Undergraduate Research with Kristine Johnson and Michael Rifenburg

Kristine Johnson and Michael Rifenburg are the authors of the new book A Long View of Undergraduate Research: Alumni Perspectives on Inquiry, Belonging, and Vocation. They tracked down alumni who had participated in undergraduate research years earlier. They wanted to know what kinds of impacts these experiences had on students over the long term. What they heard from these alumni was fascinating.

Kristine Johnson is an associate professor of English at Calvin University, and Michael Rifenburg is a professor of English at the University of North Georgia. They were undergraduate researchers as students, and they now mentor students in undergrad research. In our conversation, we talk about the importance of student-mentor relationships, the impact of working on big and meaningful projects, how undergrad research can help students find a vocation, and how these experiences can both enhance and challenge a student’s sense of belonging. 

Episode Resources

·       Kristine Johnson’s faculty page

·       Michael Rifenburg’s faculty page

·       A Long View of Undergraduate Researchby Kristine Johnson and Michael Rifenburg

·       The Meaningful Writing Project by Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Gellar, and Neal Lerner

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Transcript

Derek Bruff (00:05):
Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas and teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time.

(00:21):
Many years ago, I had the chance to participate in an undergraduate summer research program, not once, not twice, but three times. Yes, all three summers of my college experience involved staying on campus and working with math or computer science professors on very interesting research projects. I have many fond memories of those summers as well as some frustrating ones, and I know those experiences shaped my academic and professional career. On the podcast today I have on the authors of a new book titled A Long View of Undergraduate Research: Alumni Perspectives on Inquiry, belonging, and Vocation. Kristine Johnson and Michael Rifenburg tracked down alumni who had participated in undergraduate research years earlier.

(01:03):
They wanted to know what kinds of impacts these experiences had on students over the long term. What they heard from these alumni was fascinating. Kristine Johnson is an associate professor of English at Calvin University and Michael Rifenburg is a professor of English at the University of North Georgia. They were both undergraduate researchers as students and they now mentor students in undergraduate research. In our conversation, we talk about the importance of student mentor relationships, the impact of working on big and meaningful projects, how undergraduate research can help students find a vocation and how these experiences can both enhance and challenge a student's sense of belonging. Thank you Kristine and Michael for coming on the podcast today. I'm excited to talk with you and to learn about your research and your book. Thanks for being here.

Kristine Johnson (01:51):
Thanks for having us.

Derek Bruff (01:54):
I'll start with my usual question. Can each of you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator? And I'll start with Kristine.

Kristine Johnson (02:04):
So I think there might've been two moments. One, I realized in retrospect now, so the big situation when I think I realized when I could be an educator or wanted to be an educator was working with other writers, and eventually I became a writing professor. So actually the first time I sort of thought about this was in college when my roommate had to write a literature review for her geography class, and she was totally fed up and said, how do you even do this? And I was an English major, but we sat down and we talked about, okay, well you have all these sources and can you put them into buckets and can you organize them? And she kind of went, oh, that. And that was one of the first times I was starting to think about what I would do after college and graduate school sort of in the mix. So that was one moment. And then as I went into graduate school and worked in writing centers and started teaching writing, I think that same feeling of working with writers one-on-one and in classrooms is really exciting and something I enjoy.

Michael Rifenburg (03:12):
Nice. I don't remember not wanting to be an educator, so I don't remember that moment where it dawned on me. That'd be kind of fun to go into education as I was browsing what to do with my life. But I can think of a moment where it really solidified that decision. And that was actually an elementary classroom. When I graduated from college, I worked at elementary school full-time finding subs, and if I couldn't find a sub, I would be in the classroom that day. And what was really impactful about that experience was how unique it is to be in education or to be in middle school or in high school where you're with students, the same students almost every day for the whole year. And really, especially in elementary, these kids are very transparent about what's going well or what they see as not going well in their life about food, about parents, about where they might've slept that night, about what the clothes they're wearing.

