UR in RS
I just returned from the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, where I attended a very good session on mentoring undergraduate research. The panelists belong to a group within AAR that is developing standards and best practices for undergraduate research in the discipline, and they spoke about their experiences mentoring undergraduate researchers and about some of the challenges they have faced, including the difficulty of adapting a natural sciences model of research to a humanities field.
The AAR group does not appear to have made their work publicly available online yet, but it’s a good idea to be on the lookout for conversations about undergraduate research going on within professional organizations such as AAR and the American Philosophical Association.
By the way, while a lot of schools are ramping up undergraduate research programs now, the idea is hardly new. I recently came across an article called "The Place of Undergraduate Research in the Teaching of Religion," written by a professor from Mount Holyoke–in 1935! It includes this wonderful passage:
Nothing enhances the reputation of a given course more rapidly and surely than the discovery that the individual is there recognized as an individual, that his important interests in other fields are recognized and utilized, and that he is expected to work out something original, interesting, and distinctive, involving his earnest effort, and utilizing if possible the technique acquired in some related field, as for example, in history, literary criticism, psychology, language, etc. It may possibly seem out of place to dignify by the term "research", individualized study of special topics within the range of the undergraduate. But the principles of true research as related to the attack on novel problems by the study of the best available sources, the effort to discover new relationships, and to work out and establish new conclusions, are by no means beyond the reach of the undergraduate if the nature of the procedure is made clear, and one or two introductory projects are worked out cooperatively in class.
Source: David E. Adams. "The Place of Undergraduate Research in the Teaching of Religion." Journal of the National Association of Biblical Instructors 3.2 (1935): 88-90.
