Does your teaching feed back into your research?

15 December 2010

By Sandrine Berges

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We all moan about teaching. Every now and again. We say it takes time away from research, and it does. But does it really take away from our research output? I think a lot of people who work in the humanities will have to agree, reluctantly, maybe, and certainly not to anyone's face, that in fact it does not.

Here's why.

First there is the time thing. If you're doing research in the humanities, it's likely that most of your research will be either reading or writing. Or revising. And if you're really serious about it, thinking. None of that is really time sensitive. Sure, if you only have three one hour periods to dedicate to your research, that 's not going to be enough. But if you have a research position, then you probably have more time than this. On the other hand if you've ever been in a position when you actually have nothing but research time, like a sabbatical or a post-doc, you probably found that you weren't doing all that much more than when you were teaching. Productivity just doesn't increase at the same rate as time. Sad but true. Just cast your mind back to your Ph.D days: how many of you were out bed in time to put in an eight hour work day? I certainly wasn't. In fact, if it hadn't been for the teaching jobs I had to do, I probably wouldn't have gotten out of bed at all... Teaching – and then a baby- gave me the structure I needed to focus on reading and writing. My Ph.D got written on three hours a day slots.

Even now, I find it a lot easier not waste time I have pegged as 'research time' on my schedule just because I know that's all I've got. As a result I'm more productive.

But enough about time management – we each have our own ways of managing our time and I'm sure you don't need advice.

The real contribution teaching makes to my research is content related: teaching new materials forces me to focus on new areas of research. Debating it with students, trying to get them to understand it and to respond to it helps new ideas form which then become books or articles. It's one thing to try out your ideas on a class of graduate students and see how they respond before you send something out to a journal – that means you have to be one of the priviledged few who teach a graduate class in their area of specialisation. But if, like me, you teach mostly general courses to undergraduates, you can't do that. If you do, you won't be getting through to your students and they certainly won't be giving you useful feedback.

But what I'm talking about is different. Take this example. I discovered the author I'm currently contracted to write a book on because I had to teach her book. Being forced to read a new text, to tackle new ideas in such a way that I could present them to a bunch of undergraduates has so far produced a published article, one in press, a conference in Italy, and a book contract. Not bad. My previous book also benefitted no end from the fact that I had to read and re-read several of Plato's dialogue for a course. The examples I came up with to grab students' attention mostly ended up in papers and in the book.

When I've taught a class, while I'm walking back to my office, making a cup of tea, switching on my email, I usually think about what I've said, what students said, how well I presented the material, how they engaged with it. This sort of free-form thinking very often produces something which turns up in my research. I don't think I'm particularly skilled at this, or lucky. I think that if we're honest, a lot of us in the humanities do this.