Responding to supervisor feedback: do doctoral students have to agree?

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Doctoral writing, Emotion & writing, feedback on writing, Feedback practices, Researcher identity

By Susan Carter

My eight years of being a consultant for doctoral students taught me what supervisors sometimes do not see: that candidates can struggle over whether or not to take supervisory advice. Here, I want to defend two suppositions.

1) It is always wise to pick your battles, and on that assumption, students do well to defer to supervisors when the issues are relatively minor.

2) When writing decisions are important, students need to learn how to refuse advice that they disagree with and demonstrate why.

Because students transition towards independent researcher status when they are able to make decisions and then make them work, academics who support them could initiate talk about how to manage disagreement with supervisors.

Often it is tricky responding to supervisor feedback on writing for candidates who don’t really agree with it. Learning how to negotiate diplomatically is a very useful skill that is not gained lightly. The power differential between student and supervisor can make it quite hard for students to hold on to their own choices. Those who come from a culture where it is inappropriate to contradict a teacher could be advised about Western expectations that there are intellectual benefits to arguing. It’s tricky, though, for many candidates, to disagree.

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Using mind maps, memos, and abductive reasoning to help theorise your findings

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Findings section of a PhD, theory and findings

This week’s blog is from Dr Susan Mowbray. Susan is the Academic Literacy Advisor in the Graduate Research School at Western Sydney University where she works alongside postgraduate students at all stages of candidature, supporting them to refine and progress their research writing. Susan’s interest in supporting doctoral students throughout candidature is reflected in her research and publications.

As Claire noted in June, writing the methodology chapter is a hard process. The learning and thinking involved is intellectually demanding and time-consuming (I’m speaking from experience here!) and also rarely acknowledged.

It’s some comfort then that this learning becomes increasingly visible in our writing as we synthesise our reading and thinking, knowledge and growing understandings.

The plan and the eventual reality

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planning writing, Structuring time, Writing schedules

by Katrien Pickles

Today our guest blogger is Katrien, a family studies researcher, picture book author and swimming teacher. She was raised on the Big Island of Hawai’i and now lives in Wagga Wagga, Australia. Katrien’s doctoral research is on family wellbeing and public playgrounds. Here she reflects on how to plan for the unexpected in research and writing.

When I began my PhD, I read a lot about being organised: how to set up an EndNote library; how to save the impossible amount of articles you will end up downloading; how to securely store your data; and, most importantly, how to manage your time. I created a Gantt chart, included clearly delineated writing time, and felt like a super-hero. Truly, you have no idea how big a deal that is. My husband was confused because the person he married had a deep hatred of Excel. I even colour-coded the months and tasks!

Throughout my experience in doing the PhD, two seemingly opposing themes have emerged: the planned ideal and the eventual reality. You can start out with high hopes, rooted in your ideal version of the research.

Writing skills and post-PhD employment

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employability, post-PhD life, writing skills

By Cally Guerin

Researcher development workshops are increasingly focused on what is learnt during the doctorate that graduates take into their non-academic jobs on graduation.  Here at DoctoralWriting we usually concentrate on the kind of writing that is undertaken during the doctorate, but much of that is building a skillset that is invaluable outside the academy too. The writing skills developed during a PhD are right up there at the top of the list of desirable skills that employers are looking for.

Re-Imagining Doctoral Writing: An Agenda for Research

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call for papers, innovations in writing, research into writing, writing scholarship

Our guest post this week is by an international group of scholars working at three different institutions: Cecile Badenhorst is an Associate Professor in the Adult Education/Post-Secondary program in the Faculty of Education at Memorial University, Newfoundland, Canada; Brittany Amell is a PhD student at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada; and on the other side of the world, James Burford is a Lecturer in the Research Education and Development unit in the Graduate Research School, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Here they tell us about their new project on “Re-Imagining Doctoral Writing” and invite readers to contribute to their forthcoming book on the topic. All three have published extensively on the topic of doctoral writing.

By Cecile Badenhorst, Brittany Amell & James Burford

Over recent years, doctoral writing has become an increasingly important practice to institutions, policymakers, and doctoral education programs worldwide. Frequently positioned as a site of  “risk” and “trouble”, doctoral writing is commonly seen as a key location for institutional regulation and surveillance, supervisory anxiety, and student concern. It is now clear that to describe doctoral writing as a domain that is “under-considered” or “under-discussed” would be to miss the shelves of books in most university libraries about how doctoral students might write, and how supervisors (and others involved in doctoral teaching) might teach writing.

To make such a statement would also be to miss the rich collection of public fora where the discussion of doctoral writing identities, practices, policies and pedagogies takes place (e.g. DoctoralWriting, Thesis Whisperer and Patter), and the rise of initiatives like #AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month) which bring academic writers together.

Despite this wide array of exciting developments in the field of doctoral writing, as scholars who research in this area we continue to have some fundamental concerns that we are pondering and puzzling over.

Designing a new doctoral research project and factoring in writing

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Desire to write, Doctoral writing, Precision, Researcher identity

By Susan Carter

This afternoon I am meeting a new doctoral candidate I’ll be supervising, and I’ve already sent her a set of questions in advance of meeting. Before we begin working as a team with the other supervisor to design the doctoral project and start writing seriously, I want the candidate to do some thinking. Mostly, it’s she who must ensure that we do not get side-tracked by talk of methods, methodology, and theory from focussing on what is central: the candidate as someone already with a life that we want this doctorate to improve.

I’ve drawn these questions up, and filed them away knowing that this will be another useful document for sharing with other academics and using again myself.