February 12, 2008
An Inauguration Event
Professors: scholarship and teaching are inseparable
Does teaching overshadow research? Is research a distraction for faculty who’d rather teach?
Not to professors Pat Aufder-heide, Caleen Jennings, John Richardson, and James Thurber, who see teaching and scholarship as inseparable. And not to AU President Neil Kerwin, who taught at AU for more than 30 years before being named to the university’s top post.
The best teachers are the best scholars, Kerwin said, “and frankly, good scholarship can’t be conducted without a lifetime of teaching behind it.”
They spoke at a luncheon discussion on teaching and scholarship on a day that highlighted teaching and learning during a week of inauguration events.
“Life at the cutting edge of your own discipline is a very exciting place to be,” said Kerwin. The process of discovery energizes a scholar, he said, and sharing the excitement of learning with students is what teaching is all about.said, and sharing the excitement of learning with students is what teaching is all about.
(Photos by Jeff Watts)
Pat Aufderheide, School of Communication, says that working with students is a key part of a professor’s research. Sometimes the students help with research; at other times, they raise new questions, and help scholars crystallize and clarify their knowledge so that when it’s time to express it in book form, it seems to flow naturally.
Aufderheide sees professors and students as working together in the quest for knowledge. “I say, ‘Look, I’m a learner here, and I’m teaching you how to learn,’” she said. “We really become a team.”
Theatre professor Jennings is always asking herself how her teaching and research interact. “When I’m researching, what am I teaching myself and my students? When I’m teaching, what am I researching?”
Some of her best research, she said, has come out of things “that bug me in the classroom.” It might be the need to teach the play Hamlet, which, frankly, she had never liked. Trying to understand her discomfort led her to a teaching approach that emphasized the questions raised by the play. It also inspired her to write her own play, Elsewhere in Elsinore, which looks at women’s roles in Hamlet. It wouldn’t exist if she hadn’t felt obliged to teach Hamlet, said the College of Arts and Sciences professor, playwright, and director.
Thurber, of the School of Public Affairs, added that it’s not only teaching and scholarship that compliment each other. “I would add another variable—the linkage to Washington, D.C., and applied politics,” he said. That, too, might be seen by some as conflicting with traditional teaching or scholarship; but Thurber finds that it enhances both.
Interim Provost Ivy Broder, noting that many alumni mention professors who changed their lives, asked the professors if any of them had students who changed their lives.
Jennings was grateful to students who make her stop to think and critique her in constructive ways. Aufderheide mentioned students who’ve worked with her on projects. Thurber spoke of the dozens of e-mails that come each month from former students, and the way he’s been particularly touched by one who is now a captain in Iraq.
And Kerwin recalled that students were instrumental in his decision to focus on rulemaking, a topic for which he is now nationally known.
“When I talk to students about what they want to do, they almost always say, ‘I want to have a life that makes a difference,’” said Richardson, School of International Service. “Being a professor is a life that makes a difference.”
