Tag Archives: humanities

Tips for Students and Faculty

A Gathering of One’s Own: Starting a Local Undergraduate Research Conference

Many national conferences in humanities fields deliberately limit participation to advanced graduate students and faculty. As a result, finding venues for undergraduate presentation is challenging. One solution to this problem is starting a local undergraduate research conference on your own. That’s how I came to create the Michigan Medieval & Renaissance Undergraduate Consortium.

Dana Aspinall, Professor of English at Alma College
Dana Aspinall, Professor of English at Alma College

Near the beginning of my career, I took a position as Assistant Professor at a small liberal arts college in central Massachusetts. That fall, noted Clark University professor Virginia Mason Vaughan notified me of a Medieval and Renaissance consortium she had organized among several of the colleges and universities in our area, and invited me to participate. I did so, and brought with me 2 or 3 students.

While I do not remember how my students performed or the topics they discussed, I do remember thinking to myself what a wonderful opportunity Professor Vaughan had provided through this consortium: students read and then discussed their papers in a professional fashion, and answered questions from both fellow students and faculty sponsors. Perhaps more importantly, these students heard what their peers from other schools were studying and discussing, and I could see that their interactions reignited the fires that originally had led them to writing their papers in the first place. For the next ten years, I encouraged my students to participate in this consortium. And I urged strong presenters to consider advanced study in medieval and/or early modern literature.

When I moved to Alma College in the fall of 2007, I brought with me the joy of participating in this consortium. I immediately asked my colleagues at Michigan’s other liberal arts colleges if they wanted to establish a consortium among us. To my delight, the response was immediate and positive. Our first consortium, held in 2009, included six colleges and nearly 20 student participants.

My goals with the consortium have remained largely the same throughout the ten years we have held it:

  • to provide students interested in medieval or early modern fields of study (including literature, history, art, language, and religion) a forum wherein they can speak on what they have discovered and upon what they want to conjecture
  • to provide these students an interested and responsive audience
  • to provide those seeking graduate study an environment much like that of a professional conference
  • to provide faculty a place to gather and discuss what students have done and seem most interested in pursuing

One other goal, less easy to articulate as succinctly as those above, also deserves mention: I always have believed that the simple act of discussion, in a challenging but nurturing and safe environment, brings out the best in both students and faculty. Our students are seeing things and making connections between them for the first time, while faculty can guide them even further and simultaneously share the excitement students feel in their discoveries and conjectures. I am happy to have been a part of this environment, and hope it continues long into the future.

The consortium has experienced occasional years of fluctuating participation, but overall these goals seem to have been met. None of this success would have been achieved, of course, without the efforts and energies of my colleagues at Michigan’s liberal arts colleges. I thank them all.

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Tips for Students and Faculty

Mentoring Beginning Students in Humanities Research

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Recently, a professor in the history department came to me with a question: “How do I mentor a freshman history student in research, when this student has none of the skills required to do original research in history?” The question arose because one of our Undergraduate Research Fellows – first-year students selected to participate in a four-year program of vigorous involvement in research on the basis of a competitive application process – had approached him asking if she could work with him. Because the majority of our URFs are interested in social science, education, business, and STEM research, he had not encountered such a request before. While experienced in mentoring upper-level history students in research, he had no game plan for working with a first-year student with, as he put it, “no skills.”

This is a challenge for a lot of us working in the humanities. In other fields, such as laboratory sciences or education, the apprenticeship model, in which early-stage students interested in research join a group, and then learn by watching other, more experienced student perform protocols and discuss outcomes, gradually building their own responsibilities and skills within the group, makes it relatively straightforward to include inexperienced, novice students in the research culture. In the humanities, where we are more likely to work alone, and even the most basic data collection requires expertise in such skills as paleography, archival searching, and language translation, mentoring a first-year aspiring researcher can seem like a burdensome and impossible task.

