Burke, M. (Michael)

Undergraduate Research

I am the new coordinator of Undergraduate Research (UR) at University College Roosevelt (UCR) in Middelburg. This is in addition to my post as college director of faculty research. When I tell colleagues in Utrecht about my new UR post they more often than not look at me with a perplexed and glazed expression. There is then often an awkward silence, while imaginary tumbleweed blows across the scene, accompanied by a faint echo of a spaghetti western theme tune playing in the distance of our mnemonic auditory cortices. The silence is then usually broken with an exclamation: “Undergraduate research … What’s that then?” This is the cue for me to set off explaining the ins and outs of UR, knowing full well that no one is really listening at the other end. It is true that for most academics the two words ‘undergraduate’ and ‘research’ never appear in the same sentence … Unless, of course, that sentence happens to be “undergraduates can’t do research”. So, in anticipation of writing into a vacuum, just what is undergraduate research and, more importantly, why should university lecturers be enthusiastic about it?

First of all, undergraduate research is essential for anyone employed directly at one of the liberal arts and science (LAS) honours colleges in the Netherlands, such as UCU or UCR, for these are essentially teaching colleges, and with very little time to conduct any meaningful research, UR is a lifeline. The advantage is that in the colleges you don’t just have any old undergraduates, rather you have honours students who are there to be challenged rather than be mollycoddled. These are students who are intellectually curious and gifted. They are prepared to work hard and embrace any opportunity to get involved with a faculty research team. Since the colleges often have robust Academic Core departments where students are trained in transferable and academic skills, LAS students often join faculty research projects already skilled in academic writing, argumentation theory and rhetoric, research design, quantitative and qualitative methods. They are also often well versed with the ins and outs of SPSS and qualitative methods software packages like Nvivo or Atlas- ti. In addition to their multi-disciplinary methodological background, they are also always majoring in more than one subject. So, for example, if you are running a communication or persuasion research project you could have an undergraduate student on your research team who is majoring in a combination of linguistics and neuroscience or social psychology and literary studies or anthropology and antiquity. At the essence of UR is the reality that students are not put to work on a research project as academic skivvies to either remain anonymous or at best get a fleeting mention in an acknowledgements section or footnote along with fifteen other names. Rather, the student is a full partner on the research team and as such will be a full publishing partner on the academic paper: a first step in what hopefully will be a long and successful academic publishing career.

But what do I get out of it as a teacher, apart from a marginally increased output? Well, I get the opportunity to work with the brightest of young minds and the most diligent of workers. Moreover, because the coaching interaction has a strong element of both active learning and problem-based learning, it feeds back into my teaching strategies on regular courses and it also makes me appreciate the students’ commitment to their learning even more. I also get the pleasure of seeing 19 and 20 year olds enter the research world of academe, of seeing their excited faces and of remembering what it was like for me. And in the future when I am long retired I will have the honour of having co-published with some of the brightest academic minds of the moment.

Now you might be thinking that UR is just something for teaching college professors working in the Netherlands – for those academics who need to work in teams with undergrad students in order to get any research done at all. Nothing could be further from the truth. Some of the best and most prestigious research universities in the world have robust UR programmes. There are UR programmes in Berkeley; at UCLA; at Harvard; at King’s College in London and the University of Cambridge.

There are also regular national UR conferences in both the US (organised by the Council of Undergraduate Research) and in the UK. There is even a prestigious international UR conference and for the past five years there has been a small scale UR conference in the Netherlands too. The next edition will be held in Middelburg on November 27, 2015.

Moreover, some universities, like Warwick in the UK – together with their partner Monash in Australia – have their own successful UR peer-reviewed journal called Reinvention. There are many such UR journals out there. Indeed, even at UCR in Middelburg we have had a successful UR peer-reviewed, open access journal for almost 10 years now called Ad Astra. And not to be left out, this summer UU launched webpages on its website dedicated to UR within the framework of the PUUR project (the Programme for Upgrading Undergraduate Research) which I co-coordinate together with my UCU colleague Dr. Jocelyn Ballantyne.

In sum, undergraduate research in the Netherlands should not be about silence, perplexed looks, imaginary tumbleweed and distant strains of Ennio Morricone, rather it should be about coaching and caring for young academic minds as they make their first of many forays in the world of academic research. We have a lot of catching up to do with our international competitors. It is time we take undergraduate research very seriously, very soon − or else be very sorry we didn’t.

Prof. dr. Michael Burke

University College Roosevelt (Director of Research & Undergraduate Research Coordinator)