Category: Uncategorized

A scan of ads for English department chairs posted in recent editions of the MLA Job List (joblist.mla.org) reveals a bevy of necessary qualifications, framed as future-action-oriented calls for leadership. One notes that the successful candidate will be expected to “promote research and teaching excellence [and] support efforts to obtain external research funding.” Another states, “The ideal candidate is an active intellectual leader, adept at building and supporting multi-disciplinary partnerships with a diverse community [and is] knowledgeable in contemporary higher education issues (especially in relation to the humanities).” And still another asks for candidates with “[e]vidence of successful academic program planning, development, and assessment; experience cultivating strategic partnerships, and acquiring grant funding; significant fund-raising experience; a demonstrated commitment to diversity, collaboration and interdisciplinarity, including community and global outreach.”

Clearly, we want and need these skills in our department leaders—but how are we cultivating them on our campuses? Our resistance to seeing leadership roles beyond the department as opportunities rather than burdens limits our knowledge of how leaders—and disciplines—work across our campuses, knowledge we need to possess in order to build strong and forward-thinking units.

Using my experiences as a faculty member who has held major leadership roles outside both the English department and my own area of rhetoric and writing studies, I discuss why we need leaders who have facility with working across academia. To disrupt the accepted and often less-useful internal trajectory to department chair, we must acknowledge the value of external training and mentorship in what leadership work is and can be. We need to engage in what I call disciplinary dexterity, wherein chairs serve from a position of wider understanding of both the general operations of the university and the norms and practices of other fields and disciplines across our campuses. I argue that we should seek out and embrace what interdisciplinary administrative relationships can teach us and recalibrate our views of what a department chair does, is, or should be, as we reconceive upper leadership roles as prerequisite for the position of chair.¹ Doing so will allow us to engage more deeply with the broader university to cultivate and diversify our department leaders, which in turn will help us learn valuable strategies for advocating for our colleagues and for the value of our discipline.

Interdisciplinary Leadership; or, How the Rest of the University Lives

As the chair of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which houses an interdisciplinary-minded group of forty-three faculty members, forty-two postdoctoral teaching fellows in writing and communication, and six support staff members, I have taken the administrative pathway less traveled and—with apologies to Frost—it has been the difference. I am a first-generation faculty member who studied creative writing in graduate school but who, over the course of many years and several institutional roles, became a senior scholar in rhetoric and writing studies and a cross-trained academic administrator. As part of my journey through institutional types and geographic regions, I spent seventeen years as a first-year writing program director across three different universities before taking a succession of three extradepartmental leadership positions at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where I served in two upper-level administrative roles (provost fellow for undergraduate education and associate dean of liberal arts) before serving as chair of a department in a field outside my own (philosophy). I thus took a backward path of sorts toward building a leadership profile. Given this, I want to challenge the typical path that dictates unit-level leadership as the best preparation for higher-level roles, instead arguing that flipping the script may better benefit the chair position and also the pool from which we draw our chairs.

What I learned across my leadership roles at Illinois has informed how I now lead and advocate for faculty members, students, and staff members. Even though at many universities today a typical English or language department contains an array of specializations, meaningful partnerships between humanities and nonhumanities units are not common. Our departments, to benefit their ways of being in the university, have much room to expand their definitions of humanistic work beyond their own borders. Having worked in four traditionally structured university English departments before arriving at Georgia Tech, I have observed that as a field English studies can be provincial and inward facing, not eager to expand its holistic scholarly and pedagogical identities. While scholars such as Gerald Graff, D. G. Myers, Steven Mailloux, and Thomas Miller (Evolution; Formation) have periodically charted English studies’ disciplinary histories, such work typically has reexamined the mix of components that constitute our research and teaching within English studies writ large. And little in these histories speaks to leadership strategies for our current times.²

This historical concern for the integrity of our discipline and for the sanctity of our research and pedagogical methods has meant keeping certain boundaries up to protect our work from dilution. This means when we debate our identity, we tend to turn upon each other rather than seek outside perspectives or partners. We might ask, Does writing and rhetoric studies have a place in departments dominated by literary studies? Do film studies scholars belong in media departments, art departments, or English or language departments? And what is “digital humanities” exactly?³ We are consumed with moving and reassembling our own existing parts, without enough attention paid to how other disciplines are looking across and beyond their borders, especially in their leadership roles and training.

Having served as an associate dean whose portfolio included all undergraduate and graduate curricula across more than thirty departments and programs in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, I can now speak with some authority about how budgets of lab-based units work and how these costs affect both the range of their curricular offerings and who teaches them. I can explain the importance of community-based outreach for language degree programs and the difficulties of staffing and populating classes in lesser-taught languages, including European languages currently dropping off high school course lists (e.g., German). Having chaired a philosophy department, I can differentiate between the core ideological differences in philosophy subfields and how these matter when advertising general education courses in the field. And having worked in a provost’s office as well as a dean’s office, I can identify patterns and trends in enrollments across multiple fields outside the liberal arts, including engineering and business, and how those affect our humanities futures.

There are other service avenues, such as membership on a college or campus-level hiring or promotion and tenure committee, where much can be gleaned about research standards and department operations across the university. Leadership experience outside one’s field helps one become a better chair in three ways: it teaches one to understand the tenets of interdisciplinary and other nonhumanities research as it informs cross-curricular structures, it teaches the principles of such structures in fields as they are articulated outside the humanities, and it reveals the evolution and growth of other disciplines in relation to one’s own. As an associate dean, I came to understand the workings of departments besides English, and I was also able to be at the center of creating cross-disciplinary degree programs among several of them—most valuable, perhaps, when joining computer science with humanities and social science courses for a dual program of study. Programs such as these have the tall order of taking both halves of the degree and making them something new and valuable to students in ways that they could not be when operating as programs independent of each other. Taking that experience into a department chair position provides limitless imagination for what an English degree, and the faculty members teaching in an English department, could do.

Interdisciplinary perspectives gained through other administrative work can influence cluster hiring and strategic planning, each of which requires expertise regarding future programs or growth initiatives that cross disciplinary boundaries. Research-intensive universities in particular emphasize joint appointments for faculty members who can provide new ways of doing research and teaching across units and can contribute to community and industry engagement with scholarship and programming. Had I not watched, while an associate dean, the development of multi-institution, workforce-centered initiatives or reviewed revenue-minded proposals from the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, I would have less understanding of how departments might draw upon these other disciplinary models for both internal and external revenue and expansion. Georgia Tech is undertaking a massive campus initiative in arts programming, Arts@Tech. My experience with imagining cross-disciplinary projects and research has helped me engage in these planning conversations about how our school—with its faculty in media arts—can contribute to this project.

Expanding Pathways to Department Leadership

Every day, department chairs must make micro and macro decisions that affect students and faculty and staff members, decisions that often radiate out to others across campus. Fierce advocacy for one’s own faculty can sometimes fail to take into account the larger ecosystem in which a department lives. Inexperienced chairs do not always recognize that a college’s strength is only as great as the sum of its departments. Leading at the college or campus level frequently teaches us that chairs are not able to be anyone’s advocate in particular but instead must be flexible allies for many. Even when faculty members are willing to chair, they can be quickly disheartened by the day-to-day reality of what such advocacy measures mean. For these faculty members, advisory guides such as Kevin Dettmar’s How to Chair a Department or David Perlmutter’s “Admin 101” columns in The Chronicle of Higher Education (www.chronicle.com/package/admin-101/) are helpful, as are pieces about chairing and academic leadership in the ADE Bulletin (maps.mla.org/Bulletins/ADE-Bulletin). Such publications, like cookbooks, introduce new administrators to the ingredients and techniques that go into successful leadership. Leading outside one’s department, however, provides firsthand experience of working the dinner rush.

As associate dean, I had the insider benefit of observing more than thirty department chairs for four years. I knew their general needs and concerns and what kind of higher-level actions they needed to take in order to keep their units healthy and productive. This helped me when I had to step in as chair of a department experiencing a gap in internal leadership options. I also learned, in the process, how philosophy, a fellow humanities field, has some of the same struggles as English—but not exactly the same. I’ll be drawing on these lessons for years to come.

Of course, it is quite rare to serve as a department chair outside one’s field.⁴ It is far more common to serve in second-line administrative positions in dean’s and provost’s offices or similar central campus or college units. My experience working in both these positions has taught me that, despite the schism between faculty members and administrators, there is a great deal of collaborative advocacy work happening with faculty members at both these levels. Serving as director of a general education program, for example, can teach one the ins and outs of curricular development from a campus-wide perspective. When I was in that role, I was hiring and in some cases mentoring faculty members to teach small, first-year seminars, while also working with our associate provosts on articulating the effectiveness of this program per its position as our QEP (Quality Enhancement Project) for our institutional reaccreditation.

Department chair work also requires a notion of how bodies that do not intersect with academic programming on a regular basis are still critical to a department’s well-being and stability. As a provost’s fellow, I had the opportunity to work across academic departments and almost every other college on our campus, and I also attended meetings of our Council of Undergraduate Deans, which taught me about admissions and recruitment processes; student services (housing, mental health, scholarships, and funding); and the role of other colleges in undergraduate education. Understanding recruitment, retention, and how students make the choices they do regarding majors (and how they make their decisions to attend one institution over another) is extremely important to knowing how to best grow one’s own programs. These meetings with student support offices also helped me develop important connections and networks that I would draw upon repeatedly in the future.

It is equally important for department chairs to know how shared governance operates beyond the unit level, which can help humanize the work that associate deans and associate provosts do. My experience as an associate dean working with chairs enables me, in my current role as chair, to better understand the fears and knowledge gaps of faculty members as we discuss these same processes, and it gives me strategies for presenting our cases as informed requests designed to benefit the college and campus as a whole.

