research and enquiry in your discipline

The links between research and teaching and student learning are most often made at the level of the academic discipline. This is where programmes are planned and delivered, where staff time is organised and managed, and where research and research centres are often organised. It is where we have access to national and international networks of ideas from which we can draw and where we can design and deliver programmes, projects or structures that might foster links between research and teaching.

The nature of research will differ between disciplines. The types of experiences that we offer our students will therefore necessarily differ. Before planning research experiences for our students it is often useful for us to discuss and articulate the nature of research in our discipline before then considering how we might translate this into authentic experiences in our own curriculum.

Some questions you might like to discuss with your own schools or departments might be:

• How do we explicitly or tacitly position ourselves/our discipline in relation to knowledge creation?
• What sort of methodologies are most often used in our discipline?
• How is research undertaken in our discipline? For example, is it usually done by individuals or by teams?
• How and by whom is research funded in our discipline?
• In what ways is new knowledge in the discipline most often presented?
• How are the outcomes of research usually disseminated in our discipline?
• Are there other discipline specific issues concerning research? For example, around equality and diversity issues, ethics, links with professional practice, industrial involvement.

Once you have thought these questions through a useful starting point is to audit and review existing programmes.

Our approach to research enhanced teaching and the experiences that we offer students need to be planned, structured and scaffolded across a curriculum.