9.3 Impact
The first part of the assignment went well. The students enjoyed digging into the studies I had chosen for them to look at, and as predicted, they were especially drawn to ones that had been conducted by their very own professors in the department. The Connections, too, were well done. Most of the students were readily able to compare and contrast the two studies.
It is when we got to the Extensions components of the assignment that everything came together. Now they were extending their learning to their own ideas and to a research question that they had imagined and a hypothetical study that they had designed.
Group after group, my students shone. Nearly without exception, the students appeared to have spent more time on part 3 than on parts 1 and 2. Why? Because they were so excited about the possibility of doing their own study. It was as if they had moved from seeing themselves as passive recipients of the research of others to being active participants in the research process on their own.
One group included a student who was a member of the Tyendinaga Mohawk reserve. This group designed a study that they proposed to conduct in a nearby First Nations Mohawk community. Drawing from the research ethics protocol (TCPS 9) that we had discussed earlier in the term, they planned to meaningfully engage with Elders through the use of community-based research methods. Students in one of the groups were also in the Religion and Violence class together and had come up with a qualitative study in which they could use qualitative interviews to study religiously motivated violence. Another group was in the Chinese religions class; they had been working with “photo voice” and designed a study in which they would look at cultural appropriation of icons in China. Some of the students were very interested in mental health and designed a qualitative study in which they would explore the influences of religion on the health of the LGBTQ2 community at Queen’s University.
One said, “I’ve decided to do a master’s degree because I want to do that study I designed.” Another said that she had spent four years reading other people’s research and this was the first time in her whole degree that she could see herself as a researcher.
As their teacher, I felt a bit of pride: they got this. I taught them something. This was a kind of engagement I had not seen in part 1 of the course when I desperately tried to get them to distinguish between APA and Chicago formatting. They “got” that methods are useful. To a researcher, methods are like a map is to someone who is lost in the woods. In the end, I don’t want to train students who can tell me what other people have done; I want them to see their own potential as researchers. I want them to be able to conceptualize a research study that they would like to lead in order to answer a research question that makes them curious.
I recognize that I would never have put this final “extension” component into the assignment if I hadn’t been using ICE because I simply wouldn’t have thought of it. Yet, it was the piece that provided the key to students synthesizing everything they had learned. I want to train researchers, who have the tools, imagination, and confidence to use their research skills to explore real research questions that interest them. The ICE framework helped me get there.
