WHY DON'T WE DO RESEARCH ABOUT RESEARCH?

Antje Rüger & Ligia Cortés

Publicado en Capital Letter No. 4

Noviembre de 2003

One of the academic development groups formed in the Department of Foreign Languages during the second semester of 2002 assumed the tasks of revising the strategies the Department had regarding research, the monograph projects developed by students and the monograph seminars offered. While compiling information about the topics mentioned, the group identified old problems of different order that contribute to student desertion from the program and to a deplorable loss of time and effort. We can mention among others the misinformation about the different alternatives students are offered to carry out a monograph project, the lack of knowledge regarding the procedures to follow, the excess time dedicated to prepare and present the project, the weak link that connects the monograph seminars to the monograph projects or to the professional field of our graduate students…The problem is not exclusively ours. In the self-evaluation document of the curricular programs existent at Universidad Nacional, in the item relative to graduate students, it is appointed that " 19,67% of the students from Universidad Nacional that delay the ending of their studies indicate as the main restricting reason for this the monograph project[…] this project has been a limiting element for more than the half of the surveyed students"1.

Worried about this situation, professors Melba Libia Cárdenas, Claudia Nieto, Véronique Bellanger, Ligia Cortés and Antje Rüger, decided to investigate this problematic situation in depth by means of a case study. They participated in the contest opened by the División de Investigaciones de la Sede de Bogotá de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia with a research Project that had been recently approved. Such project will basically try to establish the factors that facilitate or hinder the research work in the major of Philology and Languages. In this way, they intent to provide a better orientation to the students who are in process of writing their project so that they can end their careers in the scheduled time. The participants in this research project will be 40 students of our major who had recently submitted their monograph project or are still in the process.

The Grupo Investigamos intends also to contribute to the demystification of the preconception people at the Department have with respect to research, to widen the fields of action and hopefully to give a deserved importance to the research works both teachers and students are developing in their areas of knowledge.

1 Autoevaluación. Programas Curriculares. Graduandos. Una mirada retrospectiva. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2002, p.64.