ENGAGED GRADUATE EDUCATION: SEEING WITH NEW EYES
by James L. Applegate

CREATING A NEW VISION OF RESEARCH AND TEACHING
What is involved in seeing our basic work, research and teaching, with new eyes?

A 1999 volume of the late Donald Stokes, entitled Pasteur's Quadrant points us in the right direction in rethinking our research. Stokes convincingly argues that the simplistic linear continuum between basic and applied research that has dominated much of higher education's thinking since World War II is not only an inaccurate historical description of research, but also totally inadequate as a policy framework to guide twenty-first century research. Stokes offers a more complex model for thinking about the types of research that faculty can and should do. Research, he argues, falls into four quadrants, three of which I will discuss here. The research in each quadrant influences research in all the others. Stokes's first quadrant captures what we traditionally think of as basic research. He calls this Bohr's quadrant because it has much in common with the early work of Niels Bohr on atomic structure. He calls a second quadrant Edison's quadrant. This is traditional applied research. Like Edison, researchers in this area are more interested in making something work or in solving a practical problem and less concerned with connecting research to a larger theoretical heuristic.

The third, and most significant, quadrant is Pasteur's quadrant. Louis Pasteur is often thought of as the father of microbiology. Few people have done more to alter our basic understanding of life processes. Yet, if you examine the research of Pasteur, it is what Stokes calls “use-inspired basic research.” Pasteur's work was devoted to solving problems—to finding solutions that improved the lives of the people around him.

Stokes's book is rich with examples of research across many disciplines that share the characteristics of Louis Pasteur's research. It is this use-inspired basic research that we must do a better job of explaining and encouraging as we prepare future faculty.

Stokes's analysis makes clear that research has always reflected a complex interweaving of basic, applied, and use-inspired basic research. Each approach informs the problems and methods driving the others. One does not necessarily precede or supersede the other. It is this model of research that we must communicate to our new colleagues as we prepare them to become future faculty.

Policy concerns about research in the twenty-first century will only increase the demand for research within Pasteur's quadrant. Evidence for this shift is abundant. The MacArthur Foundation recently funded a series of projects aimed at integrating research and practice. Even the National Science Foundation, created after World War II as the brainchild of Vannevar Bush, father of the linear basic-applied research continuum, has begun to fund more interdisciplinary problem-focused research. One example is its recent initiative, Science and Technology in the Public Interest.

It is sometimes said that society has problems, while universities have departments. We have to overcome both departmental and disciplinary divisions to address the challenges that society faces in ways that generate basic knowledge and solve problems. I encourage us to prepare our doctoral students to reconceptualize how they will construct their research careers and to consider seriously the role of use-inspired basic research.

Faculty also must see our teaching role with new eyes. To take the scholarship of teaching and learning seriously is to understand that teaching is a means to an end, and that end is to engage students on and off-campus in active learning. It is not enough to simply be a good teacher. Scholars of teaching are committed to experimenting with new practices, assessing those practices, engaging in peer review, and sharing those practices with the teaching community so that their own teaching improves as does the practice of teaching generally.

Today's conversation about teaching is rich with discussions of new strategies to enhance learning. Learning communities, interdisciplinary perspectives, and problem-based and service learning are all at the center of a new scholarly agenda for graduate and undergraduate teaching. These discussions enhance learning and teach students that there is nothing wrong with pursuing an education to obtain the good life, as long as they understand that the privilege of this education commits them to a life of doing good. Our teaching role must extend beyond the boundaries of the classroom and the campus. We must be lifelong learners as well as teachers in this endeavor.

An example of an undergraduate teaching and research project captures many of these ideas. Recently, the National Communication Association partnered with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a leading civil rights organization, and others in a Communicating Common Ground project. Participants create partnerships across the country in which communication faculty and students join with communities and schools to embrace the opportunities of diversity while rejecting the hate and mistrust that can accompany confrontation with human difference. The project currently involves more than forty partners, including research universities, community colleges, and liberal arts colleges. Students, faculty, and community partners are teaching one another how to address this challenge through more effective communication and community building. Teaching and research are integrated into partnership work. For example, some partnerships include efforts to gain basic knowledge about how we increase the cognitive and communicative capacities of children to deal with human difference while improving the quality of life in their communities.

In one partnership, faculty and students are working together in a school with a history of ethnic violence. For the last five years, on the anniversary of an unfortunate encounter between Armenian and Hispanic students, ugly and sometimes violent exchanges between these two groups of students have occurred. Our partners have been working with this school developing projects designed to help students understand their differences and communicate more effectively. This year for the first time no confrontation occurred on the anniversary of the event. Students and faculty are talking with one another and overcoming mistrust.

A recent volume (Huber and Morreale 2002) on disciplinary styles in the scholarship of teaching and learning makes clear how each discipline can develop a new model for teaching scholarship appropriate to the values and focus of the discipline. New faculty must have the opportunity to participate in that conversation and become scholars of teaching and learning.