagogical exercise." SR
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