Can You Really Do Humanities Research with Undergraduates?

Admissions Office materials routinely tout the benefits of small class-sizes with pictures of lab-coated undergrads doing beaker-work alongside goggled science-professionals. But how much is that work real work, I've always wondered. Are the pair about to discover something? Or is the research, like the photo, staged? And how could we in the undergraduate Humanities engage the eager intellectuals, however “budding,” with which we’re surrounded? Mightn’t giving students real, necessary, projects to do, rather than just "assignments," be a boon to all concerned?

I know such things happen in graduate school, but I decided to try inviting some undergraduates in to my actual work, recently, rather than engage in the pedagogical game-version we sometimes set up for classroom purposes. You know what I mean: an intellectual puzzle whose solution we professors already know but which we erect for students’ benefit. Those have their place, but I sense that students can tell when they are mice placed in the spinning wheel, and that they don't appreciate it, even if the running is good exercise.

One of the limitations at the SLAC where I teach literature--and a limitation for which I'm thankful, as I'll explain later--is that I don’t have a research fund and the department can't spring for a TA for my classes. But I'm still working on five articles, two books, and three conference presentations. What hope? I could either hole up in my turret, teaching my classes on autopilot while I do the real work of research, or, if I wanted to harness the brainpower, the labor hours, the creativity of my students somehow, while also inviting them in to my actual scholarly concerns, I’d have to use regular classes and regular class-time.

So I tried some ways to involve my undergraduate humanities students in practical research. Circumstances differ from department to department of course, but perhaps some of them will be useful to you. I’d be keenly interested to hear (in the comments section?) if people have had other approaches bear fruit.

The first approach I tried concerned a journal article I meant to write on a group of poets active in Scotland in the 1850s called “The Spasmodics." They are a relatively unknown group and none of them has been in print for over 100 years. Lots of background work would be necessary then to write this paper. Because my SLAC is small and nimble, it was easy enough for me to pitch a course on Scottish Literature for the upcoming term, so that was step one. Normally, I would simply have made sure to include the Spasmodics in my narrative of Scottish Literature’s development, but again, I wanted the students to make something real. So, as a kind of quarter-long project, I formed the class into an editorial board and we made a mock-scholarly edition of the collected works of one of the poets, Alexander Smith. That meant, for them, writing introductions to each of his works, assembling a basic biography, digging into the book scan databases to find the relevant texts, becoming familiar with PDF conversion software, as well as reading the texts closely enough to indicate tricky passages, which they then annotated to clarify. We did it in eight weeks. This was only possible by having the students read different texts from one another; one small group read one of the novels, another read the first book of poems, another read the famous travelogue. For me, it has meant that now I have on my iPad a searchable copy of this important body of work in full text. When I need a quote, I don't hunt around scans and, once found, retype the relevant passage; I search and grab and paste. The feeling that they were making something useful that didn’t exist anywhere else was electrifying for them; that course remains the most highly rated I have ever given.

Another time, I needed to master the critical tradition surrounding the English poet Philip James Bailey, whose poem Festus was among the best-selling British works of the 19-century but about whom scholarship is mostly silent. His book is a revision of the Faust myth, so I pitched a class called On Devils wherein we read Milton, Byron, Goethe, and Bailey on the diabolical. But again the level of our class discussions wouldn't actually help me in any way with the article I wanted to write, which was not an overview of the Mephistophelean theme but a concentrated look at this one neglected poem. So I showed the class around the Proquest 19th-Century Serials database, teaching them how to find reviews of certain figures or books by year. Then, I introduced them to Workflowy, an outlining app that can be hacked to do all kinds of fun things. We made a group document of collapsible bullets based on their findings. The students read the reviews, identified representative passages in a bullet, summarized the review itself in another, and made searchable hashtags of any other figures mentioned in the reviews, all divided into American and British responses. The database we built in that class I have used countless times since, when looking for a familiar opinion about Bailey's work. For me, these techniques have helped overcome the relative paucity of resources, For them, a real sense that their work matters beyond the grade.

