During this brown bag series in October 2016, Janet Siltanen talked about teaching research design.
Thanks to those who participated in our first teaching brown bag of the term. I was very pleased to have the opportunity to talk about my experience teaching research design to graduate students. I’ve done this teaching for quite a few years in the context of a course (titled the Logic of the Research Process) taken by almost all of our incoming MA students. The purpose of the course is to help students identify issues they need to address in the process of doing research, and to help them make progress in formulating research designs that speak to matters that interest them. Initially, I taught research design in the way it is done in many such courses: with the aim of having students complete at least a first draft of a thesis proposal, and using the department’s thesis proposal template as the guiding structure for this purpose. However, I was finding the proposal template unhelpful as a learning tool, and was soon searching for a different pedagogical approach. I became increasingly interested in how to incorporate the open-ended, creative, iterative aspects of constructing research designs in my teaching.
My answer to this question developed from some exploratory work I did with a PhD student I was supervising. She was trying to decide between two different doctoral research possibilities. I suggested she do a very short – 1 or 2 page – statement for each possibility to see if getting down the basic core of each project might provide a clue as to which was more exciting for her. We spoke about identifying and isolating the central spine of each project, the bare bones, so that the two possibilities could be more easily compared. We started to call these condensed representations of her possible thesis projects design spines. As we worked through this process, I started to see potential in the design spine as a pedagogical tool.
For several years now, I have been piloting, refining and adding to the use of the design spine in my teaching of research design. For example, I have introduced a regular slot during class time for free writing as an important aspect of design development, and added a kinetic dimension to the peer review of the design spine. I’ve shared this teaching experience with others at Carleton who also now use this approach in their graduate methods teaching, and I myself have extended its use to my work with Sociology PhD students in the second year of our Doctoral Seminar. Feedback from the students has been uniformly positive, and they have also done their own creative extensions of the design spine idea (for example, as a way to plan course papers or thesis chapters, and, in one case, as a way to structure the co-creation of community-based learning activities).
Part of my interest in talking with my colleagues about my experience in developing this pedagogical tool is that I would like to share this experience more widely and, in particular, to write something about it. Working out how to write about this, and how to identify possible publication venues, has been a challenge. It was great to get from my colleagues different ideas and perspectives on how write about our experiences of graduate teaching — and also to receive their strong encouragement to do so.