Perhaps my concern was prompted by one of the morning's plenary speakers, Rebecca Rickly, who spoke on "Making Waves in the Research Culture of Graduate Programs." Rebecca's concern was that we haven't done a sufficient job of preparing graduate students in rhetoric and composition to understand three fundamental components of empirical research:
- Good researchers can correctly articulate their research methods - which means, as researchers, we have to understand the research methods we use and why we use them;
- Good researchers can effectively focus research projects to answer specific questions in a set time frame; and
- Good researchers appreciate how "messy" research is, but to develop this appreciation, we have to do hands-on research.
Rebecca's major complaint about graduate research methods courses is that they don't provide enough of #3 - enough hands-on opportunities for research. She lamented that the outcome of most graduate research methods courses is either (or both) a literature review or a research prospectus. In her classes, she explained, she had students undertake a "micro-study," to see how difficult, messy, and downright frustrating empirical research can be.
To me, a literature review and research prospectus doesn't seem like small potatoes as an outcome for a methods course, perhaps because this is how I was prepared: At SIU-Carbondale, Dr. Ronda Dively taught our methods course, and she introduced us to quantitative and qualitative as well as experimental and naturalistic methods. She taught us a flexible conception of research - how to use the literature review to find, refine, and shape our research questions; how to use the methodology description of a prospectus to anticipate and address methodological pitfalls and counterarguments to our procedures; how to determine the best methodology for answering our research questions. But the methods course wasn't the end of my education as a researcher. For that, I had my dissertation itself, which Dr. Dively directed, and through which I learned a whole lot about empirical methodology.
Now, here's my concern. I worked with some tremendously intelligent Master's and PhD students at the RNF, but by in large, these students seemed to have a very limited understanding of how empirical research works. For instance, one PhD student wanted to study TA resistance to graduate pedagogy seminars, but her plan - and she was well into the study - was simply to look for resistance by reviewing those seminars' syllabi. She didn't seem to have considered whether or not this was an effective means of answering her question; she seemed to have chosen it because it allowed her to circumvent IRB approval for using human subjects.
We might ascribe this simply to laziness, except that this young woman was obviously dedicated enough to bring her plans to a research network forum a thousand miles from her home institution, on her own dime. She obviously cared about the research. She just didn't seem to know how to go about answering her question, or even, it seemed to me, how to ask a good question that could be explored through empirical research. Her presentation, and the presentation of many other grad students I sat with or spoke to during the RNF, convinced me that something has gone wrong in our graduate programs, and I don't think it falls squarely onto the research methods courses. Rather, I think it's a lack of hands-on direction by dissertation and thesis committees.
A research methods course is only an introduction to empirical methodology. It is a necessary introduction, but unlike Rebecca Rickly, I don't think it can also usefully encompass hands-on research - to learn about methodology while also trying to undertake a research project is simply too difficult, as even Rebecca admitted when she said that her micro-projects are designed to show students "how to fail" at research. But after a methods course, as novice researchers undertake their first empirical projects, they need dissertation and thesis directors who aren't so inundated with other work - their administrative roles, their teaching loads, their own research projects - that they can't truly mentor a new researcher through the process of an empirical inquiry. And novice researchers also need committees who insist on seeing multiple drafts, even at early stages, to understand how this young researcher will situate her/his research within the on-going scholarly conversation and if s/he can effectively describe and defend the methodologies s/he has used.
Without this one-on-one, hands-on guidance, the graduates from our rhet/comp MA and PhD programs are not going to be prepared, as I believe I was, to become successful empirical researchers. And empirical research is simply too vital to our field for us to let it slip through the cracks.
What can be done? Well, I think it comes down to a recognition that directing theses and dissertations of an empirical nature requires a different, more time-consuming approach than directing most library-based projects. Directors need to be careful how many graduate students they take on; they need to arrange their teaching and administrative loads to allow for this extra work, and they need to go before their department chairs and deans with arguments for more course and administrative releases to allow them to have more time for one-to-one mentoring.
Wherever possible, we also need to be connecting novice researchers with more experienced researchers, whether that be an MA student with a PhD student or any graduate student with other scholars through programs like the RNF. Directors can't do everything; we need excellent research mentorship, within and beyond our individual institutions, to ensure that our rhet/comp graduate students are prepared to be rigorous, successful researchers for the field.
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