You’re reading the latest issue of Teaching, a weekly newsletter from a team of Chronicle journalists. Sign up here to get it in your inbox on Thursdays.
This week:
- I describe a humanities research laboratory at the Johns Hopkins University, where students can experience the benefits of working on a collaborative project.
- I share a story on the challenges facing remedial education.
- I point you to some recent books about teaching.
A Lab of Their Own
When Shane Butler became chair of the classics department at Johns Hopkins in 2016, he found himself fielding inquiries from a lot of anxious undergraduates. They worried that they were out of step in a STEM-focused world and on a research-oriented campus.
That wasn’t all they were missing. They felt alone, they said, while their classmates had the lab. The laboratory, Butler realized, was a social space in the lives of STEM students: It’s where they met, where they did research, where they were introduced to professors and alumni and industry types.
What Butler heard from these students inspired him to create a new kind of course, one focused on the humanities and oriented around open-ended and communal research. He and Gabrielle Dean, a librarian and curator of rare books and manuscripts, created the Classics Research Lab, which is both a curricular idea and a physical space — a room deliberately chosen for its public orientation, looking out into the atrium of Gilman Hall, an academic building in the center of the university’s Homewood campus.
There, in the spring and continuing into this fall, students have worked on a pilot project designed by Butler and Dean. They did empirical research on John Addington Symonds, a Victorian scholar who studied classical antiquity, and whose essays influenced the early gay-rights movement.
The students had two projects. One was to research and re-create Symonds’s library online, to see who influenced him as a reader, writer, and thinker. The other was to develop an annotated, digital version of Symonds’s seminal essay, “A Problem in Greek Ethics,” written in 1883.
The semester started with more-traditional lectures, to get students up to speed on who Symonds was, but quickly became more open ended. “We scripted a fair bit, because that’s how we normally taught,” says Butler. “Then we tried to integrate more and more empty syllabus time into the semester.”
By working in a visible space, the two say, students and professors showed how humanities scholars can work together and produce research of public value. “People always say the library is the laboratory for the humanities,” says Dean. But the library is for solitary work. “It’s true humanists are there, but they’re not necessarily collaborating.”
Dean and Butler were surprised by a few things. One was that students embraced the detective work of open-ended research. Butler recalls a day he walked into the lab and asked about a photograph of a Greek statue that Symonds said had a profound effect on his sexual awakening as a boy. The students, in tracking down the statue and studying the history of photography, discovered that such photographs most likely weren’t in production until Symonds was an adult, suggesting that he had created an origin myth for himself.
Students also embraced the research necessary to put together an accurate list of books Symonds kept in his library, down to the publisher and the edition. That’s the kind of detail work that might otherwise bore an undergraduate, says Dean. But because these students were working toward a larger goal, they embraced it.
“My inclination is to break it down, tiny steps, and give them a light at the end of a very short tunnel,” she says. “But by holding back on some of that very careful teaching practice, they were the ones who were taking off.”
The students also learned the value of connection, both among themselves and for scholars. In addition to the brass-tacks skills of research, for example, the professors and students developed an understanding of how networks work. Symonds wasn’t just “a famous guy,” says Butler. He had contemporaries and peers with whom he shared ideas, whom he influenced, and who influenced him.
Finally, they say, they realized how much they were learning right alongside their students, like the surprise discovery about photography. “Whatever we’ve taught the students,” says Dean, “they’ve been giving back in spades.”
Although the course was too small to have any deep impact on the anxiety of humanities majors — 10 students enrolled each semester — Butler sees it as a model for future learning. When they threw open the lab in the spring and encouraged students to invite friends, says Butler, “We had an absolutely packed house.”
Two more courses, one led by an art-history professor and another by a classics professor, are in the works. And the Symonds project will continue to evolve as students work on the text and on the digital library.
Butler has a few words of advice for others who want to try their hand at a humanities laboratory. One is to have some structure for your research goals. “You can’t be infinite,” he says. But you also shouldn’t limit it to a semester — it’s OK to let students participate in a continuing project.
It’s also important to let go of traditional pedagogies, in which the professor is the expert. Show students, instead, the messy and exciting world of scholarship. “We’re saying, OK, we’re pulling back the curtain. We’re showing you what life is like as a humanities researcher,” says Butler.
Have you created something similar to the humanities lab, where undergraduates can work together on an open-ended research project? If so, drop me a line at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com and your story may appear in a future newsletter.