But perhaps this is the most critical thing I learned while serving in college and university administrative roles before serving as chair: how to understand my department’s position in the larger ecosystem of our university and therefore how to be a champion for everyone in my portfolio, not just my departmental colleagues. This is a hard leap to make. But this is exactly the kind of thinking the best chairs do. We need to think expansively about a greater good for our units and their long-term health. Especially in a school such as the one I lead now, where faculty research specialties include digital media, game studies, film theory and production, theater studies, creative writing, British and American literature, African American studies, and rhetoric and technical communication, among others, one must be ecumenical about advocacy for faculty members, a skill learned best through real-world practice and training at higher levels of academia.

I want to close by encouraging institutions to rethink what leadership profiles—and leaders themselves—can and should look like. This is critically important to the diversity of the faculty members who hold these roles. It’s a fact that women and men of color and white women are underrepresented in academic administration beyond the department level, even as just over half of department chairs are women. Consequently, serving as chair becomes for many the last step in the leadership trajectories within their own departments, which results in a waste of their talent. This is a condition that organizations such as HERS (Higher Education Resource Service [www.hersnetwork.org]) seek to remedy and that external leadership programs—such as the ACC Academic Leaders Network or the Big Ten Academic Alliance Faculty Fellows program (which I participated in at Illinois)—can also help to address. Taking advantage of other national training and mentoring opportunities offered by professional organizations—including, for English studies faculty members, the MLA’s ADE Summer Seminar and MAPS Leadership Institute (www.maps.mla.org/Seminars)—is also critical for new chairs, as well as for other faculty members who may be serving in various departmental leadership positions and whose professional growth can benefit from the MLA’s programming.

Despite professional networking opportunities, faculty members from underrepresented groups who may have great promise for success in other leadership roles may still be burned out, passed over, or never even considered for such roles after serving their own department as chair, all the while being disproportionately assigned service roles. Considering chair candidates who have first done leadership work outside the department, and supporting and mentoring such candidates in their ongoing exploration of other key roles within their institutions, may widen these candidates’ portfolios for future leadership opportunities, including in English studies, while also balancing out who takes up internal and external service roles across campus.

Ultimately, we need informed and generous leaders who have the ability to lead with grace and vision. Leaders with institutional knowledge gained outside their own fields can better respond to the socioeconomic challenges of higher education that ultimately imperil all the humanities. We need to be flexible and open to reconsidering who leads us, how we chart the paths of those who become our leaders, and how much we can all benefit from disciplinary dexterity.

Notes

1 I use the term chair to mean chair or head, as the role may be either in a department (and may even exist side by side within the same institution, as such titles did at my former university, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign). I do so with the knowledge that department chairs are typically framed as “first among equals” in their level of authority and decision-making, whereas department heads are, in contrast, endowed with veto power that can lead to less collaborative governance. This is an important distinction to make when considering leadership trajectories and pathways, but, for the sake of simplicity of terms, I use chair to stand in for both types of positions.

2 For example, Mailloux’s desire to see rhetorical hermeneutics as the center of our disciplinary practices does not challenge us to look at our own rhetorical practices when interacting with STEM or business disciplines.

3 The NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities, for example, is both expansive and inward facing, in that it “offers grant programs that fund project teams experimenting with digital technologies to develop new methodologies for humanities research, teaching and learning, public engagement, and scholarly communications. ODH funds those studying digital technology from a humanistic perspective and humanists seeking to create digital publications. Another major goal of ODH is to increase capacity of the humanities in applying digital methods” (“Office”).

4 For a good primer on this work, see Buller.

Works Cited

Buller, Jeffrey L. “Chairing a Department in Receivership.” The Department Chair, vol. 27, no. 3, winter 2017, pp. 3–5.

Dettmar, Kevin. How to Chair a Department. Johns Hopkins UP, 2022.

“Fast Facts: Working Women in Academia.” American Association of University Women, www.aauw.org/resources/article/fast-facts-academia/.

Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. U of Chicago P, 1987.

Mailloux, Steven. Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Communication. Modern Language Association, 2006.

Miller, Thomas P. The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns. U of Pittsburgh P, 2011.

———. The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces. U of Pittsburgh P, 1997.

Myers, D. G. The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing since 1880. Prentice Hall, 1995.

“Office of Digital Humanities.” National Endowment for the Humanities, www.neh.gov/divisions/odh.

While various colleges around the country cut undergraduate humanities majors and resources in favor of tracks they deem more career-oriented, we would like to argue that conducting research in the humanities gives undergraduate students vital professional skills. We base this argument on an analysis of undergraduate researchers in the humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), from 2000 to 2018. These researchers, who are now alumni, suggest that their undergraduate research experiences, in addition to giving them important academic competencies, played influential roles in preparing them for a variety of careers.

The narrative that the sky is falling and the humanities are in crisis is by now a familiar one (e.g., Hayot; Schmidt, “Humanities”). Whereas some scholars argue that efforts to justify the humanities undermine their intrinsic value (e.g., Fish), others provide compelling justifications of the field (e.g., Adams; Long). This essay, while falling into the realm of justification, does not concentrate on administrative arguments about the value of the humanities but presents the benefits of learning and scholarship in the humanities from students’ points of view. In our study, the students argue for the value of conducting in-depth research projects in the humanities.

We had originally conceived of this study as part of a larger effort to assess UCLA undergraduate research programs while analyzing student academic outcomes. What soon became clear, however, was that students not only indicated various academic benefits of undergraduate research but also suggested that their undergraduate research experiences provided a range of crucial professional skills and opportunities for personal development. After taking a brief look at the current undergraduate research and humanities landscape, we include our findings below. As we will see, undergraduate research can strongly influence students’ postgraduate paths, helping them identify their interests while developing key academic and professional skills and fostering personal growth.

Perceived Outcomes and the Prioritizing of Majors

In recent years, various governors, legislators, and university administrators have advocated for providing more resources for select academic programs, most often STEM programs, and fewer for humanities programs. Institutions such as West Virginia University; Marymount University; the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point; Stony Brook University, State University of New York; and the University of Tulsa have cut or publicly considered cuts to humanities majors (Pettit; Roberts-Grmela; Nguyen; Flaherty; Huiskes). Arguments for prioritizing STEM fields are often based on perceived career outcomes, with STEM studies characterized as more career-focused, job-friendly, and crucial for the economy (Cohen; Alvarez; Knox).

While humanities proponents note that STEM majors are crucial and valuable, they observe that humanities majors also gain important skills sought by today’s employers. Defenders of the humanities point to competencies cultivated in humanities classrooms, including critical thinking, written and oral communication, and problem solving, which correspond to skills employers value (“STEM Education”; Gilbert; Marcus). A 2020 American Association of Colleges and Universities survey found that employers prioritized the competencies noted above (Finley), and a 2019 National Association of Colleges and Employers report revealed that employers rated critical thinking and problem solving, teamwork, and oral and written communication as three of the four most essential needs in employee skill sets (Job Outlook 33).

We know that humanities students gain a wide variety of competencies through their studies, and specific evidence as to these gains can only bolster this argument. This is where we turn to undergraduate research. Numerous studies document the benefits of undergraduate research, although most of these studies concentrate on STEM fields.¹ One study finds that only sixteen percent of the literature on undergraduate research concerns non-STEM disciplines (Haeger et al.).² However, this sixteen percent of the literature helpfully explores both theoretical and practical topics of concern to undergraduate research in the humanities. Various of these studies, for instance, examine the unique characteristics, considerations, and challenges of undergraduate humanities research in comparison to research in STEM and other disciplines (Schantz; Grobman; Wilson; Dean and Kaiser). David Lopatto compares undergraduate research experiences and outcomes among students in humanities, social science, and science disciplines (“Undergraduate Research as a Catalyst”), while John Ishiyama evaluates student academic and professional gains from participation in undergraduate humanities, social science, and arts research. Others offer valuable case histories and examples of undergraduate research projects, collaborations, and course-based experiences in English (Kinkead and Grobman), history (Corley; Johnson and Harreld; Stephens et al.; Falk Gesink), theater (Blackmer), and multiple humanities disciplines (Sand et al.).³ In addition, the Council on Undergraduate Research has established an arts and humanities division, and various edited volumes on undergraduate research have appeared in the last decade or so, including Creative Inquiry in the Arts and Humanities: Models of Undergraduate Research (Yavneh Klos et al.), How to Get Started in Arts and Humanities Research with Undergraduates (Crawford et al.), and Undergraduate Research in English Studies (Grobman and Kinkead). While the above-referenced studies and resources add valuably to our knowledge of undergraduate research in the humanities, additional studies on non-STEM undergraduate research are, as Heather Haeger and her coauthors declared in 2020, “desperately needed” (67). With this study, we aim to provide additional insights on the academic and professional skills undergraduates gain through humanities research. In comparison to Lopatto’s and Ishiyama’s outcomes-oriented analyses, this study focuses specifically on undergraduate research outcomes in the humanities.

Researching Undergraduate Research

As a university with a specific undergraduate research center dedicated to the humanities, arts, and social science disciplines (the UCLA Undergraduate Research Center for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences), we are uniquely positioned to examine undergraduate research in non-STEM disciplines. Our work began with an effort to investigate the effectiveness of our center’s research scholarship programs from 2014 through 2018. In an initial study, we examined survey responses from over 150 undergraduate research program participants across the humanities, arts, and social sciences (Kistner et al.). We noted that, in comparison with students who did not participate in undergraduate research, the research program participants reported statistically significant better outcomes in a variety of areas, including critical thinking, desire for lifelong learning, and ability to communicate effectively in writing. These results were intriguing. Not only did the undergraduate research students demonstrate more confidence in their academic skills, a result we had hypothesized, but they also reported greater proficiencies in skills that specifically matched the employer needs noted above.

