Grace Therrell is an Associate Professor and the Student Success Librarian for Online Pedagogy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is also pursuing a PhD in Adult Learning from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.
The last time I wrote for LibParlor was about seven years ago. I was nearing the end of my masters program and I had just published my first peer-reviewed journal article born from a school assignment. I was new to research and feeling a lot of insecurity about being a researcher. Now here I am seven years later – recently tenured, working on a PhD, and regularly calling myself a researcher. A lot has changed since that first foray into research, though some has stayed the same.
As I step into this new phase of my career, I think back to my younger self often and wonder what I would say to her now on the other side of a milestone with more research experience and education. Research changes so much over the course of a career: my approach to research has evolved over time, and I know it will continue to evolve. Here’s what I’m learning lately about research and about myself as a researcher.
My younger self: “I don’t know enough.” My current self: “I am always learning.”
One of my early insecurities as a researcher was that I did not have enough knowledge to publish or share my thoughts. I hadn’t yet “paid my dues.” I’ve found it helpful to reframe this deficit approach. Something I have been reflecting on recently is how much there is to continue learning and knowing. I will never know enough, but that’s the point of research. We ask questions, we find answers, we ask more questions, and the cycle repeats. There will always be more to learn and know, and this is the joy and challenge of research.
Being a PhD student has really helped me embrace research as learning. My PhD is in a completely different field from libraries, meaning that I’ve had to do a lot of work learning a new field and its values. I’ve also had more explicit instruction in research methodologyMethodology The theoretical framework that informs how a researcher approaches their work and what methods are used to collect data.. In other words: I’ve been encountering a lot of new knowledge. As I’ve continued learning this new field, understanding my research preferences, and honing in on my dissertation topic, I’ve begun to see research as learning. Research is an opportunity to explore and investigate the unknown. It is also an opportunity to learn more about ourselves as researchers – experiential learning in its truest form. Instead of dwelling on everything I don’t know, I am learning to focus on everything I want to know. Letting curiosity drive my research has been a key to making research sustainable and enjoyable.
My younger self: “I haven’t done enough.” My current self: “I can build on my experience.”
Another insecurity I faced as an early-career researcher was not having enough practical library experience. I was concerned that no one would care what I had to say because I was inexperienced. I think one of the most enlightening parts of doing research on the tenure-track has been tying my research into my practice and experience, or using my experience and practice to build my research.
One thing that’s been helpful is making room for research that incorporates my practice or allows me to explore new areas of my practice. One of these areas has been the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (or SoTL). SoTL was an early area of interest for me, and I had been supporting faculty SoTL research for a few years. I wasn’t sure, though, how to pursue SoTL research as a librarian. I decided to reach out a coworker and see if she was interested in co-teaching a first-year seminar class with me and designing a SoTL project. We’ve been working on this project for over a year now, and the themes we’re seeing in our data are really interesting. I’m exploring a research area I don’t have much practical experience with, but I’m using my practice to develop that experience. This project has been so much more meaningful and interesting to me because of connection.
My younger self: “I don’t know who I am.” My current self: “I am discovering who I am.”
This final insecurity is one I still struggle with: professional identity. As a librarian, educator, researcher, faculty member, I am still trying to figure out what my professional identity is, how it got here, and how I can honor it in my work. It feels like a knot I’m constantly working at to untie: the more I work at it, the more complex it gets.
I’m not required to have a formal research agendaResearch agenda An iterative document or statement that provides a roadmap to your short and long term topics and ideas you’d like to research. for my job, but I have created a list of research areas that I’m focusing on. These focus areas have grown and changed a lot in the past few years as I’ve honed in on what I’m interested in pursuing and how I want to pursue it. In that original LibParlor post, I noted that my career was not dictated by what I published but that my career informs what I publish. This has absolutely been true for me. I have pursued projects that I dropped, discovered new interests, gotten rejections. I am still discovering the research areas I want to pursue long-term and how “researcher” fits into my professional identity as a whole. I love the way Kevin Seeber talks about researcher identity: “For a myriad of reasons, a researcher’s identity is not a linear progression, and that’s okay.” There are times when I strongly identify as a researcher and when I feel motivated with research, and there are times when I identify more strongly as an educator or as something else. The important thing to remember is that I contain multitudes, even as a researcher.
Endings and Beginnings
I have just closed a huge chapter of my career, and right now my research feels relatively focused, especially as I prepare to work on my dissertation. But I’m well aware my feelings about research will continue to change and evolve. In many ways, I feel like I’m at the beginning again. I’m excited to see what this new phase of my career brings and how my researcher identity and practice continues to evolve as a tenured librarian and eventual-PhD-haver. Cheers to growing in research… and to the next seven years!
Featured image by José M. Reyes on Unsplash.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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