Think Globally, Act Locally: Using the Urban Environment for Undergraduate Research Projects.
On February 11, 2011, at the invitation of the CGS Faculty Development Committee, several outstanding CGS professors discussed inquiry-based assignments they have found effective in generating student engagement and more critical student writing.
Some background that provides the genealogy of today’s presentation.
Joellen Masters
Chair, Faculty Development Committee
Last spring, in efforts to make CGS’s innovative style and mission more visible within the University as well as outside and in the national scene, we discussed different assignments that explored the potentials in inquiry-based assignments that build bridges between classroom learning and the world beyond the University.
One motivation was because of what I had noticed, even researched and written about as part of my contributions toVictor Coelho’s One BU Task Force report: that today’s college applicants emphasize their co-curricular, community service, and neighborhood involvement and experience. They are interested in knowing more about the different and diverse worlds in which they live, about those with whom they share those worlds. They are invested in contributing to those worlds in volunteer activity, in cooperative projects, in networking and interaction.
So, the Committee was talking, a lot, about how our CGS classes drew on and expanded that great youthful energy and drive.
In addition, as we all know, the Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research Institution emphasizes in its 1998 report “Reinventing Undergraduate Education,” research-based learning must be first in college studies (with inquiry-based learning second on its list) and particularly in the crucial freshman year. Consequently, another key theme in those discussions was how to bring more investigative leg-work and how to vary required research in all freshman courses.
Rhetoric’s Kathleen Vandenberg, a member of Faculty Development Committee last year, stimulated the presentations even more since she used in her second-semester class, and to great success, a project that required students investigate a place in the Boston area and then drew on secondary source materials – newspapers, town records, books and studies, and so forth – in constructing their argument about it. As she said during last Friday’s discussion, opening the research gates in this way and potentially sharpening the research requirements, helps us move students from merely reporting and summarizing information (as high school trains them to do) into independently questioning and analyzing, into thinking that turns on synthesis, integration, and application of knowledge to new areas of learning, to new problems and situations, toward a life-long experience of thoughtful comprehensive action in the world in which they will live.
While it’s true that so many CGS faculty, in all divisions and in both the freshman and sophomore core already assign exercises, papers, projects that use the many wonderful resources around Boston – museums, parks, and so on – for some, like Kathleen Martin, such an assignment was a first. Each discipline, of course, provides different frames of knowledge, which then produce different ways of knowing. Opening classroom and lab activities to include field work in various urban spaces and environments broadens and deepens the particular context of a class in a discipline-specific approach that lets various skills, facts, and methodologies come alive with meaning. “Relevancy” and “Meaningful” are, of course, two of the buzzwords in the national debate about pedagogy and general education.
Originally, as I said, our hopes were to let our presenters appear at a teaching innovation day here on campus but we didn’t cut the mustard on that one. So, members of last year’s group agreed to keep working on the proposal – and at that time, proposed assignments – so that some (like Gina and Kathleen Martin) would actually teach these assignments. We would then have more real experience and date so that we could apply to other conferences on pedagogy and general education with more credible experience and data.
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These are the faculty who presented their assignments and students’ work.
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Peter Busher, Chair of the Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, 1996 Professor Busher won CGS’s Peyton Richter Award for interdisciplinary teaching, and, was the recipient in 2009 of the University’s Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has participated in the Summer Institute at the University of Wisconsin sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and has been named an Education Fellow in the Life Sciences by the National Academies.
Peter describes his research focus as “in the general area of mammalian behavioral ecology. I have studied and continue to study the population dynamics and behavior of the North American beaver, Castor canadensis. I am particularly interested in better understanding how populations grow, develop, stabilize, and decline without human exploitation.” I continue my disciplinary research in mammalian ecology and the past two years have been assisted by CGS students. Our collaborative work has resulted in 4 presentations at national and international meetings and we have two articles currently being reviewed.
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Millard Baublitz, Associate Professor of Natural Sciences, Millard Baublitz received the Student Government Award for Excellence inTeaching (1994) and the Peyton Richter Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching (2003). He is a physicist who has published papers on the foundations of quantum mechanics. Most recently he also has conducted theoretical calculations about the material LaSr2Mn2O7 which exhibits “colossal” magnetoresistance.
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Regina Hansen, Senior Lecturer in the Rhetoric Division has co-authored Cultural Conversations: The Presence of the Past (Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2001) which has been through several editions and last fall was adopted by Temple University for its rhetoric and expository writing faculty. Her scholarship is in the fantastic, Victorian and Neo-Victorian studies, and she also writes children’s fiction publishing in Calliope Magazine and supported by fellowships such as the 2011 Artist Fellowship she received from the Somerville Arts Council. Her new book, a collection entitled Filming the Catholic Fantastic comes out this July. She continues publishing and presenting papers in her area of Victorian studies. Her fiction has received grant support from organizations such a PEN-New England Children’s Book Caucus and the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist’s Grant for Fiction.
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Kathleen Martin, Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences Division , whose 2008 book Hard and Unreal Advice: Mothers, Social Science and the Victorian Poverty Experts (Palgrave) examined the expert testimony that fostered the Victorian Poor Law of 1834 and the social science tradition of the nineteenth century, was the recipient in 2009 of our College’s Dr. Ismail Sensel award given again for excellence in teaching. Kathleen is currently working on the influence of the legacy of Victorian poverty researchers on the British national insurance system.
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