I feel that with language instruction specifically– in which communicating clearly and hitting certain stylistic qualities and accents is key– this is a great model. Learning Cairene Arabic in this manner, when the professor at college is an Arab-American or a non-Arab who never lived and learned Egyptian dialect and local sayings, would be the type of situation in which I could see this working. Specific textual study would also work (Qur’anic or Talmudic commentaries)….

But I’m still attracted to the idea. It provides an answer (not a silver bullet, but a start) to all those times that someone has to be discouraged from doing a viable and interesting dissertation on something which will make it harder than usual for them to find a job. As long as a candidate can teach Intro to Surveys, this could mean that an odd, quirky, specialization could actually shed lustre on the department that has such a person around the place.

It’s not surprising to hear from Carl Burkart that people will do this sort of teaching for nominal pay. (“Will” is not intended to mean “should.”) How often do any of us get to advise a student on exactly what we’re working on ourselves?

But my own experience with very good, very motivated undergrads suggests another solution: if someone wants to do something in my field but outside of my area of expertise, what’s worked is to set up a tutorial where the basic structure is that they learn a subject area and teach it to me. We set up a broad topic, and then they do a lit search (on the basis of which I will poke around to see if there’s anything else that seems interesting), and then we decide what to read first. I usually try to take a look at it before we meet, but the onus is on them to know it well enough to describe and explain it to me. If I’m really trying to figure out what something is about I will press a student with questions about it in a way I never would when I already know about it, and I’ve had some very productive tutorials this way. I think a broad knowledge of a field lets us usefully guide a student even if they end up knowing more about a specific area than we do, as long as the areas are somewhat close. So, for example. while I work on the politics of cultural revival, if a student wanted to study (say) the emergence of consumer culture in Africa, I think we could do a course where they would learn a lot about that even if I would do it differently than you would.

This is essentially the model of doctoral education, where the student is the expert on the topic, but the advisers can still guide and judge the students work.