Last year, I took it still further. I had had two exceptionally bright writers in a Research Exposition course I'd taught and on the last day of class, they asked me to coffee to talk shop. "What next? How can we keep going,” they asked. I had never done anything like this before, but I offered on the spot, under the auspices of an independent study, to take them on as co-authors of my next article. In the next term, I spent three weeks catching them up to academic conversation, assigning readings and working through the poem. Though independent studies are supposed to be, you know, independent, we met every week. I told them the things I had in mind to say and invited their contributions. We made a huge list of possible paragraphs to undertake, and then, by committee, reduced it to a manageable load. Then, we auction them off. “Who wants to write the one about Bailey’s connections to Longfellow,” for example. And each week the three of us read our paragraphs aloud and offered suggestions for making them better. Then we assigned three more. The synergy was amazing as the ideas bumped into one another and an argumentative structure appeared. We put our paragraphs in a group document and pruned and pruned. The term ran out before we had quite finished, but in 10 weeks, we had 80% of a journal article. I spent the next month evening out the voice and double-checking references. I sent it out to a journal last week.

The students gained the most sincere look at academic life available, having created a publishable article from scratch; they had the opportunity to think along with me about a subject at some length, but also to think about journal matching and critical conversations. I got an inbuilt set of deadlines: every week a new paragraph to complete no matter what. And even if most of what they wrote were versions of "my ideas" somehow, at least two of the paper’s observations were completely theirs, ideas I'd never have stumbled upon without them.

And one more: I recently transitioned to a new university and was a bit flummoxed, as I have written about elsewhere, at some of the mythologies and folkways that made up the campus culture. I was new, but I loved the place instantly and wanted to know as much about it as possible, to put the new country's wine in my blood, so to speak. But when was I going to bother researching the figure for whom the building I work in was named? I was curious--I usually am--about such things: "Tiffany Loop" sounds like such an evocative, almost a magical name for a quadrangle, and it's a lovely place, full of century-old plane trees and poplars. Who was this Tiffany? I could research it myself, but I've got a new book just published and babies at home. So I thought I'd have to leave aside the buzzing in my ear, the questions constant as my two-year-old's: why is there a totem pole on campus? How come that road doesn't lead anywhere? Who made that great relief sculpture on the clock tower?

Then, I remembered I was assigned to teach a composition class aimed at helping freshman write argumentative academic papers. The HOWTO text was fixed, but we could assign any readings we wanted. I read somewhere that a good leader is someone who refuses to take the leadership position, instead directing energy where it is most likely to solve problems. I wonder if the same is true for professors. I could very well have looked up all this information on my own. I could have told it to them via lecture or media slides, could have quizzed them to make sure they'd mastered it before leaving my class and assigned papers wherein they told those stories back to me. That would have been fine. Normal even. But it would have meant a lot more prep for me and a lot less fun for them. Instead of playing the authority distributing knowledge, I turned them into explorers, discoverers: authorities at least on their chosen site. They'd pick a named site--a building, a stairway, a library collection, and write research papers based on their findings.

They uncovered some interesting things. One noted, for example, looking through the  archives, a  photograph  from one of the college's first graduating  classes  featuring  four  seated figures: two of them women and one a native American, which made real for her the fact that SPU has been co-educational and diverse since its founding. That affects how she thinks about the campus now: that diversity and gender equity are not --for  us anyway--historical correctives or post-1970's  activism come home to roost. They are part of our DNA,  as  integral to what this place is as those  plane trees in Tiffany Loop.

Another  student found that few of the buildings are named for actual donors.  Most  were ways of  honoring   longtime servants of the  college: a librarian here, a  biology teacher there. One of my students knows more about the sculpture in my building's lobby than anyone else on campus. Maybe anyone else anywhere, since she found the sculptor's address and wrote him a physical letter to which he responded with the details of its creation, touched that anyone cared. Another wrote a eulogistic description of a courtyard we've just lost due to renovation. I found out about the totem pole.

The point is not that students  are an untapped labor resource that we should  exploit  to  our engorgement, but that  they're people, and  people, I have found, generally know when they're being tricked. Inviting  students into one's actual research can be daunting to set up, and it can't always be done--certain classes need to be  taught regardless of how they match up with our current research concerns, but if you have a supportive enough  environment, as I do, what one usually needs is the imagination to think aloud, alright, I've  got to teach such and such a class. I've got the goggles; you get the beaker. What couldn't we brew up?

This essay was originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education