Terms of career
This post is an exploration of my understanding of the differences between being a teacher, a lecturer, and a researcher. My understanding is muddled, confused. I hope by the end to have talked out the difference for myself.
If it seems like an unimportant difference, let's put it this way: a lot of careers have myriad job titles people pass through at different times, as well as distinct roles they take on in certain circumstances. Doctors are also therapists and counselors, and perhaps even legal advisors in certain cases -- all with the understanding that their primary role is medicinal but they have expertise that can answer a range of questions.
I think I started my career as a tutor; that's likely where most people in my work start: one-to-one with a small set of materials. I became a teacher after university, when I worked in a proper classroom. And only recently, in perhaps the last 8-10 years, have I become a lecturer. I am working still on the role of researcher; more on that later.
When I taught, I focused on student learning. Their intellectual and social education was the core around which the classroom and my practice rotated. It was not so much about the material as it was about the learning skills of students. Teach a man to fish, right? Not 'lecture a man to fish'? Teaching presumes the student is working on gaps in their learning skills themselves. The material, whatever it may be, can change and shift. I suspect this is why many schools for children and adolescents present a wide range of topics (math, science, history) in a condensed period of time (perhaps one hour devoted to each): the real curriculum is teaching kids to read, sit still, recite, and perform knowledge.
There's not much sense in telling children their real education is how to be act educated, and if they actually become educated it's a nice bonus. Children are told constantly what they are doing and why, how they should behave and why, and no hesitation is present when telling them NOT to do things. In adulthood people frequently or even obsessively romanticize their youth. This is good of course, but it's healthy to remember how miserable it often was to be told when to go to sleep, what to eat, where to be, and even sometimes who to be friends with or what thoughts to think. Social education, or the process of civilizing young humans, is incredibly tedious and deep-reaching. A lot of bad can come of it, but on the whole it's probably a good thing if, as you walk along the street, other people drive their cars well, don't take your bag, don't cuss you out, and respect your space and privacy. Whether civilization need come so cruelly from school and so on is another question, maybe.
Lecturing
As usual I get away from my topic. Lecturing started for me a few years back when I realized suddenly that the content of my courses was getting more interesting and, more importantly, that the university students I was teaching were not much in need of social education. In short, they knew basically how to study. Here and there it was helpful to look at pragmatic study skills and discuss habits, but this was more often in the vein of sharing what they already knew with one another, and reflecting on what and how they would like to learn in the near future.
Lecturing presumes an interested student and proceeds to dive deeper into a topic than a mere textbook, LLM, or quiz ever could. It is an exercise of art on the part of the lecturer - I really mean this. It's partially why it is so morbidly funny to me to think of professors using generative AI software to make their lectures for them. I have heard of this in limited amounts so far, but nevertheless it strikes me as funny, like a table-maker contracting work out to a factory. So one would spend so many years of training and practice just to give away the thing one loves the most?
Of teaching, lecturing, and researching, at the moment I get the most joy from lecturing. It's the closest I'll come to performative art in my lifetime, I think, and it's rhetorical ins and outs are endlessly interesting to me, if not always exciting (for instance, when I deliver the same fundamental lecture every year). Trying to vocalize my understanding of a topic in a way people would want to hear is the best way to keep myself sharp as I enter middle age.
What makes it distinct from teaching? I've said already that I think it's more about the content than about the student. This should seem straightforward, perhaps obvious to anyone thinking about it for a long enough time. By its name, lecturing implies a performative and even one-directional practice. It is not the audience I care so much about, but the atmosphere and flow of the speech.
Let's not forget though, the wealth of obnoxious but probably correct pedagogical theory stating that classrooms ought to be at least sometimes participatory and investigative, not simply lecture halls where one person performs and most people sit and listen. Education is not purely theatre, no matter how much fun that might be for some educators. So how does one shift footing and allow for their lecture to be something interactive?
In short, I don't think one does. It's a little like inserting jokes into a serious drama. Done well, it elevates the whole piece. Done poorly, it pushes at the seams of audience's patience. I have many times arbitrarily injected 'discussion questions' into my lectures at odd junctures where a topic was not really finished, I had discrete answers already, or I simply got tired of talking. This is my reveal that I am probably still not a very good lecturer and might never get any better than I am now. The little I can do here is maybe recognize my shortcomings.
