The previous special issue of Pedagogy, “Undergraduate Research as a Future of English Studies,” featured institutional and pedagogical strategies for helping undergraduate students make original intellectual and creative contributions to the fields of literary studies, writing studies, and linguistics. Authors in this special issue described large-scale, multi-institutional strategies for promoting undergraduate research, and they used traditional definitions of undergraduate research from the Council on Undergraduate Research: students are mentored by faculty or more experienced researchers, they use research methods widely accepted in their discipline, they make at least modest contributions to their discipline, and they circulate their work beyond a classroom audience (Hakim 1998: 190). These characteristics are part of what marks undergraduate research as a high-impact practice, and this cluster of articles highlights how the spirit of undergraduate research—original, primary, and secondary research that aims to answer meaningful, authentic questions in a discipline—invigorates individual courses.
Undergraduate research...