As a second study, to explore the influence of undergraduate research on students’ postgraduate trajectories, we surveyed alumni of our two biggest research programs, the Undergraduate Research Scholars Program and the Undergraduate Research Fellows Program.⁴ We reached out to 1,145 alumni who participated in the research programs between 2000 and 2018. Despite a large number of email addresses that were no longer active, we received 182 responses. Because we were particularly interested in the responses from undergraduate researchers in the humanities, we then selected the subset of 67 humanities majors for further analysis.⁵ After removing the students who had participated in the programs in 2018 but had not yet graduated at the time of the survey, as well as the students (mostly double majors) who did research in a nonhumanities area (e.g., a psychology lab), we were left with the responses of 58 humanities researchers, from 2000 to 2018. And their responses were illuminating.

From “Intellectually Formative” Experiences to “Invaluable Personal Growth”

The postgraduate trajectories of the fifty-eight humanities students were highly diverse. Their current and previous positions include some fields often deemed humanities-related (e.g., “Humanities-Related Employment”): publishing, law, grant writing, technical writing, nonprofits and social justice advocacy, and various positions in museums and theaters. Many of the alumni work in education, as university faculty members, high school teachers, educational consultants, university program managers, and other types of instructors. And numerous others are in fields we may not envision initially when contemplating the trajectories of humanities students. We count among the group multiple finance and financial project managers; a software engineer; an IT director; technology designers and specialists; health and political policy analysts; a nurse; entrepreneurs who founded consulting, baking, and construction firms; and an employee of the aerospace industry.⁶ Eighty-three percent of the alumni are currently or were formerly in graduate school, ranging from MA and PhD programs in the humanities, social sciences, and arts to JD programs, MEd programs, MFA programs, and MS programs in nursing and in biomedical science.

Thus, our students provided a variety of answers to the tired question at times posed to humanities majors: “What are you going to do with that?” (Deresiewicz). We also asked them how their personal experiences in conducting undergraduate humanities research and participating in an undergraduate research program helped them decide on their career goals. Over 48% of the respondents said that their humanities research experience made a “big difference,” and over 36% said it made at least a “little difference.” Slightly under 14% said it made “no difference.”

Conducting undergraduate research is evidently impactful, and our questions to the students then concerned exactly how it was impactful. Numerous alumni credited their humanities research experience with helping them identify their interests and consequently solidifying or changing their career paths. Some noted that research reinforced their desires to go to graduate school and into academia, giving them confidence in their choices. One former student, now an assistant professor, observed that his research experience “deepened [his] commitment to diversifying the academy.” Others credited their research experiences with leading them to a variety of careers. One respondent observed that changing his research topic led him to a different career path, while another stated, “My undergraduate research, and one of my research partners in particular, led me to my current job.” An additional respondent, who studied depictions of cultural authenticity in culinary tourism, declared: “Food had always been a passion of mine, and research opportunities at UCLA showed me that food could also be a serious area of study and work. I got to spend my undergraduate career exploring what that could look like and in turn use that experience to launch my career.”

Furthermore, in terms of launching their careers, approximately half of the respondents said they discussed their undergraduate research experiences in a job application cover letter and job interview. We wondered if these fairly high numbers could be attributed to the respondents currently in university academic positions, as respondents pursuing careers in academia, for instance, might be more likely to discuss previous research experience. To test this theory, we divided the students into two groups: those in university academic positions (current college and university faculty members and current graduate students) and those not in university academic positions.⁷ We found that the respondents not in university academic positions were just as likely to discuss their humanities research in a job application or interview as those in university academic positions.⁸ While some of this result may be due to graduate students who did not submit job applications (having gone straight from their time as undergraduates to graduate school), it does not negate the fact that over half of the respondents not in university academic positions discussed their humanities research in their job search, presumably considering it a notable and applicable part of their experience. One former student observed that a coauthored undergraduate publication had “opened many doors,” while another declared, “Despite my lack of relevant work experience, I believe my current employer noted my involvement with the [Undergraduate Research Scholars Program] as a kind of employment. My participation . . . showed that I could handle the required responsibilities and workload.”

The alumni then credited their humanities research experience with developing a number of academic skills, which they declared have served them well in a variety of areas. They responded that they gained analytical, problem-solving, and information literacy skills through their research, including the ability to think logically about complex problems (71%), acquire information on their own (76%), solve problems independently (71%), approach problems creatively (59%), and understand scholarly findings (78%). One former student credited his research experience with “allowing [him] to ask the right questions, synthesize and analyze information, and make informed decisions” in his career. Another noted, “I do research regularly as part of my job. The skills I gained [at UCLA] through research . . . have absolutely been helpful as I sift through what information is relevant and what information is simply interesting.” A third respondent pointed to the continuing value of his undergraduate research: “As an attorney I think back to my time at UCLA when I am writing my legal briefs, where my organization and references to sources are rooted in my undergraduate research experience.” Additionally, over half of the alumni cited their ability to communicate effectively in writing as a benefit of their research experiences. Their open-ended responses then enumerated various communication skills, with one person stating that he stood out in his profession through his ability to “articulately share [his] perspective and knowledge,” while another declared, “The ability to delve deeply into a topic has made me a much more effective communicator in the professional world than (quite frankly) most of my peers.”

While we had anticipated many of the alumni reporting gains in the academic skills detailed above, we had not anticipated their enthusiasm regarding the role of undergraduate research in their personal growth and development. These responses were in fact the most pronounced, with the greatest number of alumni noting that through their humanities research they gained more confidence in themselves and their abilities (84%), developed their intellectual curiosity (90%), and learned self-discipline and time management skills (79%). One respondent credited her research experience with building her “self-confidence to take charge of a project,” while another declared it gave him “the confidence to push through on difficult yet substantially rewarding tasks.” Many others also cited persistence as a key outcome. One former student stated he learned the most when his research “fell flat,” while another, when asked what she gained through her research, proclaimed, “Patience! Working toward something diligently even when you don’t see an outcome every single day.” In addition to many comments reflecting on time management skills, the alumni also responded that they acquired valuable self-knowledge and awareness. One respondent observed, “In my case at least the experience is sort of intellectually formative in the sense that I learned quite a bit about how I think and work which has all sorts of implications.” Another stated, “The experience expanded my understanding of literary research to the point the field seemed limitless in its potential to extract, redefine, or question the status quo by raising a platform on which to deconstruct responses to similar events in the past.” Interestingly, the alumni suggested that what they valued most was not the academic competencies but the more personal and immeasurable effects of the research experience.

The alumni working in university academic positions did highlight slightly different skills than those not in university academic positions, and some differences reached statistical significance.⁹ Among these differences, respondents in university academic positions were more likely to state that their humanities undergraduate research gave them skills to find and evaluate sources, collect and analyze data, and communicate effectively in writing. Many also declared that without their research experiences, they would not have pursued graduate school or have been as successful in graduate school. Those not in university academic positions were more likely to cite decision-making skills and leadership skills as key benefits from conducting humanities undergraduate research. Both decision-making and leadership skills were highly valued on the employer surveys referenced above.

Finally, many alumni noted the importance of their humanities faculty mentors in preparing them for and influencing their postgraduate trajectories. Almost 78% responded that they corresponded with their faculty mentors after graduation. While 63% stated that they received graduate school advice, almost half (48%) noted that they received career advice. (This percentage holds for both groups—those working in university academic positions and those not in university academic positions.) We know the importance of faculty mentors during students’ undergraduate research projects (see, e.g., Webber et al.), and it is striking how many of the students continued to rely on their mentors for advice after graduation. Students also credited their mentors with providing postgraduation emotional support and postgraduation guidance in continued research. In reflecting on their humanities research, many alumni specifically highlighted the significance of their interactions with their faculty mentors. One student, an English major who now works in health policy, stated that “recurrent conversations” with his faculty mentor about “career prospects in the industry” played a large role in determining his career path. Another student fondly declared of her research experience, “I cultivated close personal relationships to faculty during this time, which was super enriching and meaningful for me.”

Student Successes and Undergraduate Research Programs

We see the crucial role that humanities undergraduate research has played in the experiences of our alumni, from helping them identify their interests and postgraduate paths to establishing key relationships, building academic and professional skills, and fostering personal growth and development. We do note a few nuances of our analysis: one, that alumni who were more enthusiastic about their research experiences may have been more likely to respond, and, two, that these alumni, in addition to engaging in a humanities research project with a faculty mentor, participated in a specific undergraduate research program through the UCLA Undergraduate Research Center for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Because all respondents participated in a research program that offered scholarship support and access to varied resources over the years, we are able to recommend a similar program-based model for undergraduate research, where feasible. Yet we believe our results are largely relevant to non-program-based humanities undergraduate research experiences as well, which vary in the types of research projects and university resources available. Recognizing that many undergraduate research opportunities at UCLA occur outside of the specific research programs we analyzed, we plan to study these opportunities in the future.

Ultimately, we hope to highlight the enthusiasm with which many of our respondents spoke of their humanities research experiences. Some respondents detailed the various aspects in which their humanities research background helped them in their chosen fields. One former student who works in politics observed, “Having an academic/humanist background has intrigued a lot of people I work with and separated me from all the professional degrees.” She credits her humanities research with giving her “a different lens to analyze policy.” Many others characterized their humanities research projects as formative experiences. One respondent declared that the “deep knowledge” she gained continued to have “immense value to [her] life,” while another asserted that her research “provided invaluable personal growth.”

The students’ responses highlight the numerous ways that engaging in humanities research can influence students’ academic, professional, and personal development. They point out the many aspects of their humanities research experiences that continue to be useful, and they credit these experiences with meaningful personal and professional growth. As one student succinctly put it: “Undergraduate research propelled me on [my] path.”