Nevertheless, lecturing remains entertaining. Done in short bursts, with effective supportive materials, a good lecture can do a lot. Many students at the late stage of their formal education do not, I think, want an overly attentive and emotionally-tuned-in teacher. What they want is to see someone who knows things talk about them in a way they have not heard before. What they want is what I would want: an expert's live performance of knowledge.
Research
If things work logically in this world, the role of researcher would be the next that I comfortably step into. I'll say now that I've done research, continue to do research, have written and published my own research, and feel basically adequate in this capacity. But life wouldn't be much if I felt simply adequate; I wouldn't have come this far or stayed this interested in it.
I think research represents the total commitment to ideas that starts with lecturing. Or, I should say, that is present in lecturing. I am not sure what career paths other people take. I have a strong suspicion that most researchers start (and end) purely in research; they do not really teach, only sometimes lecture, and by and large have a smaller but more specialized skillset than most people. This is part of what makes them impressive, I think: pure-bred researchers, or pure-bred academics, are people who have focused on a small corner of the world and an even smaller set of questions within that world, and have developed the practice of 'sausage-slicing' their ideas into many smaller articles that get published in what are called 'top' journals, because other pure-breds read and refer to them.
If I sound cynical, it's because I am.
Next to teaching and lecturing, researching is intensely insular, cut off from the 'real' or general world, and characteristically intensely focused in on itself. Citations, the practice of academics listing each other's work in their own, is an incestual practice by design. It creates bubbles of thought where internal members are invited to go deeper, deeper, and deeper into their specialization, in the feverish dream of finding out something 'new' about something very specific.
Besides its inherent alienation from students and real world events, I find research frustrating in large part because the vast majority of it feels like people repainting a massive tapestry, or perhaps sanding down the edges of Gothic cathedral gargoyles, so that they might be a little smoother. If the universe is just fractals, then academia has successfully replicated this phenomena in abstract form: articles beget articles, terms beget terms, and there is an overall sense of things bending back on to themselves, as new thinkers echo ideas of past thinkers, and entire debates rage over small differences, like ecclesiastical obsessives and dogmatic pedants spilling blood over verbs.
I have had the misfortune of meeting a handful of obsessives who openly delight in these dogfights. More often than not, it starts with interpersonal tensions. The fastest way to find it is at the coffee hour at conferences. Sipping from plastic cups, the world's leading minds munch on bad bread and perform different ways of winging for one another. It all ends like recess in grade school: a sound, an announcement, a shuffling, a wandering, and then a big sad empty room of stray snacks left. The amount of garbage academic conferences must produce is satirically sad and embarrassing. Forget about the carbon emissions from all those flights for international gatherings. Academics don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to environmental protest.
But that aside, all that aside, becoming a researcher appears to be a process akin to picking one's social circle in school. Will you be a philosopher-type, or an empirical-type? Are you most keen on methods, or theory? Do you want new topics, or to refine the old ones? And how do you write? Do you appeal to this or that crowd, this or that sensibility?
Most important here, I think, is that in teaching and lecturing one is faced with a basically captive and subordinate audience: students. One can make a long and vain career out of becoming the best-damn-teacher-these-kids-have-ever-seen. This can be gratifying, yet it's like being the best advert on TV. Students see a lot of teachers. If they like you in the moment, that's nice. If you're lectures are good, that's good. Ultimately, though, knowledge production is why universities get funding.
So I'll end here: I am halfway enthusiastic about becoming a more fully-realized researcher. Mostly I am nervous about entering the world of my peers who seem, most of the time, to be obsessed and distracted not by ideas but by turf wars and funding. Publications, submissions, acceptances, tenure -- academia has a wide range of self-assessment practices that can feel downright Christian in their sadomasochistic effects. Rejections and reviews, citation counts and rankings...nothing in my career working with actual students and then actual ideas prepared me for the almost vulgar and definitely mundane feeling of staring down at a string of numbers representing 'top' journals and 'top cited' scholars. It's like I've suddenly entered a world of sports rather than reflection and investigation.
I'll keep working on the enthusiasm. It was easier, I think, to take to teaching because it meant meeting a large number of people and seeing new places. Likewise with lecturing, there was a pleasure in finding out how to synthesize, condense, or expand on the ideas I was reading and writing about to a sympathetic crowd. With research, though, perhaps I am focusing too much on the games being played above and around it. After all, teachers gossip and snipe at each other, and even good lecturers can become egotistical boors. The thread running through what I enjoy is the pursuit of ideas and new questions. So, let's make that our definition of research.