Research, teaching, and service, oh my
Tenure-track faculty positions are a strange melange of different roles. For research, our job is to think about the world, society, the future, the past, and advance our understanding of all it, sharing it with the entire world. In teaching, we’re supposed to guide, mentor, inform, and educate a group of students at our institution, and potentially more broadly if we’re teaching open classes, giving public lectures, or doing other forms of public dissemination. In service, we volunteer our time to run academia: programs, admissions, peer-review, and other infrastructure that no one but us is prepared to maintain and improve. Somewhere vaguely in the middle of all three of these jobs, we also try to have impact, changing the world through policy, product, and public education, vaguely spanning our expertise in research, our skills in teaching, and our ability to implement programs and processes.
To most outsiders, it looks ridiculous that all four of these responsibilites are in one job. How can any one person focus on all of these, let alone do them well? The reality is that we can’t. We get good at some of these, we let our skills in others languish. We respond to the incentives we’re under, to do great research, teach well enough, and try not to be too late or lax on our service deadlines. We overcommit, our days fill up with 15 hours of work, and we triage, disappointing some people by breaking a promise, or failing to do most of our jobs well.
It’s because of this frustrating tension between these roles that the past few years of my academic life, and particularly my summers, have been so fulfilling. Since I’ve started doing research on the learning and teaching of computing, and taken on an administrative role of overseeing our undergraduate program in Informatics, I’ve found all kinds of fascinating synergies between my roles:
- My research often directly informs by teaching. For example, my lab discovered some powerful strategies to teach students about how to read computer programs, and now I teach those strategies in the classes I teach that involve programming.
- My research often informs my administrative decisions. For example, we’ve gotten better at recruiting transfer students, and my undergraduate researcher, Harrison Kwik, published a study that demonstrated the powerful role that transfer student onboarding can have in socializing transfer students into universities. I’m taking the recommendations from his paper and implementing them in our undergraduate program.
- My teaching informs my research. For example, I’ve been teaching design for a decade, and have started a project with Jason Yip about youth learning design skills. Some of my discoveries as a teacher-practitioner are the basis for our theoretical framework for analyzing his data.
- My teaching informs my service. For example, as I’ve designed, redesigned, and taught my software engineering classes, it’s become clearer what gaps there are in preparing great software engineers, and led to changes in what courses we offer, how we frame them, and how we teach them.
- My service informs my research. After a few years of entrepreneurship , and efforts to build pre-service CS teacher training, many of my skills in building new programs from nothing have really strengthened my ability to start new research projects, find finding, and recruit students, but also to understand what problems are truly worth solving.
- My service informs my teaching, research, and administration. Every summer, I do outreach with our university’s Upward Bound program. I meet 20 to 40 high school students in my community, teach them about computing, but I also gather great data for research, I get inspired about new ways to equitably teach, and I see pathways to engage my city’s youth in higher education and the Information School.
This kind of synergy isn’t possible in every academic role. If I were studying neutrinos, the misalignment between my roles might be greater. But in this particular time of my career, with the roles and interests I have, there are incredible opportunities for me to blur the line between research, teaching, service, administration, and impact, and it’s incredibly fulfilling.
Where do you find synergy between your roles? If you don’t, can you? What might you gain?