My own experience has taught me that like so many other things, successful mentoring of entry-level student research in the humanities is all about clear communication and close listening. Here, I am condensing a few of the main points from my conversation with my colleague from history, which he later reported to me were quite helpful in getting started with his eager, but unformed protegee.

Motivations matter

Begin by asking the student to talk about what drove them to come talk to you about research opportunities. Are they part of a program (such as our fellows, or an honors seminar) that requires them to meet with professors and discuss research? If so, what are they hoping to get out of the experience? Do they want to build skills? Are they looking for a line on their resume? Are they driven by curiosity about the field more generally? This is the listening phase – you will get a good sense of whether this is a student who would be engaged and interesting to work with. I think it’s always okay to say no, though best if you can point them towards some other avenues (other faculty, a course that the department offers, a student-run organization) for exploration.

Ask about their existing skills

We tend to assume that first-year students have no skills, but especially with the kind of ambitious students who actually overcome the immense anxiety barrier to come talk to you in person this may not be the case. For example, when I was first mentoring a first-year art history student, in my initial conversation with her I learned that she had taken four years of high-school Spanish and done a service project in Guatemala. Her language skills made her a great research assistant. In the case of my colleague’s history student, she really did have very few skills, but her enthusiasm and her openness to learning meant that she ended up doing some very good bibliographic research for him. All he had to do was show her how to use the various search tools, give her some instruction in Zotero, and she was off to the races.

Define expectations

This is probably the most important part of the conversation you’ll have with the novice researcher. What are the student’s expectations in terms of time commitments and learning outcomes? Do they want to have a presentable product at the end of the year? Be a co-author on a paper? Get paid? Get credit? On your end, you also need to be clear: what kinds of tasks can you imagine the student performing? What are realistic outcomes for the work they’ll be doing? If you’re thinking, “Great, this student can scan and process documents” and the student is thinking “I’m going to see my name in print” this could lead to some trouble down the road, so it is important to get this out in the open. I think it’s always perfectly fine to do as my history colleague did – start the student on what a more experienced researcher might consider the boring ground-work – putting together bibliographies, searching databases, and compiling easily-accessible information. The important thing is that the student understands how their work fits into the larger research project. My first-year Spanish-fluent student ended up getting a thank-you in the acknowledgement note in a published essay, and for her that was exactly what she expected, and therefore quite gratifying.

Use peer-mentoring

Do you have a more advanced student, perhaps a senior working on a senior thesis, who might serve as a role model and near-peer mentor for your novice student? In many disciplines (and also in the humanities where they are practiced collaboratively, especially in Europe), groups of researchers at all levels working on related projects regularly meet and discuss their progress. Consider getting your research students together on a regular basis to talk. This way your own research process is made transparent to the students, and you’ll have a better sense of the progress they’re making, but above all, the less experienced students will be able to imagine where they might be in a year or two.

Benefits

While it is no doubt true that first-year students and others new to research in humanities disciplines do not come through the door with the types of skills and understandings that allow us to do our work at a high level, this does not mean that they cannot contribute. Starting them off with very basic tasks, but contextualizing those tasks through regular conversations about the overall progress of the research, we initiate them into the culture of humanities inquiry. All too often, students have been told “this is how you write a research paper” without really learning the WHY of research, that is to say, they have been shown the process but not given any insight into the motivations and concepts that drive the process. Getting a first-year student inside the machine takes a little effort, but once there, they tend to get very excited about doing research (way more excited than you might expect, given that all they’re actually doing is scanning documents or doing data entry, or whatever), and they learn, intrinsically, both the hows and the whys of your discipline.

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Resources for faculty

Rewards and challenges of UGR in Art History and Philosophy (from 2018 CUR Biennial presentation)

Centre College faculty Amy Frederick (Art History) and Eva M. Cadavid (Philosophy) presented at last summer’s Biennial CUR conference. Here they reflect on some of the followup questions the audience asked about the rewards and challenges of incorporating undergraduate research at a small liberal arts college.

