Today’s entry is the third in a series of guest-posts from the roundtable on “Teaching the Humanities in the Current Climate of Higher Education” that I organized for the recent International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Kisha Tracy and I teamed up on a presentation called “A Plea for Research” as a way to encourage our fellow medievalists (and humanists more generally) to engage in the scholarship of teaching and learning. What follows is Kisha’s part of the presentation.
Kisha’s Bio: Kisha Tracy is an Assistant Professor of English Studies, specializing in early British and world literatures, and Co-coordinator of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Fitchburg State University. She received her Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from the University of Connecticut in 2010. She is currently working on two book projects: Why Do I Have to Take This Course? Theory and Practice of Student Investment in Learning and Sins of the Past: Remembering, Forgetting, and Confessing in Middle English Literature. The former considers how we can encourage our students to be more invested in their courses, and the latter explores how the traditional medieval relationship between memory and confession provides a valuable framework for understanding the employment of recollection in various Middle English literary texts.
A Plea for Research, Part 1
Several years ago, a group of colleagues and I secured a grant to study the effect of embedded librarians in first-year composition courses. We were surprised at the definitiveness of the data we collected and decided it was worth publishing. At this time, I was relatively new to the concept of the scholarship of teaching and learning, but this was an excellent opportunity and introduction to this type of research. We wrote it up and were quite pleased with the outcome. Then came the most difficult question and the most enlightening for me: in what order did our names go? We simply stared at each other in confusion. Being mostly humanities scholars, we weren’t used to multi-authored scholarship. We wrote alone or, at the most, with only one other colleague. We had no idea in what order to write our names. We did eventually figure it out!
For me, this was a moment that brought home the idea that we in the humanities do not work in collaboration nearly as often as we should. It is time for some transparency with our humanities colleagues. One way is in collaborating on disciplinary research, but collaborating on the scholarship of teaching and learning provides additional opportunities. It makes clear to ourselves and our colleagues what we do in our classrooms, how we teach our subjects. That kind of communication can only improve teaching on a broad scale. Transparent collaboration of this nature also creates clear and consistent messages about the value of studying the humanities and the direct impact that we have upon what students are learning.
A Lifetime's Training 