Notes

1 While many studies analyze STEM undergraduate research experiences in particular (e.g., Linn et al.; Russell et al.; Jones et al.; Lopatto, “Undergraduate Research as a High-Impact Student Experience”), others examining undergraduate research across disciplines tend to be more STEM-focused due to higher STEM participation numbers (e.g., Fechheimer et al.; Bauer and Bennett; Craney et al; Johnson Schmitz and Havholm). We would like to point out that an additional assessment of undergraduate research across disciplines is the work of an undergraduate researcher (Diaz-Loar).

2 Non-STEM, discipline-specific studies account for 46 of the 286 studies. These include nonhumanities studies, such as Rand; Hartmann. An additional 4% of studies are interdisciplinary.

3 Cathy W. Levenson also details an institutional structure supporting undergraduate research in the arts and humanities, and for more on mentoring best practices (from a cross-disciplinary analysis), see Shanahan et al.

4 In 2000 and 2001, the Undergraduate Research Fellows Program was called the Undergraduate Research Development Stipend Award.

5 For the purposes of this study, we define humanities as the majors included in the UCLA Humanities Division, as well as history, which is often included in humanities groupings and has seen a similar pattern of enrollment (Schmidt, “History BA”).

6 For national data on the jobs of humanities majors, see “Occupations of Humanities Majors.” Our alumni mirror the national data, in which humanities majors are employed across sectors and particularly in education fields.

7 While the majority of respondents not in university academic positions had attended graduate school, they were currently not in graduate school nor in university faculty positions.

8 The respondents not in university academic positions were slightly more likely to discuss their research in these situations, although the results did not reach statistical significance.

9 We employed chi-square tests to measure statistical significance.

Works Cited

Adams, William D. “Not by Earnings Alone: A New Report on Humanities Graduates in the Workforce and Beyond.” American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 29 Jan. 2018, www.amacad.org/news/not-earnings-alone-new-report-humanities-graduates-workforce-and-beyond.

Alvarez, Lizette. “Florida May Reduce Tuition for Select Majors.” The New York Times, 9 Dec. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/education/florida-may-reduce-tuition-for-select-majors.html.

Blackmer, Jennifer. “The Gesture of Thinking: Collaborative Models for Undergraduate Research in The Arts and Humanities.” CUR Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 2, winter 2008, pp. 8–12.

Bauer, Karen W., and Joan S. Bennett. “Alumni Perceptions Used to Assess Undergraduate Research Experience.” The Journal of Higher Education, vol. 74, no. 2, Mar. 2003, pp. 210–30.

Cohen, Patricia. “A Rising Call to Promote STEM Education and Cut Liberal Arts Funding.” The New York Times, 21 Feb. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/business/a-rising-call-to-promote-stem-education-and-cut-liberal-arts-funding.html.

Corley, Christopher R. “From Mentoring to Collaborating: Fostering Undergraduate Research in History.” The History Teacher, vol. 46, no. 3, 2013, pp. 397–414.

Craney, Chris, et al. “Cross-Discipline Perceptions of the Undergraduate Research Experience.” The Journal of Higher Education, vol. 82, no. 1, 2011, pp. 92–113.

Crawford, Iain, et al., editors. How to Get Started in Arts and Humanities Research with Undergraduates. Council on Undergraduate Research, 2014.

Dean, James M., and Melanie L. Kaiser. “Faculty-Student Collaborative Research in the Humanities.” CUR Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 3, spring 2010, pp. 43–47.

Deresiewicz, William. “What Are You Going to Do with That?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 Oct. 2010, www.chronicle.com/article/What-Are-You-Going-to-Do-With/124651.

Diaz-Loar, Emily. “What Do UNC Asheville Alumni Think about Their Undergraduate Research Experiences?” Proceedings of the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR), 2016, www.ncurproceedings.org/ojs/index.php/NCUR2016/article/view/2015.

Falk Gesink, Indira. “Speaking Stones: The Cemetery as a Laboratory for Undergraduate Research in the Humanities.” CUR Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 4, summer 2010, pp. 9–13.

Fechheimer, Marcus, et al. “How Well Do Undergraduate Research Programs Promote Engagement and Success of Students?” CBE-Life Sciences Education, vol. 10, summer 2011, pp. 156–63.

Finley, Ashley. How College Contributes to Workforce Success. Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2021, www.aacu.org/research/how-college-contributes-to-workforce-success.

Fish, Stanley. “Stop Trying to Sell the Humanities.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 June 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/Stop-Trying-to-Sell-the/243643.

Flaherty, Colleen. “Losing Tenure Bids to a Budget.” Inside Higher Ed, 21 Sept. 2017, www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/21/stony-brook-professors-worry-budget-being-balanced-backs-junior-faculty-humanities.

Gilbert, Sophie. “Learning to Be Human.” The Atlantic, June 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/06/learning-to-be-human/489659/.

Grobman, Laurie. “Affirming the Independent Researcher Model: Undergraduate Research in the Humanities.” CUR Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 1, fall 2007, pp. 23–28.

Grobman, Laurie, and Joyce Kinkead, editors. Undergraduate Research in English Studies. National Council of Teachers of English, 2010.

Haeger, Heather, et al. “What We Know and What We Need to Know about Undergraduate Research.” Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research, vol. 3, no. 4, summer 2020, pp. 62–69.

Hartmann, David J. “Undergraduate Research Experience as Preparation for Graduate School.” The American Sociologist, vol. 21, no. 2, summer 1990, pp. 179–88.

Hayot, Eric. “The Sky Is Falling.” Profession, May 2018, profession.mla.org/the-sky-is-falling/.

Huiskes, Helen. “Here’s What Happened after Three Colleges Announced Cuts to the Liberal Arts.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 July 2023, www.chronicle.com/article/heres-what-happened-after-3-colleges-announced-cuts-to-the-liberal-arts.

“Humanities-Related Employment.” American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2011, www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/workforce/humanities-related-employment.

Ishiyama, John. “Does Early Participation in Undergraduate Research Benefit Social Science and Humanities Students?” College Student Journal, vol. 36, no. 3, Jan. 2002, pp. 380–85.

Job Outlook 2019. National Association of Colleges and Employers, 2019, www.odu.edu/content/dam/odu/offices/cmc/docs/nace/2019-nace-job-outlook-survey.pdf.

Johnson, Benjamin A., and Donald J. Harreld. “Nurturing Independent Learning in the Undergraduate Student in History: A Faculty-Student Mentoring Experience.” Mentoring and Tutoring: Partnership in Learning, vol. 20, no. 3, Aug. 2012, pp. 361–78.

Johnson Schmitz, Heather, and Karen Havholm. “Undergraduate Research and Alumni: Perspectives on Learning Gains and Post-graduation Benefits.” CUR Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 3, spring 2015, pp. 15–22.

Jones, Melanie T., et al. “Importance of Undergraduate Research for Minority Persistence and Achievement in Biology.” The Journal of Higher Education, vol. 81, no. 1, 2010, pp. 82–115.

Kinkead, Joyce, and Laurie Grobman. “Expanding Opportunities for Undergraduate Research in English Studies.” Profession, 2011, pp. 218–30.

Kistner, Kelly, et al. “Academic and Professional Preparedness: Outcomes of Undergraduate Research in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.” Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research, vol. 4, no. 4, summer 2021, pp. 3–9.

Knox, Liam. “Measuring Outcomes in Income.” Inside Higher Ed, 4 May 2023, www.insidehighered.com/news/students/careers/2023/05/04/measuring-outcomes-income.

Levenson, Cathy W. “Enhancing Undergraduate Research in the Arts and the Humanities.” Peer Review, vol. 12, no. 2, spring 2010, pp. 13–15.

Linn, Marcia C., et al. “Undergraduate Research Experiences: Impacts and Opportunities.” Science, vol. 347, no. 6222, 2015, p. 1261757.

Long, Heather. “The World’s Top Economists Just Made the Case for Why We Still Need English Majors.” The Washington Post, 19 Oct. 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/19/worlds-top-economists-just-made-case-why-we-still-need-english-majors/.

Lopatto, David. “Undergraduate Research as a Catalyst for Liberal Learning.” Peer Review, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 22–25.

———. “Undergraduate Research as a High-Impact Student Experience.” Peer Review, vol. 12, no. 2, spring 2010, pp. 27–30.

Marcus, Jon. “The Unexpected Schools Championing the Liberal Arts.” The Atlantic, Oct. 2015, www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/the-unexpected-schools-championing-the-liberal-arts/410500/.

Nguyen, Terry. “U. of Wisconsin at Stevens Point Pulls Back from Plan to Cut Six Liberal-Arts Programs.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 10 Apr. 2019, www.chronicle.com/article/u-of-wisconsin-at-stevens-point-pulls-back-from-plan-to-cut-6-liberal-arts-programs/.

“Occupations of Humanities Majors with a Terminal Bachelor’s Degree.” American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2021, www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/workforce/occupations-humanities-majors-terminal-bachelors-degree.

Pettit, Emma. “Scholars See Dangerous Precedent in West Virginia U.’s Plan to Cut Foreign Languages.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 18 Aug. 2023, www.chronicle.com/article/scholars-see-dangerous-precedent-in-west-virginia-u-s-plan-to-cut-foreign-languages.

Rand, Jane. “Researching Undergraduate Social Science Research.” Teaching in Higher Education, vol. 21, no. 7, 2016, pp. 773–89.

Roberts-Grmela, Julian. “Nine Liberal-Arts Majors Are on the Chopping Block at Marymount U.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 Feb. 2023, www.chronicle.com/article/9-humanities-majors-are-on-the-chopping-block-at-marymount-u.

Russell, Susan H., et al. “Benefits of Undergraduate Research Experiences.” Science, vol. 316, no. 5824, Apr. 2007, pp. 548–49.

Sand, Alexa, et al. “Curating Exhibitions as Undergraduate Research.” CUR Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 4, summer 2017, pp. 12–17.

Schantz, Mark S. “Undergraduate Research in the Humanities: Challenges and Prospects.” CUR Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 2, winter 2008, pp. 26–29.

