Turn Your Teaching into Publications #4: Doing Research and Scholarship Keeps You Humble

Erica and I don’t do a lot of exotic traveling, so it was very unusual that we found ourselves at an exclusive afterparty at a palacial compound late into the evening in Gujurat, India. We found ourselves talking with a marine biology professor and researcher who had relocated with her kids to Sweden, and the topic of my then previous book came up, which was about autonomy-supportive teaching. I was eager to prove how serious a scholar I was, but I kept finding myself saying things like, “I’m not sure” and, “You know, I never tested that variable.” I began feeling smaller and smaller, and I was ready to make a dash for the exit when this elite researcher put her wine down and said, “It’s refreshing to talk to someone who is willing to say that they don’t know the answer to something. It’s the sign of a true scientist.” 

Isn’t that the truth? Pursuing research and scholarship isn’t about proving one’s expertise. It’s not an ego game, even though that’s how it’s portrayed on television. If you go into it with an ego, then you will be beaten and mugged until your ego is nothing but a deflated balloon dragging behind you by a ribbon string. (The muggers in this scenario are the helpful but sometimes ungraceful peer reviewers.)

Again, this willingness to say, “I’m not sure,” will work it’s way into your classroom if it’s part of your scholarly life. This means that student questions represent an ongoing process of engagement and pursuit of knowledge, not brief exchanges of information. 

            

Consider the basic first-year psychology question, “What part of the brain is associated with memory?”

            

A simple textbook answer would be, “Oh, that’s the hippocampus.” Notice how the conversation ends right there. The student gets to add a fact to their catalog of psychology knowledge, but maybe they feel silly because they could have looked that answer up on Google. Now they’ve asked a simple question, so they’re probably stupid and should keep questions to themselves in the future.

            

But to a memory researcher, we can imagine a more detailed response—a response that makes the student feel super-smart for asking such a difficult question. That answer might sound something like this, “Well, it’s easy to think that this little region of the midbrain called the hippocampus is responsible for memory, since people who have damage to this area are unable to form new memories. But even they can learn to, say, tie their shoes, so it’s not the whole picture. What is it about memory that interests you?” 

            

In other words, courses are treated like unfinished puzzles to a professor who spends time engaging with such puzzles outside the classroom.