What do connections between research and teaching look like?Martin Oliver
Although it’s widely advocated that connections should be built between research and teaching, it’s less clear how this happens in practice. This paper will explore how a sociomaterial perspective can help develop clearer accounts of how such connections have, and have not, been achieved.
Links between research activity and teaching quality were once described as "an enduring myth", leading to a programme of research to identify pedagogic approaches that can help build such connections. Healey (2005) notes, however, that opportunities for such research-based education can vary widely across disciplines.
This variation depends partly on the social norms around research, but also on the resources, tools and technologies that it involves. Latour & Woolgar’s studies (1979) showed that successful laboratory work required the coordination of tissue samples, graphs and desks, and that the scientific process could not proceed without these often mundane things.
Studies of students’ digital literacies show that in Education and related social sciences, studying involves books, photocopies, pens, iPads, library tables, buses, field sites, software packages, data sticks, highlighter pens and the movement of texts from digital to print format and back again (Gourlay & Oliver, 2013). Much of this mirrors the practices of researchers active in these fields.
Such studies raise questions about wider patterns of connection between study and research. When do these resources cross boundaries between research and teaching practice? What variations exist across disciplines, and why? What can following these mundane things tell us about the success – or otherwise – of connections between research and teaching?