Schmidt, Benjamin. “The History BA since the Great Recession: The 2018 AHA Majors Report.” Perspectives on History, Nov. 2018, www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/december-2018/the-history-ba-since-the-great-recession-the-2018-aha-majors-report.

———. “The Humanities Are in Crisis.” The Atlantic, Aug. 2018, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/08/the-humanities-face-a-crisisof-confidence/567565/.

Shanahan, Jenny Olin, et al. “Ten Salient Practices of Undergraduate Research Mentors: A Review of the Literature.” Mentoring and Tutoring: Partnership in Learning, vol. 23, no. 5, 2015, pp. 359–76.

“STEM Education Is Vital—but Not at The Expense of the Humanities.” Scientific American, Oct. 2016, www.scientificamerican.com/article/stem-education-is-vital-but-not-at-the-expense-of-the-humanities/.

Stephens, Robert P., et al. “The Book Project: Engaging History Majors in Undergraduate Research.” The History Teacher, vol. 45, no. 1, 2011, pp. 65–80.

Webber, Karen L., et al. “Student and Faculty Member Engagement in Undergraduate Research.” Research in Higher Education, vol. 54, no. 2, 2013, pp. 227–49.

Wilson, Reed. “Researching ‘Undergraduate Research’ in the Humanities.” Modern Language Studies, vol. 33, nos. 1-2, autumn 2003, pp. 74–79.

Yavneh Klos, Naomi, et al., editors. Creative Inquiry in the Arts and Humanities: Models of Undergraduate Research. Council on Undergraduate Research, 2011.

Helen Small, Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, is an MLA member and the author of The Value of the Humanities. We interviewed her by e-mail about the value of public humanities. An abbreviated version of this interview appeared in the Spring 2021 MLA Newsletter.

What do you think about public humanities as a way of reorienting both undergraduate and graduate studies in the humanities? 

Helen Small: I welcome efforts to train students, at all levels, in writing for audiences beyond the academy, although it’s hard not to feel that something is, or has been, awry if we are especially priding ourselves on reorienting to “outsiders.” Asking students, early in their college careers, who they think they are writing for can be illuminating: the answer (in my experience) tends to run along the lines of “for an imaginary reader who doesn’t know anything about the subject.” That’s at once reasonable—an encouragement to get your subject clear at the outset—and oddly adrift from reality. No such reader is likely to encounter the undergraduate essay or graduate draft. Why not get students to start by admitting the reader they have: the professor or teaching assistant who knows the subject, wants to read something new, and would prefer it to be something that grips their curiosity and intelligence? Public humanities writing is an invitation to address the broader audiences most students are intuitively ambitious to find—widening the frame, adapting the voice, once you have acquired enough knowledge of your field to have something to say.

Learning to anticipate your audience is an education in a generalizable art: the ability to “read shrewdly and write well.” I’m quoting, not for the first time, John Guillory’s nicely nonaggrandizing pitch for the consistently marketable skills that humanities degrees provide (“Critical Response II: The Name of Science, the Name of Politics”; Critical Inquiry, vol. 29, no. 3, 2003, p. 541). I see public humanities as a modulation of address, allowing the work we do within the university to reach the numerous, overlapping audiences who stand to benefit from it. Those audiences come to our writing and our performances with various levels of investment, appetite, trust, or distrust. Some are highly specialized; some are already persuaded that the work matters and want a foothold; some are unpersuaded but interested enough to try to engage with the work. To me, it seems the challenging aspect of outward-facing humanities work is getting the correct gauge of a particular audience’s rough starting point, then putting our trained thinking into forms that don’t just popularize but genuinely mediate it and so broaden the conversation.

Do you embrace more explicitly public-oriented curricula and student projects (e.g., innovative dissertation formats)? 

HS: Yes, so long as they are designed from the inside, by people who understand the humanities’ objects and purposes. Broader terms for dissertation and doctoral work have enriched our disciplines, allowing students to write in mixed forms (critical and creative) or engage with institutions (museums, theaters, schools, external archives) or communities in ways that enlarge the scope of the research and writing. Of course, just adding something of substance to the more conventional secondary literature is no small achievement and can often be enough, but Louis Menand names a key ambition of public humanities advocacy when he writes about the desirability of the university having an eye to “actual social and cultural life” (The Marketplace of Ideas; W. W. Norton, 2010, p. 158). Problems emerge, I think, when the content drops out (accusations of anti-intellectualism aren’t hard to find in the wake of public humanities advocacy) and curriculum designers set aside knowledge of the subject; put relevance or impact first, as an abstract aim; and then try to backfill what should be done to get there. Start with the texts, the cultural objects, the political issue, the historical problem. Find the shape for it that best fires curiosity on the part of teachers and students, then design the form of public orientation that captures the reason for the curiosity and will elicit new curiosity from publics beyond the academy.

What can organizations like the MLA do to help communicate the value of the humanities to a broader public? 

HS: Organizations like the MLA are providing an essential service, supporting the full variety of work in languages and literature across a national and international sector with huge disparities in political commitment to the humanities and in institutional resources to support them. Communicating the work that speaks across our range of disciplines and out to other divisions of the university seems to me essential: using online platforms and, when they resume, face-to-face opportunities to prompt fresh affinities with old and new subject matter. We are all learning all the time, whether we are, say, scholars of nineteenth-century literature or experts in medieval manuscript design or critics of Latinx literature or advocates for disability perspectives or environmental protections. Curriculum evolution is a constant matter of common interest, and one of the tasks of professional organizations is to enable that evolution while sustaining our subjects’ breadth and historic depth. Amid so many threatened and actual departmental closures, it seems to me essential to capture and convey work that makes known the different forms of interpretative value we bring to the culture, admits intelligent audiences to that variety, and provides access to the expertise necessary to do cultural work. Finally, keeping the connections open among critics, creative practitioners, schools, and educational and other public institutions is crucial. The humanities don’t stand alone in their work or in the challenges of their public advocacy, but we are oddly unlike the social and natural sciences, and especially medicine, in having more often to remind others (perhaps also ourselves) that what we do is work and that it has effects in and on society.

What can we learn from comparing trends in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia? 

HS: Professional structures in the United Kingdom and Australia have, perhaps more consistently than in the United States, encouraged back-and-forth between specialist and outward-facing activity. That encouragement works to their benefit: it assists the general culture (which finds more routes into the thinking happening at university level); it also makes it easier to recognize and reward careers that balance academic research with cultural engagement activity, trade publication, and writing and editing the student texts that secure the interest of a next generation of college students. The gap between the academy and publics “beyond” tends to look wider in the States, even now. It’s legible in the peculiar self-consciousness that seems to attach to debates in the US about the public humanities: the suggestion that something deliberately civic is happening, a gap being bridged. That the gap remains wide is evident in the persistence of that admirable but difficult beast I think of as “the tenure book”—although it’s only one type of tenure book: brilliant but costive with defended originality. It’s a pleasure and an education reading the increasing number of writers who have declined that mode and are managing to think hard while writing for an audience instead of a committee. In short, there may be something worth learning from more flexible structures of professional reward in other countries—although we, in the UK, certainly have things to learn from the stronger curation of colleagues’ careers in the US.

All our countries are in the grip of a new institutional urgency around demonstrating the humanities’ public benefit to our funders (governments, private funders, loan companies, fee payers). As far as the work of public advocacy for the humanities is concerned, it seems to me that the crucial question before starting is how far there exists a prima facie skepticism about that benefit. The US has just come through (I hope) an exceptionally hostile period of . . . not even scrutiny. Call it preemptive disbelief. Australia has experienced similar periods of hostility, and, with proposed changes to student fees introducing a disincentive to choose the humanities, things may be about to get much worse. If the UK is in a better place, in terms of having high-level defenders and (pre-COVID) stronger integration connecting universities, the arts and heritage sectors, and earlier-stage education, it nevertheless has huge economic challenges ahead. We are not helped by being, for now, systemically wedded to public accounting for public benefit, with government bodies (I am willing to believe) eager for evidence that confirms a value already broadly understood economically, culturally, intuitively, but onerous to provide case by case. I have spent much of the last two years preparing nine impact case studies to demonstrate the public benefit of research in English literature to funders of the UK government in a regular national research-assessment exercise known as the REF (the Research Excellence Framework)—and I don’t recommend attempting to prove the worth of the humanities in this way. If we are defending ourselves with the term public, then public trust—in us, in what we do—seems to me a crucial addition to the repertoire. So, a more informed discussion of trust is in order. Where, and to what extent, do we already have it? How might we gain more of it? Who or what practices can help us do so?

For the past several years, we’ve been trying to rethink what happens in our classrooms. We’ve looked for a set of essential tools we teachers can use to understand what we do and why—the modest and difficult work of helping students learn rather than disrupt or reinvent or any of the other activities described by the buzz words beloved by administrators. We discovered that we needed to consider the kind of questions we ask ourselves, the ways we learn how to see—and, as we’ll discuss in a moment, to hear—our students. The real students in front of us, not our preconceived or projected versions of them.

Then came COVID-19; classes went online, and we were forced to see (or not see) our students differently.

Whatever we think of online teaching, it is—under our current circumstances—a model we must learn to use. The more we read and think about online teaching, however, the more it seems to us that we need to focus less on the medium and more on the teaching itself. Which means that whether we’re teaching online or in the classroom, we need to read and think and write about our students.

Picture this: it’s week 4, and your students have done the reading, you’ve asked the questions, discussion begins. What do you hear, and how do you hear it? You know that you should focus more on what the students are saying than on what you’re saying. In fact, you’ve learned to get out of the way as much as possible. A handful of students become animated as they connect the reading to current events. One chimes in with a personal anecdote related to those same events. Another follows with an anecdote related to that anecdote.

Are your students going off the rails, already? Do you need to reorient them? If you do, are you falling back into the mode of top-down teaching you’ve been trying to avoid? But if you don’t, will the lesson fall apart?