(04:01):
They tell you that kind of stuff. And so we're forming these really meaningful relationships where we might talk math, but really we're talking like, Hey, what'd you have for dinner last night? Those kind of conversations, caring for what we now call the whole person thinking about belonging things we're talking about now in higher ed, and I was having those conversations with kids in fourth grade and in second grade I remember a powerful second grade classroom. So that just solidified the desire I have to connect with people in work with people and be with people and then talk thesis statements and then talk writing and do the professional stuff now to do the college level, but really forming what Peter Felten and others talking about as this relationship bridge education really saw that for me in elementary school.

Derek Bruff (04:44):
Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. But the third graders aren't pretending to be someone they're not. And so it's easier to have those direct conversations about their whole persons. So you guys have a book out on the experiences of students in undergraduate research, and you took an interesting approach by talking to alumni students who are well past graduation in some cases. Reflecting back on those experiences, why do you think the stories of these alumni are important to understanding undergraduate research experiences?

Kristine Johnson (05:22):
I think one of our general maybe frustrations with a lot of scholarship, this frustration we share is that you don't hear a lot from students or the actual undergraduate researchers. I think both of us are writing scholars and writing scholars talk a lot about students, but we don't hear student voices as often as maybe we would like. And I think that's something we noticed in undergraduate research too. And so I think one of the motivations for our research was to hear these voices and hear from these people because their actual lived are important. And I think like we just said, maybe when we get to know an undergraduate researcher, one of our own really well, they will be forthcoming about how they're feeling about the experience and what they're thinking. But I think we found that talking to people a little removed from the experience meant that they were pretty forthcoming and willing to share a lot about their experiences.

Derek Bruff (06:24):
So both of you had undergraduate research experiences? I did it as well, yeah. Okay.

Michael Rifenburg (06:30):
Yes, we did. And that can be good or bad. So I do what I found effective for Michael 20 years ago at Georgia College in Milledgeville, Georgia. This worked for Michael, therefore let me do this with students 20 years later at a different school in a different context. We know that's a challenge for teaching. This worked for me, therefore it's going to work for somebody else. Sometimes, sometimes not.

Derek Bruff (06:52):
Yeah, absolutely.

Kristine Johnson (06:54):
And I think both of us were fortunate. I think we had pretty good experiences as undergraduates. I did research in two different disciplines and had two very different experiences, though both were good.

Derek Bruff (07:08):
And I like to remind myself that we are the weirdos that went on to get advanced degrees in these areas and teach. So that is not true of most of our students. So they may need a different kind of learning experience than we did. Yeah. Well, how did you go about the study? I'm really curious where you found the alumni, how you connected with them, how you chose them. Can you share a little bit about the study design?

Kristine Johnson (07:32):
So we started by working with databases and offices at our own universities. So both of us teach at institutions that are focused on undergraduate education and that do a great job with undergraduate research and have for a long time. So for me, I went through the database with the assistance of our research office of all the students who had done summer research for the last 24 years. And most of the people we interviewed were about five years out from their college graduation. And then went through a similar database of honors students. And it was a lot of trying to find current contact information, searching for people on LinkedIn and contacting as many people as we could through email, through social media, through university channels, and really talking to anyone who said yes.

Derek Bruff (08:33):
That's great. Well, let's talk about some of what you found, and I'll start by asking you what was perhaps unexpected and what you heard from these alumni?

Michael Rifenburg (08:44):
Yeah, two things. One, connecting with what Kristine just said, how important relationships were to these alumni, how important it was to have ice cream with a professor, and that's a memory that you carry forward, how important it was to go on a trip and present your research at a conference, not at your home campus, and potentially stay in a hotel room for the very first time. As some people told us how important that was. And as Kristine said, they're not talking about a format guidelines, they're not talking about thesis statements, they're not talking about qualitative data analysis. Those things were gone, right? It's the relationships that are at the core. Also to balance that out. I was surprised to hear stories of isolation, of loneliness, of doing that work, but by themselves in the library during the summer when campus is eerily quiet at many US universities.

