Scholarship

My scholarship philosophy is quite simple: I seek new knowledge that is relevant to citizen information about the political process.  I believe that our scholarship can be relevant, but it must not focus so narrowly that we lose sight of its greater connection to everyday citizen governance.  

I am intrigued by Ernest Boyer’s typology of research, partly because I find opportunities to explore all four of the Boyer elements in my scholarship.  I also believe that we should think about the Boyer typology – and thus scholarship - like building a house: you need all elements together, because each serves a separate but complementary purpose.  Scholarship of discovery, the traditional research that we place in journals and books, is the foundation.  The scholarship of pedagogy is the frame.  The scholarship of engagement (or application) represents the windows that allow us to look beyond the house’s limits.  Finally the scholarship of integration is the roof, taking the other elements and topping them off.  The analogy is imperfect, though I believe the progression aspect is important.  We cannot sacrifice our scholarship of discovery simply because we do a significant amount of scholarship of engagement or application, for example.  A balanced body of scholarship would include all four areas, and I believe I have done so.  

I start with the foundation, my scholarship of discovery.  I am fascinated by political campaigns, having worked in politics before I became an academic.  I was intrigued how most state representative campaigns still ran non-professional contests without full-time strategic staff. I immediately began compiling databases of state representative and senate campaigns.  I asked questions about the professionalism, staffing, fundraising, and technological tool usage of all campaigns in those states.  I was able to convert that study into three separate publications: an article in Social Science Computer Review, and book chapters in edited volumes on politicking online and predictive models in political science.  

During my graduate studies, I had the good fortune to study under two experts in campaign finance, and my scholarship of discovery interests also includes campaign money.   I have presented three times on campaign finance, published one recent journal article, and my co-author and I will write a complete book on campaign finance and concomitant regulations in the states next.  

The scholarship of discovery is the foundation upon which I have based all of my scholarship.  All of the pieces above have combined into a viewpoint that sets me apart from many political scientists and pundits: a belief that the core of our political problems are primarily the fault of the voting public and not political actors or the nebulous bogeyman of “politics being broken.”  I developed a mental picture of the electorate using the wrong tools and skill sets to evaluate their government, where citizens had abandoned their core political leadership expected in a republic and replaced it with unrealistic expectations and mere complaint.  I was invited to give the speech multiple times, not just at FHSU but across Kansas, and I began to believe that it was time for me to turn the speech into a piece of scholarship.  I was granted a sabbatical for Fall 2014 to write the book, and Lexington Press published the result, Civic Failure and its Threat to American Democracy: Operator Error in December 2016.  

The scholarship of pedagogy, the frame of the research house, cannot exist without the strong foundation of discovery.  To perform quality pedagogical research, one should already have the scholarship skills that come from traditional discovery work.  The same approach from discovery scholarship ought to apply to pedagogical work, though: if we seek to add new knowledge to our content fields, then we should take the same spirit to the analysis of our teaching.  Every day, our teaching gives us the opportunity to collect new data, analyze it, and produce new scholarship that can help us and other classroom faculty in our fields.  I think an institution whose primary mission is teaching such as ours is an excellent place for cutting-edge scholarship of pedagogy to be conducted.  

There are two elements of my teaching that I have converted into scholarship: the use of simulations and technology.  Simulations trace back to the work I did in graduate school, and continued with two publications on a Leadership/Political Science joint teaching exercise I conducted with a colleague.  I have also published in the Journal of Political Science Education on my use of online video in American Government courses, turning to my use of technology in the classroom.  I have sought to leverage technology in my classroom from the very beginning, since I am an avid user of technology myself and research consistently shows that one of the best ways to reach students is through the very technology they use.  Over two years I collected data from my introductory American Government classes, combining regular test scores with the web supplement Americans Governing from Soomo Publishing.  I found that students who struggled in the class early actually improved the more they used the web supplement as a component of their study.  The study not only earned a place in print, it validated the use of the technology in my classroom.   I also used the scholarship of discovery skills of data analysis and research question building to make rigorous scholarship of pedagogy.

Having framed the house, now we must add the windows and look outside the structure of our existing scholarship.  The scholarship of engagement, also called the scholarship of application by Boyer, allows us to expand our horizons even further, as we study how our research affects the world beyond the university.  I am proud of my co-authored scholarship with students, which emerged from American Democracy Project civic engagement work.  We worked closely together, and even though I was quite comfortable working collaboratively, the first time I was able to mentor an undergraduate student from the beginning of a research project to published conclusion was a point of particular pride.  Most recently, I have co-authored a chapter on FHSU’s efforts to move civic engagement online through our eCitizenship initiative with another undergraduate student.  

Further, I have participated in a project that has roots in both the scholarship of engagement and integration.  One of my closest research partners and I wanted to develop online iterations of our in-person service learning projects and decided we should measure our work for publication.  We not only implemented the online service learning projects, we surveyed our students and measured the effectiveness of the pilot, to turn the effort into research.  So we not only produced scholarship of pedagogy, but also multi-disciplinary scholarship of integration.  

Many of the works I have participated in creating have been collaborative in nature, and that is another element of scholarship I value greatly.  I think some of the best research comes out of multiple minds working together, whether that be two political scientists in the same department, cross-disciplinary work with colleagues here and other institutions, or mentorship with undergraduate and former students.  While I maintain my own solo-authored work as well, I am very happy to collaborate with others.  The multiple instances of working together with other scholars from a variety of institutions and disciplines are another point of pride in my scholarship.