Even in a discussion that stays on target, you might arrive at the end of the class and wonder what you and your students have to show for all this talk.

If a class isn’t a lecture, what is it?

The old high school model of the study hall was usually a quiet time in the student’s schedule, an hour to be frittered away until the next class bell rang. But what if that space were online, reasonably noisy, and imagined as a learning community where we and our students get to study together?

Group Improvisation

In the classroom, we see our students. In the online classroom, we may not see them—speaking to a row of black boxes is an accommodation some of us are willing, or required, to make for students uncomfortable with giving the class a window into their homes. More important, however, is the fact that in class meetings we hear our students.

A classroom can be a cacophonous space, one that evokes the wild complexity of experimental music more than the structured sonority of Mozart. Sometimes it’s hard to hear what’s happening because students’ conversation is so fast you can barely keep up. Sometimes it’s hard to hear because it’s so slow: you’re getting so little from students that you feel trapped, having either to do too much yourself or to suffer through the silence of students who seem checked out.

But are we sure we know what we’re listening for? Does good pedagogy have a distinct acoustic?

If you’ve ever been a music student, you’ll know how important a practice room is. A small, acoustically insulated space, big enough for a piano or bass or trombone, safe from prying ears so that you can make all the necessary mistakes. You spend hours there going over material, as the movements of eyes, hands, mouth, and limbs become second nature, just in time for your intelligence to begin interpreting the music. Technique first, interpretation to follow. A teacher joins you and comments, first on the one, then on the other. We move into larger practice rooms from there, where we learn to hear our bandmates and they learn to hear us.

The classroom—our classrooms—are practice rooms. In them, we teach techniques of learning so that informed, reasoned ideas—that’s the interpretation part—can follow.

But what does learning sound like? What’s the sonic character of a good class? How can we hear our students as they go about transforming themselves? It certainly doesn’t sound like you soloing for an hour, unless the learning in question is your own learnedness. And it doesn’t usually sound like your students taking long solos, either.

Since music is a useful way to think about sound, let’s go further and think of discussion, or “participation,” as a sort of music. Wynton Marsalis suggests that “the bass player is the key. He needs to keep a steady pulse to provide the bottom and to hold the music together” (qtd. in Berliner 353). In most bands, other players appear to be the leaders—trumpeters like Marsalis, pianists, vocalists, saxophonists, guitarists. Bass solos are less frequent, typically, than are those of other instruments, largely because without that consistent beat, the collective structure and movement of the music may break down.

If you’re any sort of musician, dear teacher, you’re the bassist. It may not be the most glamorous job, but in the kind of classroom music we’re trying to make, it’s an essential one. It enables the individual performers to improvise and test the limits of their instruments.

You will urge the ensemble on or slow it down, provide the chord changes, signal the end of a tune. In this kind of music, all have parts to play, some composed in advance and some invented on the spot. Group improvisation in jazz resembles what we want our classrooms to sound like:

[P]layers are perpetually occupied: they must take in the immediate inventions around them while leading their own performances toward emerging musical images, retaining, for the sake of continuity, the features of a quickly receding trail of sound. They constantly interpret one another’s ideas, anticipating them on the basis of the music’s predetermined harmonic events. (Berliner 349)

Perhaps from modesty, we teachers don’t typically admit just what a complex performance a class period is. We’ve planned what will happen, but what really happens is improvised by the students, who can’t—and shouldn’t—give up their own, autonomous selves. It’s essential for us to plan, but planning’s never enough. We’re faced with a difficult task: to cultivate the listening—ours and theirs—that will help students achieve the ambitious work set out in our syllabi.

Hearing Things

Learning sounds like “perhaps,” “maybe,” “I’m not sure if. . . .” We hear learning when we hear students point directly at specific details in course materials rather than gesture vaguely at the gist of those materials. Learning typically sounds better from week to week, but it does not always improve in a perfectly linear progression.

Learning sounds like increasingly sophisticated syntax, as students need “not only . . .  but also” and “on the one hand . . . on the other hand.”

Learning sounds curious, as students ask questions that feel crucial to them, not just for getting through your class but also for gaining an understanding of problems that are theirs as much as yours.

Learning sounds like your students trying out activities at which they are not already experts. To hear those attempts (as writing teachers, we hasten to note that essay derives from the French essayer, “to try or to attempt”), we’ll have to shift our focus from the right answer to the efforts that lead to the right answer.

What sounds like improvisation is actually a product of lots of smaller riffs, theoretical understandings, embodied knowledge, and, only very infrequently, genius. It is and isn’t being invented on the spot: you want students’ contributions during class to show that the work you designed for them is working for them and helping them work. You’re listening to hear if they’re using what you gave them, how they’re using it, and how they’re putting the pieces together.

Sometimes a teacher tells a class directly, “Today, I’m going to be listening for the way you practice the skill on which our last assignment focused. Please don’t be offended when I jump in to help you adjust how you’re using it; this is like refining a jump shot in basketball or a riff on the guitar. We can always get better, and it’s my job to help.”

Framing our listening work this way makes clear what the stakes are for us and for them and can help us distinguish the melody from the noise. Once we’ve explained what we’re listening for, students know what they’re trying to perform, even if they can’t do it yet. Later, when they’re alone at a desk in the library—or in their apartment or parents’ house—starting the evening’s work, remembering your classroom listening will help them realize that someone will listen to this work, too, that it’s not busywork. Their concentration will strive to operate within the range of possibility your listening defined. And, frankly, they may want to try to impress you, assuming you’ve shown you’re capable of being impressed by student work—and that may be unusual for them.

Good classroom listening is reciprocal. Your listening inspires theirs. Because one way that students learn is by listening to others—their peers, experts they encounter through course materials, and, yes, you—the teacher can’t be the only example of someone doing the thing we want students to do. This communicates the wrong message. We communicate our belief that knowledge is a group project—many-headed, many-voiced—by demonstrating our fascination with and admiration for the way others work and think and by showing respect for approaches different from our own.

You encourage students to learn through imitation, to channel in their own writing the many kinds of other voices you listen to together. You put these voices on your syllabus because you thought that listening to them was worth the effort, an effort you help students make by finding ways for them to practice understanding out loud. You do this so that students will become more comfortable with the way our disciplines make and process questions.

Listen well and make listening the core of your presence in the classroom. Let’s remember that our ears, not our mouths, are at the center of our heads. Our syllabus is about what the students do, so when we’re in class, let’s try to hear it.

What Teaching Sounds Like

What should we be listening for from ourselves? Many of us are uncomfortable hearing recordings of our own voices, perhaps because we’re unfamiliar with how we sound to others. And now we’re typically heard through tinny laptop speakers, wireless headsets. What do we sound like when we’re doing our work well?

To answer this question, we might consider what we can hear at the most elemental level of teaching, the one-on-one interactions of office hours—what we do with them, and what they can teach us about the sound of our own voices in class.

We ask, “What are you here to work on today?” Teaching sounds like that. We say, “Tell me how you got to that idea,” or “to that solution,” or “to that interpretation.” Teaching sounds like that, too. We say, “I noticed that here,” pointing to a place in their work, “you refer to the text from last week, but you don’t actually quote it. Where exactly are you looking? Can you show me, right now?” The student pulls out the text, finds a spot on the page, and reads aloud. You ask more questions, and whenever the student gets somewhere you urge, “Write that down!”  Like the classroom, your office—or a one-on-one Zoom session—is a place where students work.

Good questions lead to more work by the students and more questions from us, in a cyclical progression. We use Socratic questioning to get students to carry themselves somewhere we know they need to go. We use something like Socratic questioning to get students to carry themselves somewhere they’ll discover they need to go, a place we can’t entirely anticipate for them.

Like the office, the classroom demands that our participation enable our students to find a way to work better. This is, of course, a harder task when so many people are trying to learn at once. Your questions can’t always respond to individual students or point to work that seems right for just one person. Your students are struggling with different things. But it’s also true that if you’ve designed the work of the term well, there will be some things that most or all of your students are struggling with at once. We try to give as many of them as much of what they need as we can. That’s what good teaching sounds like.

A question causes something to happen next. Good lecturing does, too. A lecture is really a form of participation the teacher engages in, a voice calling other voices, ultimately, to speak.

Done well, the lecture (which is really a lecture-question) can generate good sounds. If you make students wait too long, or they realize you never imagined they’d say anything meaningful in the first place, students check out. If our own utterance is the final word, we’re hearing poor participation, from them but mostly from us. A lecture can be an extended bass solo, too, if we’re doing it wrong. We strive for something better and more modest not because we’re obligated to hear students’ opinions but because we are obligated to listen to students doing something with what we just gave them. Why else would we have given it to them?

Of course, we might mistakenly assume that because we are responding to a student’s question, we are necessarily participating in their learning. We forget that our answer also needs to be a question, needs to point toward something the student will do with that answer. Not just call-and-response, but call-and-response-and-response.

And response and response. What does a community sound like? The dystopian version of the community is groupthink, where the impulse to work together erodes the unique strengths of the individuals who make up the group. When that happens, sloganeering takes over. We know the political consequences of an overwhelming desire for conformity.

When what we’re suggesting here works—and we believe it’s a lot easier to make it work than you might at first think—the classroom community understands that a learning group is only as effective as the recognition of the differences among the individuals who make it up. Standards, requirements, assessments, and other evaluative tools are meant to help all students work and learn within  themselves while at the same time working and learning within a group. And that requires listening to two kinds of sounds: together and apart.

Make good noise. Encourage it in others. Tune your class—and your own ears—to hear the messy, active thing called learning.

Note

This text is adapted from a section of the authors’ Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything (Princeton UP, 2020).

Work Cited

Berliner, Paul. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. U of Chicago P, 1994.

