(Kurita) Hello, everyone. (Students) Hello. (Kurita) Welcome to “Interactive Teaching” WEEK 7. This week’s topic is “Let’s think about career paths PART 1:
Reflection as a professor. In this session, we would like to have the graduate students work on envisioning their ideal image of being a faculty member. The objective of this session is to: “Think about the ideal relationship between ‘education’ and ‘research’ in a faculty member’s activities. Here is a review of the previous sessions. The faculty members’ duties can be divided into four categories: education, research, administration, and social contribution. You are all graduate students right now, so let’s focus on education and research. How do you imagine the ideal relationship between education and research? Suppose education and research are circles, draw them on an A4 sheet of paper at hand and consider the balance of their size and the amount that they overlap. Think about your ideal state through this exercise. Here is the procedure. First, draw circles on a white sheet by drawing an education circle with a blue marker, and a research circle with a red marker. Be careful of their size and the amount that they overlap. Second, once you are done with drawing circles, the slide instructs that you should post your sheets at the front of the classroom, but before that, discuss the exercise with a student next to you. Did you understand? Now, draw the circles in your ideal balance. I will give you two or three minutes. (Kurita) Now, I think you’re all done with drawing your circles. Please make pairs and explain to your partner why you drew the circles in that balance or size. Explain in one to two minutes per person. Let’s start. (Student 1) I think research and education are both important and that there are overlaps between them. What I especially would like to be mindful about is the process of incorporating my research into education, sharing my practice with other people, receiving feedback from them, making use of it in my research, and incorporating my new research into education again. I would like to brush up both of them by linking them together in this way. That is why I drew so many circles. (Student 2) I see. (Student 1) Yes. (Kurita) Are you all done? Now it’s the other person’s turn to explain. (Student 3) Could you describe your idea? (Student 4) There are two circles for describing education. One is drawn in a dotted line and the other in a solid line. The circle in a solid line is my ideal state. The circle in a dotted line shows that my present education is limited
to my own research topic. My field is international politics, and the academic area of this field is very wide. I specialize in security, but there are many other issues such as economics and the environment, and these three hardly overlap when conducting research. Therefore, what happens is that I will be involved in the other two issues only through education. I would like to widen the overlapping area by expanding my research topic, which is currently triggered by chance when getting involved in other issues through education. I must figure out a way somehow. I drew a circle in a solid line of equal size with the other circle, and that is the ideal state. (Student 3) I see. (Kurita) Are you all finished? Gather all the sheets in each table, so that I can collect them. (Kurita) Here are the sheets you made. The education circle is drawn in blue, research in red. The illustration varies from person to person. The sheets around here all have a similar balance between education and research. Who drew this? Horiuchi-san? It is interesting. Does it mean that education and research develop by linking each other? (Student 1) Yes. (Kurita) So there is a timeline here. (Student 1) Yes. (Kurita) How about this one? (Student 4) Me. (Kurita) What does this dotted line mean? (Student 4) It means what I would achieve by being engaged in education with my usual effort. (Kurita) I see. (Student 4) And the solid line is my ideal state. (Kurita) This one is your ideal state. I see. This sheet shows a large overlap. Who drew this? (Student 2) Me. (Kurita) It’s you, Rodrigo-san. Could you explain it? (Student 2) I think that after becoming a faculty member, research will be mainly conducted through advising graduate students, so most of the research will become education, and education will be conducted as part of the research. That is why I drew the circles like this. (Kurita) Thank you. How about this one? (Student 5) That’s mine. (Kurita) Could you please explain it to us? (Student 5) My field is nursing. If the education is for a clinical situation, such as for training doctors, nurses, or clinical psychologists, I think it is important to place importance on devoting myself as an educator to train health professionals. The overlap shows the education for training researchers. (Kurita) Oh, I see. (Student 5) I think that it would be better to entrust research to those who specialize in basic medical sciences working at research institutes to improve the quality of the research. That is why I made the research circle smaller. (Kurita) I see. Thank you. The research circle is large in this sheet. (Student 6): It is large, but I do not mean to undervalue education. My field is close to the real world, so it overlaps not only with education, but also with social contribution. (Kurita) I see. Social contribution is included. (Student 6): I would also like to emphasize how I could directly connect my research to my social contribution, so I balanced the circles in that way. There is a margin in the sheet, but there is an invisible circle for social contribution. (Kurita) I see. Thank you. There are only eight people here, but as you can see, there are various kinds of relationships between education and research. The image of the circles would change after becoming a faculty member. All you have to do is to just draw circles, so I recommend you to keep drawing circles every so often. That’s all for this session. Thank you.