CURAH: What were some of the challenges you faced when you started doing undergraduate research at Centre, a small liberal arts college in a small town?

Eva Maria Cadavid

Eva: The biggest challenge for me was thinking about what undergraduate research looks like in philosophy. I found myself thinking that it either had to look like the sciences or feeling like my students would have to have all sorts of expertise if they were to genuinely work in my areas of research. Philosophy is normally seen as a solitary endeavor. It is not. If it was, why would we share our work at conferences and try to get feedback from others? Admitting that was my first step to identifying how to foster research with students. Students can collaborate with each other and with faculty while still being responsible for research that is theirs.

Amy Frederick

Amy: I absolutely agree that scholarship in the humanities has traditionally been solitary, which can be a challenge when thinking about conducting research with undergraduates. As an art historian, I find that our geographical location at Centre also presents obstacles for meaningful undergraduate research. Our closest regional art museums are the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY (89 miles away), and the Cincinnati Art Museum (121 miles away). My first thoughts upon arriving at Centre turned toward attempting to rectify this situation for my students. A common thread through my ongoing efforts is to provide opportunities for them to interact with objects both inside the classroom and as part of independent research projects.

CURAH: How are you addressing some of those challenges?

Eva: I am still trying to figure out what I am doing with UGR. Some of my students are doing the traditional independent study where they develop an interest they have over a semester and either revise a paper or write one. But I only work with students who are really focused on the topic and who agree to present their work publicly and revise their final papers. This seems to me a more traditional (and very valid) way of doing UGR with humanities students.

Some of my students have become an integral part of my research, which intersects both philosophy and social science. We have a research team with students staking their skills and developing a main project under the umbrella of our overall research but also very much knowing that they must help others on the team as needed.

Most of the students who have worked with me over the last 4 years are not philosophy majors. Some are and some declare a minor after working with me for a few semesters. They bring a lot into our research and they also develop a lot of philosophical skills that they then take with them and apply in their chosen fields.  They bring creative and fresh perspectives and challenge me to  defend and to rethink the way I do philosophy.

Amy: When I arrived at Centre, I was happy to find that the College owns a small teaching collection of art. Two years ago, two students and I began the long process of creating a database for the College’s ceramics collection. While work had been done on the collection in preceding years, it was never a primary focus for any one person or office. The students learned new vocabulary and how to create and use metadata. The students and I regularly discussed how each step of the process would inevitably lead to twenty more steps that they hadn’t initially considered. We all had to readjust our expectations, especially me. By the end of that first summer, one student was able to put all of the digital photographs of the objects into a OneDrive folder, and the second student had been able to input most of the already-known information into an Excel spreadsheet. No supplementary research was done, and we did not get through even a description of each object for our spreadsheet, much less a decision about how this information would eventually be presented to the public.

This past summer, another student took up the task. Work in the interceding two years had been sporadic and inconsistent, and often without parties talking with one another. We now have (incomplete) databases in OneDrive, GoogleDocs, Excel, AirTable, and an old image database. We have old file folders in a variety of locations on campus. I think I have become more realistic about the scope of this project, and more enthused by the continued student interest in working on it. I am thrilled that these students are learning to “do” art history. We will keep making small steps forward.

CURAH: What aspects of your experience might be applicable at other institutions?

Eva: Mostly, it has been very successful but it works best when I trust the student and give them the freedom to fail. It is also an endeavor that takes time. Although independent studies can lead to success in only a semester, for creating a research team, it helps to have students stay with the team over a few semesters, help train each other, and stake an area where they then train the next person. It may sound weird to think of applying this to philosophy, but it is doable – whether it is developing bibliographies, websites, documents, etc.

Amy: For me, I think it is important to discover and then utilize what you have. What are your available resources for undergraduate research (on campus, in the community), even if those resources may not be what you expect or are familiar with?

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What are your early experiences like in integrating undergraduate research in the humanities? Let us know in the comments or by contacting the editors at editors@curartsandhumanities.org.

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