This is a tangent from the post, but your opening anecdote about the student response gets at something interesting. Probably all of you taught in standard disciplinary ways, and with a heavy focus on secondary sources, because for most of the students they were just starting out with the material. And we often (I think rightly) believe that original work and interdisciplinary work both rest on a foundation of knowledge and skills learned over time.
But this is a constant tension, really in every discipline except literature and math where students are starting basically at zero. They want to be able to do the interesting work that we do as researchers, but we want to teach them fundamentals first.
Yes--we want to get them to being able to "do" knowledge work and we think that making judicious choices about what kind of methods and disciplinary traditions need to come into that work takes preparation. But I feel like we can model how that works at an early stage of things. I talk now with students about "off-ramps"--where their interest in a problem might make them seek a different disciplinary approach to that problem than the one I'm teaching.
This is a tangent from the post, but your opening anecdote about the student response gets at something interesting. Probably all of you taught in standard disciplinary ways, and with a heavy focus on secondary sources, because for most of the students they were just starting out with the material. And we often (I think rightly) believe that original work and interdisciplinary work both rest on a foundation of knowledge and skills learned over time.
But this is a constant tension, really in every discipline except literature and math where students are starting basically at zero. They want to be able to do the interesting work that we do as researchers, but we want to teach them fundamentals first.
Yes--we want to get them to being able to "do" knowledge work and we think that making judicious choices about what kind of methods and disciplinary traditions need to come into that work takes preparation. But I feel like we can model how that works at an early stage of things. I talk now with students about "off-ramps"--where their interest in a problem might make them seek a different disciplinary approach to that problem than the one I'm teaching.