(09:44):
And for them it was an impactful experience. But also looking back there, founding that was, I was kind of lonely. I felt kind of isolated. I'm not sure how they felt in the moment, but looking back as we were having that conversation, it was almost dawning on them that was kind of lonely. That kind of sucked at times. So those two things, the importance of relationships, but also how sometimes this kind of underwriter research, especially the humanities as we're often single author focused as we're often in the archives by ourselves, can be an isolating experience for students, particularly if that's happening during the summer when campuses are very quiet.

Kristine Johnson (10:23):
Yeah. I think another thing I was surprised by, so probably 75, 80% of the people we talked to are not, like you said, the weirdos like us who continued on to graduate school. They did do other things, but they were on the whole very strong students. They were in honors programs which let them do these thesis projects or they applied for competitive experiences. So they were good students. I was surprised by how much more meaningful their undergraduate research was to them, even compared with their coursework. These students would say, oh, for my classes I would sort of write essays the night before and do the bare minimum literature review and kind of get it done. But in undergraduate research, they were caring about things that they didn't care as much about in their classes. They really did want to find a gap in the literature they really did want to do well.

Derek Bruff (11:22):
That's very interesting. What do you think led to that greater motivation and sense of caring?

Kristine Johnson (11:28):
And I think there might be two things going on there. So the first is I think the scope of undergraduate research. If students produce a thesis, it is probably the longest thing they've written in college. If not in their lives, they use the most real research methods. They're just doing more. So I think the scope of it pushes you into almost needing to care on that level. I think another thing is Michael and I are both big fans of the book, the Meaningful Writing Project, which came out from a group of writing scholars I think in 2017. And that study shows that for writing to be meaningful, one of the things that can happen is it allows students to integrate personal interests with intellectual interests in a way that's meaningful to them. I think many of these projects for the students either started because they cared about the topic and wanted to pursue it intellectually or doing the research made them care and the personal became intellectual or vice versa. And I think the conditions in undergraduate research allow for that. Maybe in the way they don't always in a typical class.

Michael Rifenburg (12:54):
To continue on to that and maybe lead our conversation towards vocation, one of the things we talked about, the authors of Meaningful Writing Project also add, if the writer sees future application in this text that they're doing, they'll often find it more meaningful. And so if they're doing a literary analysis on a William Faulkner novel and they want to work in William Faulkner's museum in Oxford, Mississippi, they might find this very meaningful if they don't even know who William Faulkner is and what on earth is going on and the sound of theory, it might not be a meaningful project for them. So that forward facing application and talking with students who wanted to go into this kind work broadly in sub capacity and therefore able to find meaning in that project because they thought it could yield future benefit for them broadly us higher education knows this is beneficial, but how it's actualized, implemented, assessed, done on the ground differs vastly across just individual departments from one faculty member to another one, they'll do this a little differently. We know it'd say good all our high impact educational practices, but they're placed on the campus in very different ways. Undergrad research is no different.

Derek Bruff (14:10):
So what are some ways to do it badly?

Michael Rifenburg (14:13):
I like that.

Kristine Johnson (14:16):
I mean, I think one answer to that is looking back on maybe the traditional apprentice model where the faculty member has, we'll say his project and the student is there to write a bibliography and gather sources and I don't know, make copies maybe at worst, where you're really cast in the role of a research assistant. I think students learn something doing that work, but I do it badly when the student has nothing to show for it at the end. If they never have the opportunity to even give a local presentation, if it is all work that isn't visibly fed into a faculty project, I think that's a problem.

