Postgraduate Supervision Conference, Stellenbosch, March 16-18, 2022

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postgraduate supervision, trajectories, transformations, transitions, University of Stellenbosch

By Cally Guerin

The 8th Postgraduate Supervision Conference (PGS) was run fully online for the first time in March this year. It’s the first full conference I’ve attended since the pandemic began and it was such a joy to be in the ‘presence’ of other people researching doctoral education – I didn’t realise quite how much I’ve been missing this company! The program had lots of familiar names and faces, as well as many researchers whose work is new to me.

The Stellenbosch conference draws participants from across the globe and facilitates discussions that focus on some of the big issues facing doctoral education at present.

Another year and do we understand doctoral writing any better?

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End-of-year greetings, feedback on writing, online writing group, Supervising online, Writing tips

 

For many of us in English speaking countries, the end of the year means heading into seasonal holidays when we gather together with family and friends, share meals, drinks, Christmas pies and side-step the pressure of work. Lockdowns and anxiety might have both limited this activity and made it even more emotional when there are chances to get together and celebrate just that—time spent together.

Photo by Askar Abayev from Pexels

This year we’re issuing a challenge: what have you learned this year about doctoral writing? The pandemic has forced us to learn new tricks, mostly with working at a distance to support doctoral writing, a topic that Cally considered last year. We thought we’d end 2021 by reflecting on what we’ve learned.

An A to W of Academic Literacy: Book Review

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academic literacies, book review, research literacies, research terms

By Cally Guerin

Mary Jane Curry, Fangzhi He, Weijia Li, Ting Zhang, Yanhong Zuo, Mahmoud Altalouli & Jihan Ayesh (2021) An A to W of Academic Literacy: Key Concepts and Practices for Graduate Students. University of Michigan Press.

This book is jointly written by the eminent academic literacy scholar, Mary Jane Curry, along with a group of graduate students at Rochester University in the USA. Curry is well known for her work that engages directly with the politics and implications of globalisation in which “standard English” (or “Englishes”) has become the common language of academic scholarship. I was keen to see how these authors together explored core concepts of academic literacy that are important to post/graduate writers. Arguably, the co-authorship of this book with international students performs Curry’s position on academic literacy. And the book does satisfyingly deliver significantly more than a standard dictionary of terms or advice to novices. The information offered is not so much about “correctness” as a guide to navigating the contested, shifting terrain of research writing.

Strategies for Writing a Thesis by Publication: Book Review

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book review, thesis by publication

By Cally Guerin

Book Review: Lynn P. Nygaard & Kristin Solli (2021) Strategies for writing a thesis by publication in the social sciences and humanities. Insider Guides to Success in Academia Series. Routledge.

I was delighted to come across Lynn Nygaard and Kristin Solli’s Strategies for writing a thesis by publication in the social sciences and humanities; sensible advice on this topic from such well-informed scholars is welcome and timely. This book is the first one I’ve read in the series edited by Helen Kara and Pat Thomson and it makes me keen to see other publications in the series.

The primary audience for Nygaard and Solli’s work is doctoral candidates, but it is very useful for supervisors, writing teachers and researcher developers. It takes a straight forward, practical approach to the thesis by publication, outlining the challenges and offering implementable strategies to produce a document suitable for examination. The text is up to date with current thinking, cites extensively from recent literature and is clearly in tune with the discussions occurring at institutions around the world and in a broad range of disciplines.

Online resources for doctoral writers: an annotated bibliography

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academic writing resources, online writing resources, research writing resources, writing websites

Our guest blogger is Siân Lund from the Royal College of Art PG Art and Design college in the UK. She has been the EAP (English for Academic Purposes) Coordinator for almost 6 years. She has a background in language education and is passionate about exploring diversity in communication with a special interest in acculturation processes. At the RCA she is responsible for providing Academic Literacies support for all students at MA and Doctoral level as well as promoting pedagogic strategies for enhancing learning.

By Siân Lund

While building up support in academic literacies skills for our students, I was struck by distinct epistemologies of Art and Design disciplines and how this impacts on the way students develop their research and writing. Through interviews with staff, I recognised the importance of a reflective process of enquiry underpinning the research process in these fields. Tutors often expect the students’ experiences, inspirations and reflections to become part of the writing with individual perspectives and interpretations. Combining this creative and often very personal approach with more conventional and critically objective elements of academic writing has caused difficulties for many students. We are often asked ‘how can I combine my individual journey and voice with criticality and academic writing?’ At the risk of opening a huge can of worms here around terminology, I am thinking of ‘objective discussion’ as a genre along a spectrum of ‘academic writing’. Sometimes a tutor’s conversation with students which involves encouragement to use personal perspectives, narratives and a creative approach in the writing process can lead to a struggle for students to combine these elements with critical, more objective discussion. 

Not wanting to go down the rabbit hole of exploring what researching and writing in an Art and Design context might mean, it feels necessary to set this context for the annotated bibliography that I am including here.

End of 2020 – thank goodness!

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COVID 19, End-of-year greetings

by Claire, Susan and Cally

Looks like we’ve made it through to the end of 2020 – the strangest year many of us have ever experienced.

In this apocalyptic year, most people we know have been in lockdown at various times; some liked it and many hated it. Most supervisors and doctoral writers have found themselves working from home this year much more than they had planned. For some, this has been a bonus, making it easier to manage the complex matrix of family, work and study. They’ve saved time from not travelling to campus and the proliferation of online workshops has meant more ready access to community and professional development than they would usually enjoy.

For many others, especially for doctoral writers living on modest budgets, this has been hugely challenging: the routines of moving between work and other parts of life have dissolved; the loneliness of doctoral study has been exacerbated with even fewer opportunities to meet with peers; and the restrictions of living spaces and internet connection have been unavoidably confronting.