"The Ideal of Synergy: Authoring from the Classroom" By David Abrahamson Northwestern University Presented at the SouthEast Colloquium Association of Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Annual Meeting Columbia, SC March 10, 2001 Our topic, the inter-relationship between research and teaching, can perhaps best be understood as the evocation of an ideal -- specifically, the ideal of synergy. The key question then, it seems to me, is: how close to the realization of this ideal are we able to come in our actual working lives? Some might argue that it is merely a myth that there is some important connection between what we do in the classroom and what we do as scholars, that what we do as creators of new knowledge can somehow be brought into the classroom, and that, conversely, having the role as teachers makes us better as seekers of new knowledge. My core contention is that the heart of the matter is this: that this inter-relationship will only remain only a myth if we allow it to do so. We can, in effect, make the myth a reality, that all of us accept that, if done well, working in a classroom or working as a scholar are, almost by definition, mutually enriching. If itıs done well. But there are, of course, some problems. At many schools, important considerations might be termed cultural. Most journalism programs are, in a pedagogical sense, informed by a passion for the idea of learning by doing. My own institution, Medill at Northwestern, is a very skill-based, with a clear goal of preparing our students to excel in the professional practitioners. Though this practical does not by definition rule out the intellectual quest, it does sometimes push it to the background. Moreover, we have no doctoral program at our school, those bright Ph.D. students with their bright young questioning minds that will be under our tutelage for five or six years. In fact, most of our Master's students have an incredibly passionate and completely justifiable career focus that is almost pathological in its intensity. They come to us and make no excuse for the fact that they are betting roughly $40,000 and one year of their life that if they go through this very demanding, intense, rigorous, stressful program, they will, in effect, get a better job than if they didnıt spend that year of their life and those $40,000. Clearly, our obligation to them is to make sure, for most of them anyway, that such an investment was a reasonable career choice. There are also the problems when one tries to combine research and teaching, particularly involving students in one's scholarship. Perhaps the key issue is the time constraints. In many cases, if the student does have any extra time, it is hard to make an argument saying they should use it on some sort of grander quest for knowledge rather than perhaps pursuing a local internship or maybe writing a piece that can get published -- all of which, they quite properly could argue , would contribute to better prospects when they venture out into the job market. So there are issues. Nevertheless, we can still try to realize an ideal. For better or worse, two concepts have enabled me, to a greater or lesser extent, to do so. The first is to try to structure the work that the students do for a class in a way that contributes to a larger research mission and research interests. And second, to seek way to structure my research to involve students in a way that ultimately contributes to the classroom. For the class work, I am a true believer in something called the recitation. For example, in every magazine editing or writing class, every student chooses from a long list of magazines one magazine on which they will do in the spoken word a five- to seven-minute recitation. At the beginning of every class, one student will present their recitation, explicating its most salient features. They often are encouraged not to read the entire document, but rather to pick out the most important aspects of their analysis and then to defend their choices. For instance, they all calculate the publication's cost per thousand advertising rate (CPM). I might ask, ³Why do you think the CPM is what it is? What it is about the advertising worldıs perception of those readers and that market that positioned that CPM at that level?² The resulting class discussion, while obviously not based on the internal records of the company or magazine, clearly provides an opportunity to learn a process of analysis. And more often than note, the recitations will produce information that I did not previously possess, e.g. current biographies of the editors, contemporary histories of the publication, the most current look at the publicationıs competition, etc. And in their own self-guided, self- administered way, the often do some very interesting primary research. Both directly and indirectly, when writing magazine history in its various forms as I do, I often am able to make use of knowledge that my students obtained in the course of doing their recitations. Similarly, in my literary journalism classes, I also use the same recitation methodology to have students research writers whose work we are engaging, with the same effect. Sharing the results of the students' own research in the beginning of class and using it as a starting point for the discussion serves a clear purpose. I suspect that it allows us to discuss some very, very important issues in an unstructured way. If itıs a good morning, I can direct the conversation in interesting directions that I would be hard to put on a syllabus. For example, we can talk about some particular ethical issues that arise in a magazineıs history. Or, in the matter of literary journalism, we can discuss issues related to the coincidence of true genius and true insanity. As an aside, I've found this to be a somewhat important question for many students. Reflecting on such issues, perhaps even enabling a student to come to their own conclusions about such matters, seems far easier to accomplish through the organic process of discussing specific authors in a specific context. In addition, I suspect that research perhaps can best be experienced in a team-based learning environment and this involves engaging students in group work such comparative analysis. I give students a category of magazines and I have them do both a qualitative and a quantitative analysis of the category. It involves counting editorial and advertising pages, examining relative amounts of coverage of different topic, structural issues such as, features versus departments, design parameters such as text densities. The end result is wonderfully expansive spreadsheet which we can then use as a basis for comparative analyses. What are the similarities between the publications? The differences? Why? What are shadings, the subtleties, of differentiation? When one really looks closely across a range of magazines in a single category, some very interesting patterns emerge which would otherwise be unavailable to you. Moreover, we find that this sort of quantitative analysis does a great deal to prepare our students for the capstone course in the graduate program, the Magazine Publishing Project, where our students not only conceive, staff and produce a prototype of a magazine but also a fully-realized five-year business plan to go with it. I also found it most useful to involve students as research assistants in my own work. For instance, I have found that in my own scholarly efforts I am often at the mercy of very large bibliographies. I've discovered that the best solution is to cede complete control of the bibliographies to my research assistants. Given the online access to card catalogues, it is quite rare that I ever go to the library anymore. My research assistants have a copy of my ID card. They check the books out. They keep track of books in hand, loans, due dates and the like. In effect, they maintain the entire bibliographic file for me. And as we go from one year to another, and therefor from one research assistant to the next, the retiring one briefs the new one on the necessary procedures. I can imagine a conversation that I've never overheard: "This is what this guy requires. This what you need to do. This is how to do it." I have been told that there is a document that explains "the system," but they have never shared it with me. I suspect this is the case because they know it will confuse me. But, all in all, it is truly amazing what a good job they do. I really recommend such an arrangement. For the historical research I am working on, I also give work-study students and research assistants books to read. I try to train them to read the books not for the facts, but for argument explicated in a one-page document deliverable to me in one week's time. Similarly, I have students read for excerpt. In my literary journalism course we have a canon of about 50 authors, and I try to change perhaps ten or 15 percent of the readings every time I teach the course, which is offered twice a year. As a result, I am always on the lookout for new authors. So I assign my research assistants a book with the requirement that they identify a 20- to 30-page fairly self- contained excerpt that we can use as a reading for this course. In conclusion, perhaps I can close by adding that, in both avenues of approach -- that of class work enriching the research and of research enriching the class -- I do hope to do more. It is clear that it is something that one has to be specifically proactive about bringing into existence. It will not happen on its own. I do know that it is a real benefit to me, both in the obvious sense of the intellectual labor it contributes to my projects, but also in the way that it can provide me with ideas that I otherwise would not have had, which I find incredibly stimulating. Further than that, the hope, of course, is that it is also of some benefit to the students. When I think back to my own experiences as a student, it was those moments for singular, synergistic intellectual engagement with the good teachers in my life that continue to inspire me to this day. And if I can in some small way, offer at least some of that inspiration to some of my students, perhaps I am helping justify that $40,000 they are paying to sit in a room with us. And that, I would argue, would certainly be an ideal realized. Thank you very much.