.
.
.
.
Home
Page
Overview
Program
Information
Overview
Program
Assumptions
Focus
Curriculum
Program for Students
Program for Fellows
Responsibilities
Eligibility
Evaluation
Frequently Asked Questions
Application Procedures
Presentations
by Fellows 2004
Colloquium Series
Schedule of Events
MSU Spencer Fellows
Recommended
Readings
MSU
Spencer RTG Proposal 2002-2007
National Spencer Site
College
of
Education
MSU Home Page
|
| Funding for Fellows
The
MSU Spencer RTG Fellowships will be available to students beginning in
their middle years of doctoral study - in the period after they have
completed a major part of their doctoral coursework and begun to
develop a research agenda but before they have started work on a
dissertation. Most
first-time recipients of the fellowship have been in their second (or
sometimes third) year of study when they applied.
This year we will award 15 or 16 fellowships. Fellows will receive a fellowship of about $11,500.
They are also permitted to take on a research or teaching
assistantship of no more than ¼ time in the fall and spring
semesters. If you add in
the stipend from the assistantship, the total income for the Fellows
comes to $17,000 or $18,000 across two semesters.
In addition to this support, each fellow also receives free
copying, phone, and materials, and a desk in the MSU/Spencer RTG area
in 216 Erickson Hall. Fellows
are free to take on additional assistantships during the summer.
|
|
The Working Assumptions of the Spencer RTG Fellowship
The MSU COE faculty have a history of
self-examination concerning the teaching of research.
Self-examination has led us to the following working assumptions
about what future researchers need during their middle years:
- sustained contact with a cohort of future researchers;
- thematic, inter-disciplinary study of research traditions and methods as
well as opportunities for sustained study within particular
traditions;
- integrated examination of theory, method and problems of practice;
- forums for "greenhousing" research ideas, drafting proposals for
external funding and conference presentations; practicing research
presentations for diverse publics (e.g., researchers, policy
makers, legislators, teachers, citizens); and becoming involved
with professional organizations;
- participation in a sustained project in which complexity grows as the
research fellow learns to assume the full role and
responsibilities of "researcher" within an organized
system of relationships with faculty mentors and peers;
- balance between teaching, service, and research assistantships in one's
graduate career;
- opportunities for research "readers' and writers' workshop"
experiences where fellows learn the skills and strategies of
critically reading and discussing research as well as those of
writing for publication.
|
The Substantive Focus of the MSU/Spencer RTG Fellowship: Teaching and
Learning.
While researchers in the COE pursue a variety of
research agendas, the Spencer/MSU Research Training Program will focus
on the preparation of researchers who are interested in questions of
teaching and learning. The improvement of educational practice requires sustained
attention to learning, teaching, and the relationships between the two.
While the history of research includes studies of these
phenomena, traditionally these studies have been isolated from one
another: Some researchers
examine learners and learning, others study teachers' thoughts and
actions. Still others look
at institutional, structural, and contextual variables and how they
shape what is learned and taught. These
streams of work have not been woven together in any systematic way.
Yet lessons learned about learning - absent an eye on the kind
of teaching or on the context in which the learning took place - do
little to provide the situated, contextualized knowledge that
educational practice requires. Granted,
it is easier to carve education up into manageable pieces.
But as Stephen Jay Gould argues, the human tendency to focus on a
narrow slice of life, without attending to the "full house,"
is the greatest impediment to collective understanding.
In much the same way, our
faculty has long believed that isolated studies of learning and teaching
impede, rather than advance, the improvement of practice.
This does not, however, mean that every study done
must embrace the "blooming, buzzing confusion" of education.
There is still room for people with selective foci.
But at MSU, we have tried to create a community in which we
strive for connectedness, we push ourselves to consider
new forms of research - including narrative - that embrace,
rather than deny, learning. We
work to develop a deep understanding of learning and teaching that goes
beyond classroom walls, for we believe that learning and teaching (and
their interrelationships and contexts) are not solely the domain of K-12
schools. Research must be
done about the learning - in and out of school - of students,
teachers, administrators, policy makers, and parents.