Michael Rifenburg (15:08):
It's also problem when it's not broadcasted broadly to students when it's given to the students that the professor likes, right? Because they've had multiple classes with them. It's a great student, we get along. Therefore, Hey, do you want to do undergrad research? Let me tell you about this, right? As if Michael's handpicking the people who I'm appointing as able to go forth in this intellectual enterprise. That's something Kristine and I have been talking a lot about and thinking a lot about is how to broadcast undergrad research to make it more available to students and make it more available early in their college experience. So it's not something you do as a junior or a senior because Michael Ryberg thinks you're a great student, but there's early in a college experience for that and more students had the opportunity to elect to opt into this or not opt into this. We heard several stories of students doing undergrad research because they just happened to hear about it, and the professor happened to mention it. Two of them almost just, they just stumbled over it and they did the project not because there was a giant sign on the campus, not because there's a QR code on the dining hall tables. They just happen to hear about it. So it can be done poorly when it's reserved for the elite few that the professor deems worthy for that quest.

Derek Bruff (16:25):
Yeah. So I want to talk, Michael brought up vocation. I'd like to hear a little bit more about how these types of experiences can help students choose a vocation, because as you said that most of your students did not end up in the academy, most of the alumni that you interviewed. And so I'm curious what some of those trajectories might have looked like.

Kristine Johnson (16:50):
Yeah. Well, I dunno, maybe we'll start just by defining vocation on two different levels. So I think one way you can think of vocation is simply the idea that one good reason to go to college is to prepare for a career and to be employed someday. And so I think we can think of vocation and undergraduate research in those terms. How is undergraduate research instrumentally helpful in the job market? And then I think the other meaning of vocation, one that's important to us too is I think a sense of purpose or even calling and saying, how can your college education, how can your research experience identify maybe those big threads or questions that are going to guide you through your career and through your life. Michael, do you want to talk about either of those?

Michael Rifenburg (17:49):
Sure. The story I keep coming back to, I remember hearing it when we were collecting these interviews and it still sticks with me many years later as a student who did a undergraduate honors thesis on bullying. So she was in the psychology department at my home university. I remember city, I was on her committee. And so I remember sitting in that defense and she's talking about how she collected her data for this psychology study and they were having hard conversations about statistical analysis. I was just sitting back and trying to pay attention to try to figure out what statistical analysis is, but she talked about bullying and how memories of bullying stay with people as they move forward. So fast forward five, six years, we have a chance to interview her, talk to her on Zoom, and she's now working for a domestic violence agency.

(18:35):
And she's not doing talking statistical analysis, but what she's doing is going into middle schools and she's going into high schools and having really challenging conversations with students about relationships, about toxic relationships, about signs of verbal, physical, sexual abuse and how to avoid those and how to fight against those. And she particularly enjoys going into high schools around February because many high schools, at least in northeast Georgia, assign Romeo and Juliet around Valentine's Day, I guess, forgetting how that play ends. And so she goes in and they has these conversations. They have to point as passages in the text, Hey, this is messed up. This is problematic. Let's talk about this. And so what she's carrying forward, maybe she's still knows her statistical analysis, but what she's really carrying forward, our communication skills, our presentation skills is audience awareness, but also going back to vocation as a calling. She's carrying forward a deep passion for how memories impact us and how to advocate for people who are experienced traumatic memories over and over and over again. So that's just a really powerful story that I think connects with two different ways we can think about vocation here.

Kristine Johnson (19:53):
I always think of another student we interviewed. So she was an undergraduate majoring in linguistics and Spanish and wasn't quite sure what that would mean for a career someday, but she knew she liked both of those things. And she did two undergrad research projects. So one, she did a summer project helping to redesign the placement process for international students at the university into first year writing. And from there she became really interested in the experience of non-native speakers of English and college writing courses and did ethnographic work and a lot of interviews for senior thesis. And so for her, I think the undergraduate research said, oh, I think I want a career teaching ESL and working in these spaces. So she did actually get a master's degree in linguistics and ESL. And at the time of her interview, she was a curriculum developer for a community literacy center in California and where she worked with a large immigrant and refugee population.

