–Analyzing a text that has not already received significant critical attention (because it is new or because it had been lost and/or ignored).

–Analyzing a well-studied text using a different critical approach than has been applied before.

–Juxtaposing texts in ways they have not been grouped before, to yield a new critical story (about influence, tradition, culture, common experience/identity, etc.)

–Recovering hitherto unexplored contexts (historical, biographical, cultural, publication history, allusions, etc.) and exploring how they shed light on a text or texts, and/or on the received critical wisdom about them.

–Treating critical works themselves as primary texts, and exploring how critical consensus/tradition has been shaped and reshaped over time, and/or how certain schools of thought differ from each other.

The other major issue, which Karen also brings up, is students’ time, and, especially, many students’ need to spend a considerable portion of their time earning money. Original research is unpredictable (that’s part of the fun), and requires significant blocks of unstructured time — and the ability to structure it, assess whether the planned timeline is working, adjust as necessary, and begin the cycle all over again. As I mentioned in my answer to Question #1, our students have tremendously full schedules. Many of them have also had very little experience with self-structured time, and, if my experience in ENGL 302 is any guide, have difficulty executing long projects that require work outside the classroom, even if the professor has already broken the project down into manageable steps (I’ve had several students this semester tell me that they’re having problems with ENGL 302 because it’s the only class for which they actually have to produce something; they can’t get by with doing the assigned reading and/or attending class, taking tests, and hoping for the best. Others have clearly mastered the process, but a significant minority haven’t; this is a skill we need to teach, and not only for the sake of the QEP).

If the QEP is to work, it needs to build sufficient time into the curriculum, and it needs to provide students with practice in planning and executing smaller projects before they’re faced with large, capstone ones. For lower-level classes, that time might be provided in part by adding a credit (and by emphasizing campus-wide the necessity of scheduling prep/homework/research time as well as class time); for capstone projects, I suspect the university may indeed need to consider fairly generous funding, at least for a small number of students who have proven their ability to do independent work. Career Services has done an excellent job finding paid internships, which allow students who need to work to gain experience relevant to their majors; the same approach might be applied to the QEP (and outside funding might need to be sought).

Individually-mentored projects (some of which might well reflect on co-curricular activities, service learning, etc. in a structured way — something that I know is already happening in many departments) strike me as the ideal culminating/capstone experience for the QEP. But providing that kind of experience for a significant proportion of the undergraduate population is a very expensive proposition, almost certainly beyond GMU’s means. Advanced courses in which a group of students work with a faculty member (or members) on an original research project would be a possible substitute or supplement; the students wouldn’t get as much experience with designing a project, since the faculty member would have to do at least some advance planning/narrowing of options, but they’d still get the experience of making and communicating new knowledge.

To reach large numbers of students early in their careers (and to prepare them for some of the culminating experiences above) I think the QEP committee would be wise to look to the existing core curriculum, and (with departmental consent/cooperation) to entry-level departmental courses, especially those taken by large numbers of first-year students, and those taken by students embarking on a major (the “research methods in”/low-300-level classes). Such courses already address some of the same issues as the QEP. As I’ve suggested in response to question #1 above, making some of these courses “QEP-intensive,” and perhaps adding a credit (or two or three) to allow students and faculty time to focus on original research, might be the best way to leverage our scarcest resources, the university budget and student and faculty time.

But the really pivotal moment for me came during freshman year, when I did a research paper for an Introduction to Women’s Studies Course on how gender-role assumptions were reflected in contemporary reviews of the Bronte’s novels (which were originally published under gender-ambiguous pseudonyms). Most of my research was done using bound copies of popular 19th-century magazines that had once served as leisure reading for Harvard undergraduates, before being filed away for future reference in Widener Library. For me, being able to handle the same pages that contemporary readers of the novels had, as well as being able to see the context (other articles, advertisements, letters to the editor, etc.) in which the reviews appeared, made the whole experience come alive. I’ve been hooked on archives (and open-stack libraries with all kinds of fascinating things hidden in plain view) ever since (and am presently researching the life of a 19th-century American author about whom very little is known, a project that began with a serendipitous encounter in another open-stack library, and has moved forward thanks to research approaches ranging from archive and library visits to google searches to wandering around in graveyards).

