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| Academic Graduate (Photo credit: Goodimages) |
Ed: This article outlines the trend that has inspired me (Dr Robert Muller) to offer mentoring and guidance services for PhD, Masters and Honours students in line with your supervisor's requirements. For more information, see: http://tutoringtoexcellence.blogspot.com.
As an experienced academic with over 20 years of experience, including extensive experience as a Research Fellow, such services are a growing trend that fill the rapidly growing gap outlined below.
This is an op-ed piece I’ve recently written. It’s still in press but I thought I might give it a little pre-publication outing here. The DIY theme is one I’m doing more work on right now.
In the humanities and social sciences, the PhD is usually equated with a supervision relationship; thinking about this supervision relationship as a pedagogy is however relatively recent.
One of the landmarks in the supervision-as pedagogy-thinking came in a 1995 issue of The Australian Universities Review (Vol. 38, no. 2), when editors Bill Green and the late Alison Lee brought together a range of ‘down-under’ scholars to discuss “postgraduate studies/ postgraduate pedagogy”.
The special issue addressed the emergence of a mass higher education system in which a normative ‘rational’ science model of research and supervision and discourses of ‘quality’, ‘experience’, ‘competency’ and ‘accountability’ were rapidly becoming dominant.
In this context, the editors and authors collectively argued, the PhD was still subject to its popular caricature of apprenticeship. This, they said, ignored key questions of disciplinarity, identity and the production and reproduction of knowledge and knowledge elites.
While addressing the Australian context, the special issue also suggested that the same practices could be seen elsewhere, including in Britain.
Arguably, much of what the writers in this special issue saw as trends in higher education postgraduate education have become reality.
British universities no longer see the PhD as the production of a ‘genius elite’ (Yeatman, 1995); rather it is ‘training’ for a career in some form of knowledge work, research or teaching either in higher education or elsewhere.
It would be hard to find a British university that does not now have a Graduate school and/ or Academic Development Unit which runs a menu of doctoral training programmes.
Some of course also have Research Council funded Doctoral Training Centres which offer ‘core’ methods modules, as well as master classes.
Supervision too has become more formalized and normalized with various kinds of confirmation papers and vivas, annual reports, and proforma to provide audit trails of supervision meetings. Doctoral education is now much more than the sole responsibility of the supervisor.
However, a recent Google search, combined with conversation on social media, suggests that in Britain, despite all this ‘academic development’ there seems to be pretty patchy institutional engagement with supervisors on the topic of postgraduate pedagogies - despite the growing body of research in and around supervision pedagogies and doctoral education.
There is even less discussion with supervisors about the changes that might be produced by what I see as rapidly expanding DIY doctoral education practices.
Doctoral researchers have probably always acted outside of the supervision relationship, talking to each other, swapping ideas, books and experiences.
These days it would be a rare supervisor, graduate school or academic developer who frowned on self-managed reading groups - such groups are often formally organised within institutions, and more often than not, within shared disciplinary frames.
Supervisors are not averse to referring doctoral researchers to selected volumes from the shelves of advice books that are now available on every aspect of the PhD. There are also now academic writing groups that function in the same way as reading groups, within and beyond universities and within disciplines (Aitchison & Guerin, 2014).
The plethora of advice books (Kamler & Thomson, 2008) were probably the first major indication of the trend to de-institutionalise doctoral education through DIY pedagogy. The advent of social media has exponentially accelerated it.
Doctoral researchers can now access a range of websites such as LitReviewHQ, PhD2Published and The Three Month Thesis youtube channel. They can read blogs written by researchers and academic developers e.g. Thesis Whisperer, Doctoral Writing SIG, Explorations of Style, and of course this one.
They can synchronously chat on social media about research via general hashtags #phdchat #phdforum and #acwri, or discipline specific hashtags such as #twitterstorians or #socphd. They can buy webinars, coaching and courses in almost all aspects of doctoral research.
Doctoral researchers are also themselves increasingly blogging about their own experiences and some are also offering advice to others. Much of this socially mediated DIY activity is international, cross-disciplinary and all day/ all night.
We know too little about how doctoral researchers weigh up the advice they get from social media compared to that of their institutional grad school and their supervisors. We also don’t know much about how supervisors engage with this DIY sphere, particularly about how much they talk with their supervisees about what they are doing online.
We don’t know what support doctoral researchers get to work out what is good and bad online advice. We don’t know how supervisors and academic developers build on what doctoral researchers are learning elsewhere.
As someone who is engaged in this DIY field with books, blogs and twitter, it seems pretty apparent to me that something is happening here and we (collectively) don’t know what it is.
It’s largely outside the normative audit oriented training processes that Green and Lee were so concerned about. It’s a field which is fragmented, partially marketised, unregulated and a bit feral.
But it’s big, it’s powerful, more and more doctoral researchers are into it, and it is profoundly pedagogical.
I’m concerned that British universities are generally (and of course there are exceptions, but mostly this is the case) not helping supervisors to think about this DIY supervision trend and what it means for how doctoral education is changing - and crucially, what the implications for their supervision practices might be.
References
Aitchison, C., & Guerin, C. (Eds.). (2014). Writing groups for doctoral education and beyond. London: Routledge.
Kamler, B., & Thomson, P. (2008). The failure of dissertation advice books: towards alternative pedagogies for doctoral writing. Educational Researcher, 37(8), 507-518.
Yeatman, A. (1995). Making supervision relationships accountable: graduate student logs. Australian Universities Review, 38(2), 9-11.
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