(21:07):
So I think undergraduate research helped a linguistics major, which is sort of a tough sell in the career market. Sometimes it helped a linguistics major say, okay, here's actually a defined career path for me. But what I love about her story is she got so interested in the people involved in education, and when she talked to us, she said, I'm just fascinated by people's stories and I'm really empathetic to the challenges these refugee populations are facing. And so in my work as a curriculum developer, I'm always thinking about just the human challenges and the human side of this. I think asking those human questions is a vocational move for her. It's saying in this work I have, yeah, I'm going to be a curriculum developer, and I know a lot about language acquisition, but also my purpose here is a human purpose.

Derek Bruff (22:09):
I love that. I love that. And she's working with a different population now of people, but her purpose is the same,

Kristine Johnson (22:19):
Her ethic is the same, her purpose is the same.

Derek Bruff (22:23):
Could either of you speak to be a little bit more pragmatic to that first piece that you mentioned, Kristine, the getting a job piece, and did you hear some stories there about some meaningful connections that were made?

Kristine Johnson (22:37):
Yeah, so I think we heard sort of two different things. One thing we heard was that for a number of undergraduate researchers, they learned specific skills in these projects that translated directly to a job. A lot of that would come down to data analysis. Even in the humanities and social sciences, the skill of learning to work with data quantitative or qualitative was something that they could bring straight into a job interview. We heard a lot about becoming a stronger writer and stronger public speaker. I think we also though heard some maybe disappointing stories of students who said, yeah, I wasn't really sure how to mention it on my resume or anything, so I didn't,

Derek Bruff (23:27):
Oh, wow, that's a missed opportunity.

Kristine Johnson (23:31):
Yeah,

Michael Rifenburg (23:31):
That's what I expected. I expected them to say, this is on my LinkedIn profile. It was on the top of my cover letter, it's on my resume. And at least for the interviews I did when I asked those questions, Hey, is this on your resume? And no, I don't think it is. That's almost surprised I would ask, right? It might be on LinkedIn, but it might be somewhere near the bottom. Did it come up in an interview? I don't think we really talked much about it. And so I was thinking this would kind be at the fore. This is when I sit down for an interview. The first thing I say is, I did this undergrad research project. And so Kristine and I spent some time thinking about how we broad, we could help students leverage those experiences in meaningful ways across workplace readiness documents, like a resume, like a cover letter, like a LinkedIn profile. How can we take what the task you did and think about the verbs that can capture that really well and that are connecting to hiring trends within a job that you're looking for.

Kristine Johnson (24:33):
And in the book, we talk about activities a mentor could do with a student one-on-one or an honors program could do, a research cohort could do to say, okay, maybe you've reached the end of the experience. Let's do some structured reflection and discussion of how can you talk about the skills you have developed here, thinking of them as skills and how could those appear in a cover letter? How could they appear in a resume? How would you use what you did in research? As an example, in a job interview, we did hear stories of that where I think someone told us that she was interviewing for a job and they asked her about her time management skills. And she basically answered by saying, well, I was a full-time student. I had a job and I did this massive research project at the same time. Let me tell you about it.

Michael Rifenburg (25:28):
What a great opportunity for a faculty member, for an undergraduate researcher, and for so many career services, to sit down together at the end of a project and talk about how to connect this into, as I said, a workplace readiness documents. That's hard to do because oftentimes that thesis defense happens one day before graduation, and you're packing your car to move back to somewhere as you're getting kicked out of your dorm because the semester's over and you graduate, right? So it's hard to do that and if the flurry of the end of the semester, end of the academic year, but what a rich opportunity to sit around a table together with career services who do such amazing work, and to have them a mentor and a student together, putting together a cover letter, putting together a resume, talking out loud and vocalizing what are some things we did? What are some of these experiences? And actually talking about the experience, not necessarily the findings from the research project, but the broad experience itself and how that might lead to whatever you want to pursue next.

Derek Bruff (26:27):
And I think for faculty who may feel intimidated by that process to reach out to career services, you'll have an ally there who can probably fill in the stuff about job searches that you don't know anymore, right?