In a recent opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed, George Justice and Carolyn Dever encourage mid-career and senior faculty members to become active university citizens through institutional leadership. The authors—former administrators recently returned to full-time faculty roles—maintain that their administrative backgrounds have redefined and reinvigorated their identities as researchers and educators, influencing how they approach their roles as faculty members.

I share their opinion. Based on my own experiences as well as consideration of the broader humanities landscape, I am persuaded that nonacademic or alternative-academic jobs are central to the survival of the humanities in the twenty-first century. There are many reasons this is the case, including that most PhDs will not be able to secure full-time teaching positions at colleges and universities.¹ As someone who left the academic track for several years only to return to it, my biggest takeaway is that humanities departments need a professoriat composed of faculty members with diverse professional experiences who can actively mentor and train students for a range of careers. This work cannot be sidelined or relegated as service—it needs to occupy a central place in the curriculum and in the intellectual life of humanities departments.

Coming to terms with this reality requires the restructuring of humanities programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, specifically with regard to the need for diversifying the professoriat across the board. The profession must consider hiring faculty members with broader professional experience than what has been typically valued in academic hiring and promotion or—at the very least—training, supporting, and incentivizing faculty members’ professional development in this area through formalized positions and evaluative systems.

Lessons Learned from Going Off-Track

I defended my dissertation in September 2008. Within a week, the economy had tanked, and roughly half the academic jobs posted that cycle were pulled. Like many doctoral students, I had spent most of graduate school preparing exclusively for a career that lacked enough jobs for the number of qualified candidates. My experience on the academic job market that year, as well as the next, was disastrous.

I was unwilling to accept that this was the end of the professional road for me, however. This perspective was informed equally by stubbornness and necessity, as well as by as my working-class, first-generation immigrant background and a healthy dose of anger at a system failing its students on several fronts. While a full-time lecturer at my graduate institution, I furiously applied for jobs in academic administration, as well as in other nonacademic fields. I finally landed one at my graduate institution working in a central administrative office for global programs in a position that incorporated multiple roles, from speech writing to strategic planning and much else in between. None of these roles explicitly required advanced training in the humanities (at least not in the traditional sense), yet all of these responsibilities benefitted from flexible and dynamic skills cultivated by years of extensive reading, writing, teaching, public speaking, and research.

I also approached my job as an opportunity to further the humanities’ core values. In meetings about new global initiatives and campus inclusion strategies, I raised points that seem obvious to humanists but are often overlooked by colleagues with different academic and professional backgrounds. We want to build programs in Peru? Let’s make sure that we adequately staff Spanish language programs and build serious study of Peruvian history and culture into the curriculum, especially for programs aimed at STEM majors with little training in these areas of knowledge. Similar opportunities to enhance diversity and inclusion using humanities perspectives existed in on-campus support programs for students and faculty members. Do faculty members across disciplines need to be more globally aware in the case studies, readings, and examples they use in class? Let’s create resources to help facilitate more diverse content and perspectives that will help math majors, engineers, and economists become better global citizens. Despite taking a break from teaching, I felt satisfied that I was doing my part to support structural changes at the university that made a difference inside and outside the classroom.

One of the questions I hear most about nonteaching careers is whether they will be as intellectually challenging as traditional academic positions. I won’t lie and say that I was always happy with my job during this time (a persistent woe no matter one’s employment situation), but I was never bored. Stepping outside the classroom and the library, for the first time I found myself actively experiencing a university as a university instead of as a discipline. I learned how to see the university as an aggregation of its many parts—academic, administrative, support services, outreach—and this was intellectually invigorating.

Three years later I reentered the job market transformed, applying to both nonacademic and academic positions. I was interested in using my unconventional experience to guide my way through an academic career if I was lucky enough to get back onto the academic track. And despite most people saying that it could not be done—that I was likely no longer legible as an academic because of my time away from a traditional position—I landed a research-intensive job and began my tenure clock in 2013.

Strategies for Departments and Faculty Members

Despite small gains in specific areas of specialization, the professoriat has never recovered from the economic crash a decade ago, and the most recent numbers indicate a historic low for tenure-track jobs in the humanities. The volatile future for tenure-track jobs continues to put pressure on PhD programs to prepare doctoral students for a range of careers and to support dissertations and theses produced in new forms and media. However, despite this range of commendable efforts, relatively few traditional academics are sufficiently prepared to train and mentor humanities majors in a way that reframes the conversation around career diversity. Ethically and fiscally effective answers to the employment realities faced by our graduates will require us to restructure programs to meet the career needs of humanities students as well as the institutional demands of twenty-first-century colleges and universities.

Such change needs to happen on multiple fronts, but here I want to focus on retooling course objectives and assignments to make them more explicitly connected to the full range of professional skills developed by humanities degrees from BAs to PhDs (see Katopodis and Davidson). Professionalization is a crucial aspect of restructuring humanities education that nonetheless remains undervalued precisely because there are few faculty members with related experience to help advance this conversation theoretically and practically. Humanities departments must build strong connections both inside and outside the academy, particularly remaining in contact and learning from graduates who have built successful careers in a range of professions. Many of our alumni are eager to mentor current students and recent graduates with regard to professional development, and we need to see these individuals as intellectual resources that are also able to help faculty members adapt courses, assignments, and learning goals to better prepare students for a range of careers.

There are also structural impediments to this important work, both at the level of individual institutions and in the profession at large. Career education and professional mentoring are often treated as service work in the humanities, which is to say that collectively the disciplines do not see it as a core function of advancing academic profiles. In the face of mounting market pressures, it should come as no surprise that our colleagues in more professionally focused fields are increasing their share of undergraduate majors (if not overall course enrollments), and their graduate programs are stable and growing. Career education is structurally embedded into most of these programs, and faculty members see professional training and mentoring as a core part of the intellectual work that they do. Although humanities and art departments aren’t vocational training centers, the future of our collective disciplines depends on faculty members and students being able to articulate the value of the arts and humanities to the public and in professional life beyond the academy. Humanities and arts majors need faculty members to help them translate the value of their coursework and demonstrate the skills they develop as liberal arts majors as they seek jobs and transition from the classroom into the professional world. This work cannot be accomplished by seeing career education and professional mentoring as add-ons or extraneous (if not prohibitive) to the work that we do in the humanities—it needs to be infused into the curriculum at all stages, as well as into the intellectual life of academic departments.

One way to do this is to offer (perhaps even require) career education courses as part of the regular for-credit curriculum. At the University of Arkansas, where I currently teach, I’ve offered two different versions of credit-bearing courses focused on how to get a job with an English degree since 2014, one designed for undergraduates and master’s students, the other focused on navigating job markets with a PhD. I teach these courses as the department’s schedule permits alongside my usual courses in nineteenth-century literature and culture. These courses are designed to allow students the space and time to discuss, reflect, and take inventory of the skills they’ve learned in their humanities courses and to explore a range of viable career options that they find meaningful. This is no small undertaking. Students spend hours reading career guides and articles, conducting informational interviews, crafting job documents, and honing their storytelling skills to become more effective at interviews and networking.

Incorporating career education and mentoring into the intellectual life of the humanities requires institutions to rethink faculty evaluation—particularly teaching and research—because this work necessitates reading (and perhaps publishing) career guides, working collaboratively with career centers, populating professional networks with people outside the academy, and building professional pipelines that include ethical internships and co-op programs for our students. For several years, both the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association have signaled to faculty members that these are important endeavors. However, as someone who has attended many Connected Academics sessions over the last few years, it’s clear that the attendees are primarily department chairs and directors of graduate studies. It’s time for humanities faculty members at large to see this work as an essential part of our professional responsibilities and as central to the work that the humanities must accomplish over the next generation.

Moving forward, the skills, experiences, and professional interests of faculty members must adapt to these disciplinary needs. New scholars hired on the tenure track should be selected in part for their ability to advance these conversations and dedicate to them the energy that they deserve. Existing faculty members should either seriously consider administrative appointments or publicly engaged work that builds their professional areas of expertise to include career diversity. Structural change must support faculty development in these areas through a combination of time allotted for curriculum development, funding for travel to conferences specifically geared toward addressing career diversity and education, and assessment systems that value these professional issues in annual evaluations, as well as in building cases for promotion and tenure.

Until we collectively start seeing career education as part of the central intellectual work we do as humanists, we will continue to hemorrhage undergraduate majors, watch graduate enrollments dwindle, and experience the ongoing erasure of the professoriat as a profession. We owe this work to our students—undergraduate and graduate alike—as well as to the future of our collective disciplines. At all levels, professional precarity is poised to be the death of humanities unless we agree that career opportunities and financial stability are humanistic values insofar as they are necessary for creativity expression and self-actualization. We need humanists in all types of professional positions both inside and outside the academy to restore and reinvent the already proven value of the humanities in professional, political, and personal arenas.

Note

1 Although there has been a recent turn of replacing the alternative academic, or alt-ac, terminology, I use the term here at times not only because it was the most commonly used term to describe careers off the tenure-track during the years I worked in this role but also because it remains a useful way of understanding the many types of careers in higher education in which PhDs may very well continue to identify as academics even if traditional humanities-focused teaching and research are not their central job responsibilities. Career diversity is a useful term that I believe includes alt-ac, covering a much wider range of career options for humanities graduates.

Works Cited

Justice, George, and Carolyn Dever. “The Intellectual Joys of University Administration—No, Really!” Inside Higher Ed, 19 Sept. 2019, www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/09/19/how-jobs-institutional-level-administration-can-strongly-benefit-faculty-members.

Katapodis, Christina, and Cathy N. Davidson. “Changing Our Classrooms to Prepare Students for a Challenging World.” Profession, Fall 2019, profession.mla.org/changing-our-classrooms-to-prepare-students-for-a-challenging-world/.

