It’s not over until it’s over: writing a doctoral graduation citation

Tags

graduation citation, Researcher identity

Today’s guest bloggers, Ana María Benton and Ian Brailsford, write to us from New Zealand. Ana María Benton holds a doctoral degree in education and is a language learning adviser within English Language Enrichment  (Libraries and Learning Services: Te Tumu Herenga) at the University of Auckland. She has long worked with university students and is passionate about language planning, second language education, and language revitalization. Ian Brailsford is an assistant with the University of Auckland’s Specials Collections (Libraries and Learning Services: Te Tumu Herenga) and was previously employed as a postgraduate learning adviser working primarily with doctoral candidates. Here they explain the identity work involved in writing the citation that is read out at New Zealand graduation ceremonies for PhD candidates.

By Drs Ana Maria Benton Zavala and Ian Brailsford

Introduction

This blog post describes the final piece of doctoral writing for a recently awarded PhD: the brief citation read out at graduation. Conventional wisdom is that the thesis abstract is the final (and possibly hardest) piece of writing. At our University, the official guidelines stipulate that abstracts be no more than 350 words. This equates to approximately three to four years’ full-time doctoral study honed down to three to four paragraphs. Good advice on writing the abstract is out there; this post attempts the same for a citation.

Top Terrors for PhD supervisors–things that make us wake in fright

Tags

Care in supervision, PhD supervisor roles, Supervisor fears

By Claire Aitchison

It’s scary being a PhD supervisor.

Whatever the reason, there would be few supervisors who have not experienced anxiety and self-doubt at some point.

This post is about some of the ‘night terrors’ that can afflict doctoral supervisors. What scares you the most? Please feel welcome to add to this list—and share remedies!

Am I asking too much of this student?

During doctoral candidature there are inevitable ups and downs. Emotional turbulence for both student and supervisor can have their origins in the challenges of the research itself; the stresses around writing and giving and receiving feedback; or perhaps have nothing to do with the research and instead arise from financial, family or work concerns. Life gets in the way, damn it! It isn’t easy to know when to ease off and make allowances, or when to maintain the right level of pressure so that the PhD stays on the boil. How does one balance the personal vulnerabilities and demands on individual students against the institution’s completion-focussed priorities? Furthermore, sometimes the needs of supervisors come into the equation — we too have lives, challenges, workloads and vulnerabilities!

Managing supervisor/candidate falling out over doctoral writing

Tags

Emotion & writing, Feedback practices, Researcher identity, supervisor feedback, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Susan Carter

It’s common for supervisory relations to grow tense somewhere during a doctorate. It’s also usual for the parties involved to work through such tension, and move on, that very usual process in most human relationships. Now and then, though, emotions grow intense, and the disagreement between candidate and supervisor threatens to obstruct the doctorate. And while some tensions may emerge from differing personalities, some relate to differences in writing processes or style preferences. A few times I have worked with supervisor/candidate couples in strife, and this post describes my suggestions for managing discord.

Supervision: the key relationship to get right as a doctoral writer and researcher

Tags

Researcher identity, supervisor feedback, talking about writing, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Ian Brailsford.  Ian is Postgraduate Learning Adviser in the Libraries and Learning Services at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. With doctoral advising as his core work, Ian has an insightful approach to doctoral writing and the personal context that supports it.

Postgraduate research marks a transition from structured teaching and learning, with the lecturer deciding the course content, learning outcomes, assignment tasks and schedule, to fully fledged academic independence. To manage this in-between space, universities have for decades adopted an academic apprenticeship model where the less experienced researcher works under the supervision of a ‘master’. When it works well, as it does in most cases, postgraduate supervision is ‘win win’: the emerging early-career researcher is guided through the project to completion and the supervisor, as one experienced academic, Professor Robin Kearns, once put it, gains a new colleague. In an ideal world the balance of power shifts towards the end of the project; the postgraduate researcher becomes the expert and teaches the supervisor about their new-found knowledge.

However, we’re all human.

But what about creativity?

Tags

Creativity in doctoral writing

Today’s guest blogger is Steven Thurlow, who is undertaking a doctorate at The University of Melbourne. As part of his studies, he has written about the perceptions of creativity held by PhD candidates in the Arts (see Thurlow, Morton & Choi in The Journal of Second Language Writing). He is currently investigating how Arts academics understand the notion of creativity in doctoral writing, both what it is and where it is found.

By Steven Thurlow

It was the last class of our 6-week “creative” writing circle for Arts doctoral writers at the Australian research-intensive university where I work. We had spent each 2-hour class looking at one aspect of creativity – both practical examinations of creativity at the textual/product level and more esoteric discussions about how creativity might be present in doctoral writing processes and practices. The mood was buoyant as the students began taking their leave and heading back to their various disciplinary nooks and crannies.

As she was heading for the door, one of the more enthusiastic participants turned to me. “Gee, Steven, that was a really interesting course and I learned so much.” Then came the body blow:

When research moves too close: Maintaining awareness of boundaries

Tags

Research writing and emotion

By Susan Carter

Some doctoral students find their study overwhelming for more reasons that all the usual ones. Sure, they face the same challenges as others do: the study is vast; there is so much to read and to write; and almost inevitably difficulties occur with the research itself—it’s hard to find participants, experiments don’t work, or data fails to make sense. But beyond all this, some students find that their research topic winds so intensely into other people’s lives it involves something of a meltdown. How can such crises be handled?