Michael Rifenburg (26:43):
Oh, yeah. I don't know how to put together a resume or a cover letter at all, and I'm so thankful they can talk verbs and they can talk, here's a really great verb for this hiring trend right now. This captures what you did. Yeah, yeah.

Derek Bruff (26:56):
Well, let's talk a little bit about belonging. I was really struck by your comment earlier about the kind of isolating experiences that some students have. And it reminded me, I did summer undergraduate research all three summers in college, so starting after my first year, and there wasn't anyone else around that first summer that I knew the other folks sticking on campus were juniors and seniors. They weren't the folks going into their sophomore years. And so it was very different as I now think about it, than the second and third summers where I had a whole team of folks that I had already made connections with. So I'd love to hear about more thoughts on isolation and belonging and what you heard from some of these alumni about that.

Kristine Johnson (27:40):
Yeah, I mean, I guess I could take the positive part. I think maybe you do the positive two themes. Yeah, yeah. I'll keep it positive. No, I think two themes maybe emerged. I think one was this idea that doing a undergraduate research gives you a better sense of belonging on your campus and in academia in general. So a lot of students used kind of a scene behind the curtain or scene behind the scenes metaphor where even writing an honors thesis or certainly being on campus all summer, it taught them how universities work. It taught them how research gets done. And I think seeing into that process made them feel more at home, literally and otherwise on their college campuses. I think another part of it was many of the students we interviewed, probably because they agreed to be interviewed, had good experiences and had good relationships with their mentors and really appreciated their mentors.

(28:46):
And I think there is something important for a lot of us about people we meet as emerging adults who aren't our family, who care about us and take us seriously as scholars, as people. And so I think those personal relationships, again, gave students a sense of belonging maybe in their home department, maybe in the field for the students who were thinking about graduate school, having a relationship with a professor who said, no, you could do this. Go ahead and apply to grad school. I think that was a really meaningful element of belonging in academia generally.

Michael Rifenburg (29:31):
Well, Kristine did the positive, so I'll do the negative. A challenge there is often these projects extend over the summer or might it extend over the winter months? Campuses are closed and dining halls are closed, or residence halls are closed, and students might be living in a new place on campus that they haven't lived on before, and the gym might have different hours and the library has different hours, and the sports teams and sororities are no longer around all these different ways that higher ed has designed community to be built or gone or they're lessened. And then you're there by yourself in the library during doing IV of work on some literary movement. I love that. I love being in library by myself, but I'm also the kind of guy that loves having lunch by myself, but we are also built for community. So those things can be isolating. And so we need to think about how do we create an environment for continuing community during the off season to use kind of a tourist term, because that's where those lonely experiences come from.

Kristine Johnson (30:41):
A question that emerged for us in our interviews was the relationship between participating in research and belonging. So for some students participating in research, they said, yes, this made me feel more at home on campus. It made me find new friends, find community, other students already felt like they belonged on campus and then had the confidence, the investment to pursue research. So the relationship goes both ways, and I think it's hard to tease out, I think both directions are true, but it's hard to tease out maybe which way it always goes.

Derek Bruff (31:25):
How have your findings from the study informed your own practices in these areas?

Kristine Johnson (31:35):
I will offer one specific one. One of the things we learned about the intellectual process of doing this work, the actual research process, is that students can feel, I think, lost and overwhelmed at the beginning. And so I think one thing I have intentionally paid attention to and maybe even changed since doing this research is being more hands-on and possibly even a little more directive at the beginning of the process. So if a student is doing an honors thesis and they've got a million ideas, I know that they may have at most a year to do this project, and realistically maybe five months. And I think as a writing teacher, I always want to say, this is your project and it's your agency and it's you. I think I've become a little more comfortable saying, okay, these directions will probably work and might be generative, and these directions are not, and so let's take all of the things you're interested in and try to support you in a way where I think you could have a good product or I think you would actually be able to do this.