This means studying how individuals, families, organizations, and
institutions learn. It
means studying the pedagogy of educational policy and the pedagogy of
teacher education. Faculty
across departments have engaged in scholarship that uses the lenses of
teaching and learning to understand educational institutions, policy
making, higher education, and reform.
We will continue to do so. Potential
applicants who cannot persuasively argue that their interests are
aligned with this broad-stroke portrait of research on teaching and
learning will not qualify for the fellowship.
Back to top
|
The MSU/Spencer RTG
Program’s Curriculum
The
primary concern that underlies the Spencer RTG program is that the
students who show the most promise as researchers all too often write
dissertations that are merely adequate; they are competently carried
out but not a significant contribution to the field.
Our programs often seem to be better at preparing students to
sound like, act like, and talk like scholars than to do the kind of
scholarly work that makes a difference.
Therefore, the Spencer program has come to focus most centrally
on the question of how to raise the research aspirations of the
fellows (and by extension the rest of our doctoral students) - to
encourage and equip students to take the kind of intellectual risks
that are required to do work of significance in the field of
education.
Along these lines, the curriculum for the program
revolves around four questions that we all ask, implicitly or
explicitly, when we evaluate the work of the research products that
come our way - maybe in reviewing papers for journals and
conferences or just in our own reading.
These questions are the following:
1)
What's the point?
(This is the analysis/interpretation issue: what is the
author's angle?)
2)
Who says? (This
is the validity issue: on
what (data, literature) are the claims based?)
3)
What's new? (This
is the value-added issue: what
does the author contribute that we don't already know?)
4)
Who cares? (This
is the significance issue, the most important issue of all, the one
that subsumes all the others: is this work worth doing, does it
contribute something important?)
Back to top
|
The Program
for Students in the College as a Whole
Seminars: The
program sponsors a series of seminars on two related topics.
On theme is The Practice of Educational Research.
Here the aim is to deal with issues in the doing of research
that are not covered in research methods courses or other parts of the
formal curriculum. For
example, this year
is a series of sessions
about the craft of interviewing.
A second theme is The Life of the Scholar. Here the aim is to deal with issues involved in becoming and
being a scholar and teacher on the faculty of a research-oriented
college of education.
Small
Research Grants: The
program sponsors a competition in the fall semester in
which students who are not RTG Fellows (and have not received other
multi-year fellowship awards) submit proposals for funds to support
their research efforts. These
can be projects done as part of a course, a research practicum, an
independent project, or a dissertation.
The maximum award is $1,000 and the decisions are made by a
student review panel.
Circulating
Library of Research Equipment:
The program is also purchasing research equipment (such as
video cameras, audio recorders, and transcription machines) and
lending them to doctoral students who need them in their research
endeavors.
Back to
top
|
|
The
Program for Fellows
Work with Mentor(s):
The primary focus of the program for MSU/Spencer RTG Fellows is
to focus on working closely with one or more mentors drawn from the
senior faculty of the College of Education.
With their mentors, the fellows work out a plan for the year
that will allow them to develop their research skills and extend their
research agenda. This
involves carrying out some form of research apprenticeship and
producing at least on written product, which will be presented to the
fellows and mentors in a retreat during the spring semester.
See the next section for details.
Back to top
|
Responsibilities of RTG Fellows
All Spencer Research Training Grant Fellows are
expected to meet the following requirements.
-
They
should take full advantage of the opportunity posed by the
Spencer fellowship - release from most regular assistantship
work and close association with a faculty mentor or mentors - to
develop their own capacities and agendas as researchers.
This means doing no assistantship work beyond ¼ time for
pay during the academic year; it means working closely and
intensively with the mentor; and it means participating in the
retreats and seminars and other elements of the program.
