Learning to Put Research into Practice
By Edward J. Balleisen and Laura Howes
Universities are increasingly striving to provide students with research experiences, knowing that such experiences are important tools for developing analytical and critical thinking skills. But how can universities equip students to translate and apply these skills to complex societal challenges – settings in which controlled experiments are not possible? In this post, Edward Balleisen, Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies and Laura Howes, Director of Bass Connections at Duke University offer practical suggestions for developing project-based courses as a scalable mechanism to providing students the opportunity to apply research skills outside of academia.
During the month of February, we shared insights and lessons learned from the Bass Connections program at Duke University as one model for facilitating interdisciplinary research. We have each had the good fortune to oversee this program for several years now, which has allowed us to hear the experiences of scores of student participants and faculty team leaders, as well as more formally evaluate the program’s impact. This style of interdisciplinary, project-based learning, we have learned, enables students to hone their interests and expertise, develop critical thinking and teamwork skills, and chart future pathways. As a result, we believe that universities should integrate this form of learning into their curricula as a core component of a liberal arts education, as an important complement to traditional disciplinary pedagogical methods such as didactic lectures, discussion seminars, labs, and individual research projects.
In our earlier piece, Scaling Interdisciplinary, Collaborative Research within Higher Education, we offered several examples of analogous interdisciplinary research programs at other universities. . While signature programs are important catalyzers of innovation, the most sustainable and affordable way to create more avenues for interdisciplinary, project-based learning is to build them into existing or new courses.
While not every class can, or should, include collaborative, research-inflected projects, we see great opportunities to increase the number of, what we have coined as, “Collaborative Project Courses.”
Collaborative Project Courses
In Collaborative Project Courses, student learning occurs through team-based engagement with applied projects that extend across an entire semester. Such courses often reach beyond the classroom, giving students a chance to bring their academic knowledge and skills to bear on complex problems under the mentorship of faculty, graduate students and, in some cases, community leaders. These curricular offerings are often, though not always, interdisciplinary and can be taught at any level (from first-year courses to master’s capstones and Ph.D. research seminars).
Students in an environmental science gateway course work collaboratively to assess trees in a local forest
Faced with consistently greater student demand than we can meet through our year-long teams, we have recently prioritized developing mechanisms to support and incentivize the creation of semester-long courses that embrace collaborative, open-ended research. Central to this effort has been the development of course design resources as well as a faculty fellows program that includes modest grant support and brings faculty together through guided workshops that facilitate course and project design, as well as best practices for facilitating teamwork. We also have created a funding mechanism that provides support for doctoral students to work with a faculty sponsor to create or redesign an undergraduate course at Duke to integrate collaborative, project-based work as a central learning feature.
Cover of a zine created by students in the Latinx Social Movements course to accompany their exhibit
Through these efforts, we have begun an evolutionary process of updating existing courses and creating new ones where project-based learning takes center stage. For example, in summer 2020, Sociology Ph.D. student Colin Birkhead worked with his faculty mentor Jen’nan Read to integrate client-based collaborative projects into an existing course on immigration and health (read about their new course). This January a new exhibit on Latinx activism opened at the Duke Libraries – this exhibit was cultivated by students in a new collaborative project history course on Latinx social movements. Professor Cecilia Márquez, who designed and led this course, reflected that “It was exciting for students to know that something they were working on in class would have an audience. Students really value feeling like their work has meaning and purpose beyond the classroom.” Student Isabel Lewin-Knauer agreed, remarking in advance of the exhibit opening “It’ll be so exciting to see it come to fruition. We all became pretty close because of the work that we did. It’ll be cool … to actually see our final product.”
Want to try these approaches in your courses?
For faculty who are interested in experimenting with Collaborative Project Courses, we invite you to visit our Collaborative Project Courses: Course Design Resource Center, which is organized around the following key course design questions:
What are the course learning objectives, and how will the collaborative project element support those learning objectives?
How might you shape the process of project selection? Will projects be student-, faculty- or client-driven?
How will you form teams?
How will you set teams up for success?
How will you divide class time and expectations for work outside class between didactic content and group work?
How will the grading rubric account for a mix of individual and collaborative work?
From its inception, Bass Connections has been committed to an open source ethos. We invite faculty and administrators from other universities to explore our resources, to borrow from any of the programs we have devised, and to share their own ideas and evidence about the impact of related programs. We see many opportunities for experimentation.
At Duke, we are trying out “applied research” course shells that exist in each degree program – creating curricular umbrellas to accommodate this type of engaged, open-ended instruction. We hope this template lowers the bureaucratic threshold for faculty to move in this direction.
Another arena that beckons – the construction of reliable mechanisms to connect stakeholders outside the university who have compelling research questions with faculty teaching collaborative project courses. In our professional schools, several practicums – in engineering management, environmental management, public policy – now offer this kind of engaged research. But we often hear frustration from faculty about the effort required to recruit clients for project-based courses. On the flip side, our community partners often feel bombarded by queries from different corners of the university for partnerships that all too often prove episodic and short-lived.
What if there was an existing course (for example, in public policy) that offered a consistent mechanism for delivering applied policy recommendations to local partners? Or if several of our master’s programs created interdisciplinary capstones that brought student teams together to address an applied challenge in areas like climate resilience or health equity?
As we note in our essay on scaling interdisciplinary research models, a growing number of universities are building instructional capacity around collaborative inquiry. That process reflects a widening recognition, increasingly grounded in educational research, that experiential learning motivates deep intellectual engagement, builds confidence, strengthens community, and facilitates a sense of purpose. As higher education adapts to a world with heightened access to information and new modes of certification, we are convinced that educational strategies built around collaborative inquiry will become increasingly compelling as a means of preparing students to meet the challenges of an ever more connected world.
More Methodspace posts about teaching, learning, and doing research through the Bass Connections program
The Director and Assistant Director of the Bass Connections program at Duke University share lessons learned and open access resources for team success in interdisciplinary collaborative research.