Michael Rifenburg (33:02):
Two things come to mind for me as we're wrapping up our time together. One's a big thing I haven't done, but like to do, and one is a small thing I have done. So I've already done the small easy thing. The big thing I'd like to do is connect more with our staff who are work with our first year experience program and try to make undergrad research a part of that first year experience. Again, not requiring students to undergrad research, but at least opening up opportunities for them to learn what this is and see how they could be involved in that. Almost like using a metaphor of an on ramp onto an interstate. They could see there is an on-ramp over there, and I can go that direction, and that is what undergrad research is, if I want to drive my car onto that. Right now, many students I work with at my home university aren't familiar with undergrad research and might hear about it by chance as a senior or as a junior.

(33:51):
So that's a big thing I'd like to have conversations on my campus about. The small thing I've already done is having students in class read undergrad research. There's wonderful journals publishing undergrad research, and students don't just need to read stuff by Dr. Michael Rifenburg, right? Mind blowing. They don't just need to read Foucault. They don't just need to read Kenneth Burke. They can read undergrad research. There's wonderful articles out there that are doing insightful, engaging, beautiful work in weaving that intentionally into our curriculum. And so I've already done that and I've had great conversations with students, and that also opens up doors that I can do this and I can publish on this and I can see myself as a scholar. Wow,

Derek Bruff (34:33):
That's got to be powerful.

Kristine Johnson (34:35):
No, and that's great, right? Because we know as writing teachers, which both of us here are that giving students a sample essay or a model essay that's close to something they can actually do or will actually do is going to be far better than, I don't know, giving them a long form piece from the New Yorker, which it has its own merits, but isn't something they will do. And so yeah, looking at undergraduate research, which is maybe a little aspirational, but within reach, that's very cool.

Derek Bruff (35:12):
Yeah. Well, and it's another on-ramp, right? If you start to build that into some of the early courses, I am liking this metaphor. I'm imagining the student who's driving around the city streets for three years and then finds out there's an interstate near their town. They at least should have known that was there before they spent all that time. Yeah. I'm also thinking, Kristine, about the more directive approach you might take with students, because I think it's probably tempting because these are often excellent students. It's tempting to think that they can take on more at this stage than maybe they can. Yes, they may be well prepared for this, but this is still a very new kind of work for many of them. And so they will still need that kind of directed scaffolding early on, even if they seem pretty awesome in general, right? It's still something new for them.

Kristine Johnson (36:04):
And I think the excellent body of research on research mentoring points to the idea that the most effective mentors somehow balance this dialectic of control and freedom, and we heard that from students too. I think they appreciated when they were given elbow room to do what they wanted to do, but they also appreciated when their mentors gave them really clear expectations and when they felt safe enough, knowing that, okay, even if I can't maybe see where this project is going, I have this mentor who can see three feet in front of me.

Derek Bruff (36:52):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you both. This has been really insightful and I hope inspiring to our listeners, thank you for doing this work and for sharing it, and I will definitely be including information about the book in the show notes for this episode. So thanks. Thanks for coming and sharing.

Michael Rifenburg (37:10):
Thanks, Derek. Thanks for having us.

Derek Bruff (37:14):
That was Kristine Johnson, associate professor of English at Calvin University and Michael Rifenburg, professor of English at the University of North Georgia. They are the authors of the new book, A Long View of Undergraduate Research: Alumni Perspectives on Inquiry, Belonging, and Vocation from Routledge Press. In the show notes, you'll find a link to more information on the book, which is part of a series of books from Elon University's Center for Engaged Learning. The series is on engaged learning and teaching. Thanks to my friend and mentor, Peter Felten, co-editor of the series for tipping me off to this great new book. And thanks to Kristen and Michael for coming on the podcast to share their research.

(37:52):
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the Online and Professional Education Association. In the show notes, you'll find a link to the UPCEA website where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities and professional development offerings. This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website, the Intentional Teaching Newsletter, and my Patreon, where you can help support the show for just a few bucks a month. If you found this or any episode of Intentional Teaching useful, which you consider sharing it with a colleague, that would mean a lot. As always, thanks for listening.