Turn Your Teaching into Publications #3: Doing Research Keeps Your Classes Exciting

Once again, this post is more of a "Why bother with classroom research" than a how-to manual. I promise the latter is coming.

Throughout this series I'm ignoring the intrinsic benefits of doing research as well as the extrinsic career-building reasons for doing it. I'm speaking specifically to full-time teaching faculty--the ones who think of research as a superfluous add-on designed only to make their university look good. If that sounds like you, then consider: doing research will make your classes more exciting.

Developing a research program means establishing your expertise in a specific area of study. As you establish your expertise, articles and book chapters becomes easier and easier to write. But doing so also helps keep courses more exciting, because you realize that each subject represents a bunch of ideas about which no definitive conclusion has been reached. This means students get to learn about problems that top end scientists and scholars are still grappling.

When you write a journal article or book chapter, you will introduce your topic, research question, hypothesis, or teaching strategy by identifying only those threads that are most relevant to your specific study. This requires a lot of work initially, but after a few years—provided you have stuck to the same general vicinity—it will hardly take any time at all. You will know the relevant perspectives and theoretical orientations that pertain to your study. This is why research mentors (and peer reviewers) can make such great recommendations without much or any additional research. They have already developed a familiarity and kinship with the perspectives in their area of expertise.

I remember telling my dissertation advisor (Chris Aanstoos) about an idea I had for a study. He would listen quietly and nod his head. Then he’d squint off into the distance and name ten books that would make for a neat project. They would be ten books I’d never heard of and he’d never mentioned before. “Where did that come from?” I’d wonder.

Of course, now I get it. I do the same thing with my students, sometimes surprising myself with the connections that happen in me.

But knowledge isn’t the only benefit to establishing expertise. When you get deep into a specific content area, you will find that many disagreements go unresolved. In my work, I use a method called phenomenological inquiry. This is so small an area of psychological research that most members of the American Psychological Association have never heard of it. But even in this tiny area, there are at least four different methods to follow, each with their own small cadre of practitioners. I originally thought that the factions simply needed to communicate better. Surely there had to be mutual ground between them. But when I spent more time there—that is, when I further developed my expertise—I understood that each faction recognized different features of research as the most fundamental. So when they reached a fork in the road, methodologically speaking, each faction made a decion about which way to go based on their perspective about what was most important. In other words, nobody was wrong. Differences in practice emerged from differences in value. To understand the field of phenomenology deeply, I had to be willing to see it from each perspective (and I’m not quite there yet).

If you venture deep enough into any subject, then you’ll find debates within which both sides are incompatible yet also correct. This is seldom how subjects are taught to undergraduate students via textbooks. If multiple perspectives are presented, there is usually one that is “correct,” and any differing perspectives are introduced almost as an afterthought. 

This understanding works its way into my courses—even the ones that aren’t my main area of expertise. I’ve never practiced industrial and organizational psychology, for example, but I already know that that behind every fact written in the textbook will be a handful of perfectly valid perspectives that disagree with that fact. Consequently, college courses are no longer comprised of facts—“Here’s all that has been established by _______ (i.e., developmental psychology, behavioral research methods, humanistic psychology).” Each course represents an unfinished and ongoing dialogue.