I’m taking a course on university pedagogy to, hopefully, become a better teacher. While reading about students’ learning and what teachers ought to do to facilitate it, I couldn’t help thinking about researchers’ learning, and what we ought to do to give ourselves a good learning environment.

Research is, largely, learning. First, a large part of any research work is learning what is already known, not just by me in particular; it’s a direct continuation of learning that takes place in courses. While doing any research project, we learn the concepts other researchers use in this specific sub-subfield, and the relations between them. First to the extent that we can orient ourselves, and eventually to be able to make a contribution that is intelligible to others who work there. We also learn their priorities, attitudes and platitudes. (Seriously, I suspect you learn a lot about a sub-subfield by trying to make jokes about it.) We also learn to do something new: perform a laboratory procedure, a calculation, or something like that.

But more importantly, research is learning about things no-one knows yet. The idea of constructivist learning theory seems apt: We are constructing new knowledge, building on pre-existing structures. We don’t go out and read the book of nature; we take the concepts and relations of our sub-subfield of choice, and graft, modify and rearrange them into our new model of the subject.

If there is something to this, it means that old clichéd phrases like ”institution of higher learning”, scientists as ”students of X”, and so on, name a deeper analogy than it might seem. It also suggests that innovations in student learning might also be good building blocks for research group management. Should we be concept mapping with our colleagues to figure out where we disagree about the definition of ”developmental pleiotropy”? It also makes one wonder why meetings and departmental seminars often take the form of sage on the stage lectures.