Research and Teaching on a Graduate Methods Course
Contact details
Philip Crang,
Department of Geography,
Royal Holloway,
University of London,
Egham Hill,
Egham. Surrey,
UK
TW20 0EX
Tel: 01784 443645
Email: p.crang@rhul.ac.uk
Classification Category
- Developing student appreciation of research in the discipline.
- Development of student research skills (explicitly, in addition to other disciplinary and generic skills).
- Using assignments which involve elements of research processes (e.g.
literature reviews, bidding for grants, drafting bids or project outlines,
analysing existing project data, presenting at a 'conference').
Context
- Course/unit/module title: Methods and Techniques in Cultural Geography
- Course title: MA in Cultural Geography (Research)
- Level: M
What does the teacher do?
The MA Cultural Geography (Research) is a one year taught Masters programme that seeks to combine substantive specialisation with a broadly based research training for graduate students. The programme has always been 'recognised' by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), most recently acting as one of two first year pathways in our 1+3 Human Geography postgraduate degree programme. About half the students leaving the programme progress to doctoral research; about half use the degree as a more specialised qualification to complement their generalist undergraduate degree. The programme is both a joy to teach on and central to our development of an internationally recognised school of graduate research students.
Like many Human Geography 'research training' programmes, one problem we face is how to teach the methods and techniques specified by the ESRC as essential to any research training programme in Human Geography when most of these will already have been the subject matter of students' undergraduate techniques courses. Our solution has been to replace sessions that review the standard literatures on the strengths, weaknesses and practices of particular methods with workshops that immerse students in the particular research practices and issues of recent or on-going research in the department. This allows students to work hands on with materials (so, for example, we don't talk about qualitative data analysis in the abstract, instead students work on full transcripts from on-going research projects), provides a sense of issues being confronted in context (so issues of positionality and reflexivity are addressed through students revisiting past research of their own), and inducts students into the research cultures of the department.
A second issue is assessment requirements. In order to signal the place of students in our research community, the course is assessed using methods very similar to those of peer review within academia. There are no examinations. 50% of the overall assessment is counted for by students' independent dissertations. More generally, students fashion their own sense of what they want to write about. For example, in the element concerned with 'contemporary cultural geographies', students discuss with staff the 'term papers' they want to produce, looking to review what they understand as important research trends and agendas rather than responding to pre-set questions. These papers are also 'formatively' assessed in the same way that research outputs are. Students submit a draft of their paper and then receive formative feedback before choosing whether to revise that paper for final summative assessment. We try hard to institute a research culture in which the dialogue of ideas is more important than the allocation of a grade, though wider developments such as the need for generic marking criteria have made this harder.
In this relatively small programme, then, we have the luxury of uniting research and teaching not only in terms of content but also in terms of the social and textual forms of intellectual engagement, judgement and debate. But, potentially, will the imposition of an audit culture distanced from research make this increasingly difficult?