Academics live with the expectation that they must produce scholarly publications to remain in their given fields. For some, this is a privilege and a pleasure to carry out. For others, it may or may not be so pleasurable, to put it euphemistically. Balancing a fluid yet ever tighter schedule of service, teaching, administrative responsibilities, and scholarly pursuits can be formidable for many, particularly in an environment that lacks temporal structure and where support for the process of scholarly writing is often left for individual faculty members to discover on their own. Writing groups have been demonstrated in many cases to successfully address the at-large professional challenge of producing written work for publication. This piece presents what writing groups tend to entail and what issues they can help the profession alleviate.¹

What Is a Writing Group?

Variations on writing groups abound, yet they share a number of core features. As Claire Aitchison and Cally Guerin state in Writing Groups for Doctoral Education and Beyond, virtually all types place “value in creating separate, safe and collegial possibilities where researchers can focus explicitly on writing as a central activity of academic life” (“Writing Groups” 12). Companionship and connectedness are hallmarks. I note the variations here:

• Location: On- or off-campus are possibilities, including residences, eateries, and out-of-the way campus locations specifically dedicated to writing.
• Participants: Two to twenty or more members, of varying or homogeneous ranks, disciplines, and sexes. Some single-sex groups emerged in recognition that women in academia statistically take longer than men to obtain promotions (Alexander et al.; MLA Committee), and solidarity in all-female groups has proven valuable to participants.
• Formats: Range from loosely to heavily structured, with or without a designated faculty facilitator, with or without peer review feedback, often with a statement of goals at the onset and concluding acknowledgement of whether goals were met, planned recreation or refreshment times, and long-term or short-term group times.

When feedback is not a part of the process, specialists in faculty development refer to accountability writing groups. The value comes from the group expectation that one will take part according to an agreed-upon schedule. This obviates one of the most vexing problems among researching academics—that virtually all of one’s time (in addition to overtime) can easily end up devoted to teaching and service responsibilities, leaving nothing for what is often mischaracterized as one’s own work (i.e., scholarly writing), a misnomer that floats in a mix of impediments to professional success.

What Holds Writers Back?

Hindering academic writers from producing manuscripts are the mixed messages on campuses about the type of work that is to take place there. We have students and classrooms, so there is no mistaking that teaching and advising have to happen. We have endless streams of e-mails and meetings for a plethora of service and committee work, and we often set no bounds for these myriad activities, and thus we can have a tendency to allow service (and teaching) to know no bounds. But where does scholarly research happen? If one typically works in isolation, a ubiquitous occurrence, this prime function of the profession often gets relegated to certain weekends, holidays, or summers, if it happens at all. Taking place during one’s so-called private time lends credence to the falsehood that it is one’s own work.

Working in isolation is problematic for other reasons as well. It can lead to a “competitive academic individualism . . . connected to the fear of falling” (Holt and Anderson 197). When unable to free time for writing and research or when experiencing writer’s block, academics can suffer a further freezing effect when hearing about the publication successes of fellow colleagues. Anthony Paré suggests that this psychosocial destructive pattern is “perverse” and “ridiculous” (24, 25) and that a “social view of writing . . . offers a damning critique of the individualism imposed on writers within most educational settings” (23). The foundational problem is that concrete institutional support for the act of writing, a mandated act, is more often than not nonexistent at work sites. As with many deep-rooted social problems, this one is generally a taboo topic. For a colleague to express that they experience difficulties with the act of writing, one of the principle duties of an academic, is to risk perceptions of weakness and individual failure, traits that are anathema in a neutral environment, let alone in one that may be hypercompetitive. Those who summon the courage to carve out periodic times to write run the risk of acquiring reputations of being brutal, ruthless, disloyal, and unprofessional (Murray 81). The perception frequently is that one’s colleagues suffer through being put on hold unfairly while one attends to publishing needs. Thus, while star authors are heroes for emulation, the procedural work to attain that status is a tortured and lonely exercise. Such a culture is schizophrenic. The systemic failure and dysfunctionality associated with the usual isolationism of the scholarly production mandate is all the more to be lamented when, at the heart of it, we readily identify the issue at hand and have even taught others how to navigate it.

When we teach our students to write, we emphasize the importance of finding an appropriate work space, following a schedule, making use of peer readers and editors, and enjoying the work. Certainly, a faculty member’s context is different from that of a student, but the basic principles can translate across contexts, if we temporarily ignore the psychosocial layers of added complexity at the professional level. The work space should be where one is uninterrupted. A schedule for someone with a professional requirement to write ought to be regular and adhered to over long periods of time to promote sustainability. Peers for feedback are beneficial but not always necessary. Here is where the variation in work group types comes in. If one functions more optimally with peer feedback, then that system should be cultivated, but one also has the option to receive feedback through peer review from colleagues working directly with journal or publishing venues. A writer can gain the other social benefits when working in an accountability group (i.e., without feedback). Colleagues provide a framework to work within that adds psychosocial gravitas to the event of writing, warding off stigmas of neglecting other work, increasing the likelihood that the schedule will be maintained, and allowing academics to more readily experience the joy of successfully pursuing their research.

Benefits and Testimonies

The benefits of creating a community and space for rewarding work are manifold. As social animals, we thrive under positive social contexts. Supporting one another in a group setting, however that is carried out, does much to push the institutional culture in a direction more welcoming to openness, intellectual curiosity, collaboration, and scholarly productivity. The benefits are borne out in testimonies of participants from a variety of writing group types: “After attending [the writing group], I was able to write over 100,000 words in 2012. It was literally just a tiny bit of feedback about my writing but it was a very big conceptual shift and I just knew what to do”; “The time and collaborative research atmosphere was perfect. Research was ‘the only’ thing in the world at that time. [The writing group] was delightful” (qtd. in Knowles and Grant 115, 114).  “What has helped me most about [the writing group] is the feedback you get from people who read your work. They ask you questions and you have to explain what you mean, which forces you to organize your own thoughts’ (personal communication). Participants often prize the benefits of metatalk: “Talking about work during breaks was helpful”; “I was inspired by others, the projects they were working on”; “Camaraderie and moral support . . . helped me emerge with new energy for my own project” (personal communication).

The overwhelmingly positive experiences of participants noted in the literature attest to the great gains from participation in writing groups of all kinds. Some gains are finite in scope related to completion of a certain project (e.g., an article, book, and even dissertations—writing groups are also catching on among graduate students), including grant proposals. Other valuable outcomes are of the more durative sort, and they serve as powerful records speaking to the culture of change that is needed and that is taking hold in some institutions. These greater wash-back effects include changes in status, such as receiving tenure or getting promoted, receiving academic positions, and rediscovering the pleasure innate in research, and in enjoying the positive, supportive, and communal work structure that can flourish parallel to collegial endeavors such as writing groups. Growing numbers of participants at Indiana University attest to the success of their writing group programs: they began several years ago with 17 participants and are now managing 217 faculty participants. One colleague there notes that with “support like this, we are much more likely to achieve what is expected for tenure—importantly, we are much more likely to want to remain at IU where we feel a part of a unique community” (Alexander et al).

Implementing Writing Groups

Much of the evidence for writing groups is anecdotal, and more empirical research is needed, but the evidence thus far appears overwhelmingly in favor of the implementation of writing groups to enhance productivity and the work environment. Pat Thomson and Barbara Kamler lay it straight out: “the most enjoyable but also productive institutions are those where writing is a collective practice and a common endeavour” (6). Below I summarize overall findings:

• A frequent ingredient in the recipe for success lies in the type of group with which one works.
• Colleagues should carefully determine what type of feedback they may desire or, if no feedback is sought, seek an accountability group. Taking either action ensures that a given amount of time each week can be scheduled for the all-important research work.
• Although most participants appear to enjoy and richly benefit from writing groups, they are not for everyone. Some colleagues carry out their research happily and alone.
• If underrepresented demographics are intentionally sought out for optional participation in a group, this can send the message that an institution is serious about matters of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
• Most groups, including the Indiana University colleagues, identified having a faculty facilitator and a structured orientation to set expectations as vital to success.
• If a writing group is supported or created by the institution, it is important for participants to understand that they are not being monitored per se by administrators but, rather, that systemic structures are in place to take advantage of and to enhance research opportunities.

Having institutional support of some kind can also send a powerful signal that the research process, not just the research outcome, is of paramount importance. Without a healthy research process, there is no sustainable, healthy research culture.

Note

1 This article draws heavily but not exhaustively on “To Rally for Writing Groups: A Necessity for the Profession,” published in the ADFL Bulletin, vol. 44, no. 2, 2018 (pp. 81–89, doi:10.1632/adfl.44.2.81).

Works Cited

Aitchison, Claire, and Cally Guerin, editors. Writing Groups for Doctoral Education and Beyond. Routledge, 2014.

—. “Writing Groups, Pedagogy, Theory and Practice: An Introduction.” Aitchison and Guerin, Writing Groups, pp. 3–17.

Alexander, Joyce, et al. “Addressing Gendered Practices through Women’s Writing Groups.” Academe: Bulletin of the AAUP, May–June 2018, www.aaup.org/article/addressing-gendered-practices-through-womens-writing-groups.

Holt, Mara, and Leon Anderson. “The Way We Work Now.” Profession, 2012, pp. 192–203.

Knowles, Sally, and Barbara Grant. “Walking the Labyrinth: The Holding Embrace of Academic Writing Retreats.” Aitchison and Guerin, Writing Groups, pp. 110–27.

MLA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession. “Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey.” Profession, 2009, pp. 313–50.

Murray, Rowena. “‘It’s Not a Hobby’: Reconceptualizing the Place of Writing in Academic Work.” Higher Education, vol. 66, no. 1, 2013, pp. 79–91.

Paré, Anthony. “Writing Together for Many Reasons: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives.” Aitchison and Guerin, Writing Groups, pp. 18–29.

Thomson, Pat, and Barbara Kamler. Writing for Peer Reviewed Journals. Routledge, 2013.