As a professor, I wish I could remember how my freshman self came up with the idea for the Bronte project. I know I had had considerable exposure to close reading/textual analysis in high school literature (English and French) and history classes, and had spent considerable time practicing Document-Based Questions (DBQs) in history classes. Those tended to be based on well-known documents that were provided for us, which meant we were recapitulating earlier scholars’ work, not making new knowledge, but it was a good way to learn how scholarly knowledge is made, and to practice the skills involved. I think it also helped that the Women’s Studies class was interdisciplinary, and that the questions involved were relatively new, so that the process of research (and what had been left out of earlier research — women’s experiences, and the documents, artifacts. etc., that reflected them) was very much part of the conversation. And I’m pretty sure that someone mentioned in a lecture the reaction to the Bronte’s novels. We might even have read an excerpt or two from one of the reviews. But I’m pretty sure that the idea to search out the rest of the reviews was mine, and that the examples of DBQs in high school, and of the research we were reading in the Women’s Studies class, helped inspire me.

Of course, I was lucky to have unfettered access to a library collection begun well before the Bronte’s novels were published. But access to primary materials is now much easier, thanks to databases such as the American Periodicals Series (which I’m reminded every time I go to a conference we’re lucky to have — it’s expensive), and GMU has made substantial investments in that area. And of course GMU is close to two very longstanding, very comprehensive collections — the Library of Congress and the National Archives — and many local jurisdictions have rich and well-documented (but not yet exhaustively studied) histories of their own. So I think, given the time to explore, virtually, physically, or both, and a bit of help in deciding where to look, there’s plenty of opportunity for GMU undergrads. to have similar experiences.

There are good models for such activity the committee might examine from other institutions. Among the most compelling is the Ethnography of the University project at the University of Illinois. Here’s a description from their website:

“The Ethnography of the University Initiative (EUI) engages students in research on what they know and care about: their own universities. Student work is public and preserved, housed in a dynamic on-line archive designed to encourage future generations of students to build on past student research. EUI guides students to think about colleges and universities in relation to their communities as well as in national and global contexts. EUI researchers reflect on their findings to identify concrete ways that the University can better fulfill its many missions. EUI leads students to become engaged citizens, actively and critically contributing to public life.” (http://www.eui.uiuc.edu/)

Students work on projects within the EUI through courses across the University, including in the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences, College of Applied Health Sciences, College of Communication
College of Education, College of Fine and Applied Arts, and College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. I’d love to see Mason take up and improve upon the model of this exciting project.

Colleges and universities supporting the scholarship of teaching and learning have also powerfully engaged students in examining the dynamics and effectiveness of teaching and learning on their campuses. Recently published by Stylus, _Engaging Student Voices in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning_ is an edited collection that examines projects at multiple institutions (http://stylus.styluspub.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=215686). I hope the committee will review it. Similarly to in the case of the Ethnography of the University, the scholarship of teaching and learning can be done effectively across disciplinary contexts. (Some of the best work is in the natural sciences, for example.) Other examples abound. Students at North Carolina A&T do focus group research to make sense of institutional assessment data. At Wabash College, students interview alumni to track the longitudinal impact of coursework on the understanding of gender. Engaging students in studying their own learning would both help Mason develop scholars and reaffirm our commitment to excellence in teaching.