-
First-year
fellows will have the option of applying for a second year of
funding. However they
will have to demonstrate that they have used the first year to
full advantage and that their plans for the second year are worth
supporting. This
means demonstrating the value added to their work by the
opportunity that was provided by the RTG program in the first
year (and would be provided by a second).
It also means demonstrating that the first year in the
program provided (and a second year would also provide) a chance
to pursue a mode of inquiry in which they could take on intellectual
risks and pursue issues of educational significance
that would not be possible without it.
These two criteria emphasize that the program is designed
not as a prize but as an intervention, intended to provide
promising students with an intellectual and experiential
opportunity that would not otherwise be available to them.
As a result of this opportunity, we expect fellows to aim
for a level of scholarship that is significant rather than merely
competent.
-
All fellows are expected to work closely with their
mentors in developing a plan for the year that meets their
particular needs as emergent researchers.
They are also expected to use the free time granted to them
by the fellowship to participate more actively within the various
existing intellectual communities that relate to their interests.
-
All fellows are required to carry out some form of research
apprenticeship, although this can take many forms:
perhaps working on a funded research project, observing in
an educational site under supervision of the mentor, carrying out
a pilot research project of one's own, or other such activities.
The nature and structure of this apprenticeship are defined
at the discretion of the mentor and fellow in each case.
-
In addition, all fellows are required to produce some
form of written product from their research-related
activities during the year, which must be turned in the middle of
the spring semester and presented to the RTG group.
This product can take a variety of forms:
maybe a research paper arising from project work, a
preliminary analysis of a pilot research effort, a research
practicum paper, a literature review in an area of special
interest to the fellow, or a dissertation proposal, to name just a
few. This paper may
be presented at a conference or submitted for publication, but
that is not required.
Back to top
|
Eligibility
Every student who applies must be interested in
becoming an educational researcher whose substantive interests are
related to teaching and learning. Applicants
must be MSU College of Education doctoral students who will be enrolled
full-time during the time they received the fellowship and who are
approximately midway through their doctoral programs at the time when
they first apply (generally in the second or third year of a full-time
program, but having not yet begun work on their doctoral dissertations).
No one who is close to defending a dissertation proposal can
apply for a first year of funding.
The Spencer Foundation stipulates that students at the
dissertation stage should apply instead for a Spencer Dissertation
Fellowship. All current
first-year RTG fellowship holders are eligible to apply for a second
year, even if they will be spending all or part of the first year
gathering data for the dissertation, unless they are likely to complete
their dissertation in the second year.
International students are eligible if they are full time
students who meet these criteria.
Back to top
|
Evaluation and Selection
Applications will be evaluated by a committee of faculty members from the
College of Education (appointed by the dean) who are actively involved
in research and doctoral mentoring.
Factors that will be considered in evaluating applications will
include: letters of
recommendation; grades obtained in doctoral level classes (incomplete or
deferred grades - in courses other than the research practicum (995)
- will count against the applicant); relevance of the proposed work to
issues of teaching and learning (broadly conceived); potential for
making contributions to the research literature; leadership potential;
and the likelihood of the applicant pursuing a career in educational
research. For applications
by first-year RTG fellows for a second year of funding, there will be an
additional factors: they need to show the extent to which they have put
their first year of support to good use.
Two overarching criteria will shape the evaluations
of applications for both the first and second year of funding:
Students need to demonstrate the value added to their work
by the opportunity that will provided by the RTG program; that is, what they will be able to do
that they couldn't be done without the award.
Students also need to demonstrate how the program will provide
them a chance to pursue a mode of inquiry in which they could take on intellectual
risks and pursue issues of educational significance that
would not be possible without it. These
two criteria emphasize that the program is designed not as a prize but
as an intervention, intended to provide promising students with an
intellectual and experiential opportunity that would not otherwise be
available to them. As a
result of this opportunity, we expect fellows to aim for a level of
scholarship that is significant rather than merely competent.
Back to top
|
|
|
|
|