Undergraduate Research Forum at Ohio State University
This article from the University of Miami points to the critical need to involve undergraduate students in research. In the last two-decades there has been a call of institutions of higher education to do just that. Moreover, students are actively seeking out colleges and universities that provide such opportunities. The availability of research opportunities will influence recruitment and retention.
In its report Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Universities (1998), the Boyer Commission urged research universities to re-conceive their undergraduate education so that it takes advantage of the richness of their research and graduate programs and “makes research-based learning the standard.”
Joan Bennett, Coordinator of Undergraduate Research and English Professor at the University of Delaware offers her expertise on why involving students in research is of vital importance and how to successfully manage such partnerships. Professor Bennett specifically addresses the application of collaborative research for faculty and students of the humanities.
Directing a senior honors thesis can be made into a research collaboration if the faculty member requires the student to investigate a topic that he or she intends personally to explore. Yet humanities faculty often allow students to propose topics unrelated to their own research and then find themselves expending a sizable amount of time teaching independent studies, unlike their colleagues in the sciences who genuinely collaborate with their students, directly sharing the trials and the excitement of their own ongoing research life. With the exception of models described below, humanities faculty rarely invite undergraduates into their own ongoing research projects.
Finally, this article presents, in detail, three universities as successful models for involving undergraduate student in humanities research. They include the University of Delaware, University of Washington, and Northwestern University.
In 1980, with the help of a FIPSE grant, the University of Delaware inaugurated a program through with faculty who were willing to engage undergraduates in their research programs could receive assistance needed to make such collaboration optimally fruitful. … For humanists, perhaps our single most important guideline is the one that requires a faculty-student team to demonstrate a strong link between the student’s work and the faculty mentor’s own research. It is not that we want to discourage faculty altruism per se but that we don’t want burnout. We want faculty participation year after year, and we want students to be mentored from the faculty members’ own deepest strengths.
The University of Delaware now offers research opportunities to students in the fields of philosophy, English, art history, and history. Through the grant-funded program, students receive both college credit and research stipends.
The University of Washington has created two unique programs: the Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities and Library Research Awards for Undergraduates.
While the primary motivation for developing the Summer Institute was to increase undergraduate participation in humanist scholarship, the model that has evolved also provides an important faculty development opportunity. … More than three quarters of the twelve faculty who have thus far participated in leading the Institute have continued to engage with undergraduates in research (two now hold primarily administrative positions), and several have continued to collaborate with their faculty colleagues in a variety of ways following the summer term.
At Northwestern University, undergraduate research helps generate not only published research papers, but also a series of conferences.
Eager to bring together students on campus and throughout the country to discuss this topic, these students decided to organize a national conference on human rights, featuring presentations by experts and active discussion among delegates. The result was the first Northwestern University Conference on Human Rights, titled “Human Rights and American Responsibility,” which took place in April, 2004. … This conference was so successful and such a rich experience for the students that they were determined to organize another one. The conference, which is free and open to the public, will bring together distinguished academics, activists, and policy makers from around the globe. In addition, it will provide a forum for some seventy undergraduate delegates from thirty-seven universities and colleges throughout the United States and thus have an impact that extends beyond Northwestern University. The delegates, chosen from more than 150 applicants, learned about the conference through the publicity efforts of the student organizers.
Involving undergraduates in research in the arts, humanities, and even sciences enriches research opportunities for both students and faculty. Read more about the specifics of each example here…