Scholarship research criticism

From Studyplace

What are the distinctive characteristics of scholarship, research, and criticism and are these balanced appropriately in the contemporary academic world?

Intellect leavens experience in three ways — with scholarship, research, and criticism. In lived experience, scholarship, research, and criticism overlap and in the person they combine to make the complete academic, yet conceptually they have significant differences, which become clearer if we think about them as ideal-types. Scholarship begins from the cumulative state of a field, the broader the better, and integrates findings, new and old, addressing a fundamental concern by crafting a coherent understanding of the whole. Research starts with a well-defined, specific question, to which the researcher seeks a clear and definite answer using peer-sanctioned methods and techniques. Criticism addresses a spectrum of aims and accomplishments and informs selection among them, strengthening assent, deepening appreciation, provoking doubt, channeling attention and energy.

Problematic role of research

In practice, research is taking on a role, central yet problematic. Research is an important means in the conduct of scholarship and criticism, for scholars and critics alike must answer numerous particular questions in the exercise of their craft. In addition, research is also an important purpose, one that is ever more central in academe: not a means, but an end, the dominant purpose defining elite effort — the essential character of the research university itself. Leading universities have become research universities because they depend financially on funded research and their faculty members rely on the publication of peer-reviewed research for promotion and tenure. Such activity is a great source of intellectual energy in the arts and sciences. As researchers bring their specific results together as the basis for theoretical abstraction, they energize scholarship, and as they uncover unexpected specifics they empower criticism. In addition, research powers much professional work, as distinct from the academic, for good research tends to be use-driven, conducive to interested, not disinterested, results, and it accentuates findings with instrumental value directly applicable to a specific form of activity. In contrast, scholarship and criticism, even when energized by significant research programs, often have less direct instrumental value. Instead, they leaven experience substantially through their capacity to have lasting educative effects as a student uses them to define her values, standards, and skills. The pay off is neither direct nor immediate, and consequently the arts and sciences need recurrently to explain the educative value of reflective scholarship and critical discourse with care, which disinterested scholarship on education can help to do.

With respect to the educative power of the arts and sciences, the ascendance of research in academic culture presents important, but subtle difficulties. The prestige of research conduces to instructional practices that differ in important ways from those that would pertain with scholarship, research, and criticism in a proper balance. Pedagogically, the distinction between the professional and the academic relates closely to a distinction between the applicable lessons and the formative education. In her studies, a student seeks both applicable knowledge and formative experience, one problem being that the former is relatively easy to identify and assess while the latter can be obscure and hard to measure. Formative education is all that which a student builds up over time by way of characteristic interests, proclivities, hopes, skills, considered purposes, attachments, and a unique, dynamic mix of knowledge, lore, information, and experience.^[1]

A subtle problem is now building because it arises, not directly, but as a side effect. All three — scholarship, research, and criticism — offer students significant formative experience. Whenever a student is learning by doing, the process is deeply formative, and as a student learns to be a researcher, as all students should, she does so by doing research, a deeply formative engagement. In this sense, the formative induction into the activities of scholarship, research, and criticism are all of one piece. The difference arises with the way the results of research enter into education in comparison to those of scholarship and criticism.

Whatever the field, the accomplished contributor deploys all three — scholarship, research, and criticism — in a well-unified effort. Maintaining the balance becomes more difficult, however. Within the arts and sciences, the prestige of research as an end product grows and that of scholarship and criticism shrinks, for research produces the coin of tangible worth, applicable answers to evident questions. Education as accumulating applicable knowledge gains prestige at the expense of education as formative experience. This makes the formative tasks of scholarship and criticism much harder and detracts from the education of researchers as well. Doctoral students perceive the instrumental value of research work and readily plunge into it, accepting unreflectively the constraints of one or another formal methodology that they find at hand, eager to produce some results. In this process, moreover, they are often impatient with the scholarly effort required to base that research on a well-developed theoretical grounding and to extract its full, critical implications for theory and practice. In this way, research itself as a formative educational experience suffers from the prestige of its results. With such influences steadily shaping educational practice at every level, the measurement of recollected information, research findings at one or another remove, and some superficial skills, increasingly mark educational attainment.

An education in the results of research alone does not suffice; the disinterested mission of the arts and sciences thrives through formative engagement in scholarship, research, and criticism, the power of which is more enlightening than instrumental. How does this formative enlightening take place? By sustained engagement in scholarship, a student develops a large conceptual framework with which she can judge the importance and plausibility of diverse ideas and assertions. By actively doing research, a student forms habits of testing how well different claims are grounded and perceives the strengths and weaknesses in assertions of validity. By producing reasoned criticism, a student acquires a considered structure of priorities to draw upon in the endless process of making choices in response to all the claims upon her attention and commitment. The arts and sciences populate a thoughtful public as a steady stream of university students form their intellectual standards by engaging in the work of scholarship, research, and criticism for substantial periods. And the arts and sciences nourish that thoughtful public through a continuing flow of publication, renewing and extending the scholarship, research, and criticism active in the different realms of public discussion.

Traditionally, the formative role of scholarship, research, and criticism seemed self-evident or relatively easy to uphold. As professionalism has spread into the arts and sciences, the rationale for more and more work appears to be instrumental, if not to high public purpose, at least to the interests of academics themselves. Under such circumstances, the mission of the arts and sciences, exercised through the formative uses of scholarship, research, and criticism, becomes less self-evident. More and more, academics have difficulty showing employment conscious students, their parents, and the public how study in the arts and sciences should differ from gaining marketable skills through professional preparation. robbie 14:42, 19 November 2006 (EST)

1. ↑ In German there is a literature, both extensive and deep, on formative education, Bildung, but it is largely ignored in English. It is important to reinvigorate the ability to think well about the formative effects of education as they develop over the full period of a person's formative experience. Schooling, and the study of education as schooling, pigeonholes educational experience into grades and subjects and assesses the fragmentary results as these are evident in cohorts, not the integral development achieved by the person. Educational scholarship needs to regain contact with ideas about Bildung, and a good place to start is "Bildsamkeit/Bildung" by Dietrich Benner and Friedhelm Brüggen, which surveys it well in Historisches Wörterbuch der Pädagogik edited by Dietrich Benner and Jürgen Oelkers (Weinheim: Beltz Verlag, 2004), pp. 174-215.