1) Digital Storytelling: In Cornerstones, the new first-year program that Janette Muir describes, students are composing digital stories in several of the courses. Students are also composing digital stories in our introduction to integrative studies and some of our information studies and sustainability courses. Digital stories are short films composed primarily of still images with special effects, a voiceover, and a soundtrack. Digital storytelling is a form of creative expression that introduces students to using multiple modalities together and yet is relatively easy to teach, both conceptually and technically. The resulting stories can be quite compelling and can focus on a wide range of topics, both personal and academic. We’ve asked to student to tell stories about such topics as their personal development, the process of learning to use technology, and environmental justice, and food and globalism. The genre of the digital story was originally developed by the Center for Digital Storytelling, which often offers customized workshops for colleges and universities. Here’s an example of a digital story I made as a model for students: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB314AtF4mo.

2) Service learning that includes some formal or informal research component is central to many of our NCC courses, including the one Dr. Muir describes. In NCLC 249, when I teach it, students work with community organizations on an Internet-related project. In addition to the service project, they also research the setting of their work as an information ecology, examining the way in which people, technologies, and policies intersect in the work of the organization through interviews, observation, and document analysis. In a chapter for a book on information literacy published by the Association of Research Libraries, I describe this assignment and its theoretical and pedagogical rationales in more detail. A pre-print is available on my website: http://ncepr.org/darren/publications/seil2008preprint.pdf.

For most of my students, the primary obstacle to their doing more original, better research in 302 is time: theirs and, to a lesser extent, mine. Students’ schedules tend to be packed, with nowhere near the traditional recommendation of 2-3 hours of homework/prep/research time for each classroom/credit hour available. Some of the deficit is a matter of personal choice, but a lot of it results from economic pressures (pressure to earn money while in school combined with pressure to finish as quickly as possible). Add to that the fact that many of us teaching 302 have 4/4 writing-intensive loads (or are adjuncts with even heavier teaching loads and/or other responsibilities), and there’s not a lot of time for the sort of one-on-one teacher/student interaction, or sustained investment of time in research, that the QEP envisions.

So, from my perspective, the main way the QEP could strengthen scholarship in ENGL 302 would be to give both students and teachers more time to incorporate in-depth, original research into the course. I’m not sure exactly how that might be accomplished, but perhaps a 4-credit or even 6-credit version of 302 that fulfilled both the 302 requirement and all or part of an upper-level QEP requirement might make sense. Depending on the course, the extra hours of class time might be scheduled in 3- or 4-hour blocks spread over the semester, perhaps on Fridays and/or Saturdays, allowing/forcing students to set aside time to begin field, archival, or laboratory research under the professor’s guidance.

A smaller class size would further increase the opportunities for the sort of one-on-one teacher/student interaction necessary to design complex original research projects, and to deal with the unexpected results that inevitably, and profitably, emerge from such research. Making the course worth a larger number of credits would be a step in this direction, since faculty teaching several sections would have fewer students in total, and so be able to give each student more individual attention (a major improvement over the current situation, which has a certain bait and switch quality: yes, our writing-intensive sections are relatively small, but most faculty teaching them have a total number of students that makes it hard to give the amount of out-of-class individual attention implied by the class size). However, there’s still a limit to how many students a professor can give individual attention during even an extended class period (and, student schedules being what they are, scheduling one-on-one time outside of scheduled class hours is getting harder and harder). The fewer students in a section, the more chance the professor has to make sure that each one fully understands, and is fully engaged in, either an individual project or a component of a larger group project.

Because 302 is also a gateway course for transfer students (few other schools have an equivalent course, and it is a prerequisite for many other courses, so transfer students often take it early in their GMU careers), a “QEP-enhanced” 302 might also serve as a way to introduce students who transfer around halfway through their college careers to GMU’s “culture of scholarship” at a level appropriate to their intellectual development (rather than asking them to take a more basic class with first-year students, an approach they might, with some reason, resent; while I like the idea of an introduction-to-scholarship class or — preferable, I think — an introduction-to-scholarship component to existing introductory classes, I’d also argue that, if we and other institutions of higher education are doing our jobs correctly, a class appropriate to the intellectual development of first-year students would *not* be appropriate for junior- or even late-sophomore-level transfer students).