Managing supervisor/candidate falling out over doctoral writing

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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.

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Scholarship as collaboration: Towards a generous rhetoric

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Emotion & writing, Researcher identity, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Anthony Paré

Anthony Paré is a Professor at the University of British Columbia. He’s also an inspiring researcher who took a lead in researching doctoral writing, with wise articles based on practice as well as data.

Who is the speaker of academic texts? What is their relationship to readers? With what authority and conviction do they speak? Is their task to contest, criticize, and rebuke, or is it to cooperate, assist, and collaborate? In scholarly practice, and in the training of students, is academic discourse regarded as a field of combat, where opponents’ positions are attacked and one’s own arguments advanced triumphantly? Or do we approach academic writing as a fundamentally social act through which understanding and knowing are built collectively?

Since I believe that knowledge-making is a social enterprise that depends on collaborative work, these are questions I’ve frequently considered over many years of teaching and studying writing, and they were the questions I addressed in my presentation at the recent International Academic Identities Conference in Hiroshima, Japan. The Conference theme was The Peaceful University: Aspirations for academic futures – compassion, generosity, imagination, and creation, a powerful and poignant theme in a city that experienced such horrendous violence in August, 1945. In this blog entry, I offer the written version of that talk.

Christmas reading; doctoral writing in 2019

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Doctoral writing, Researcher identity, talking about writing

By Susan Carter

It’s customary for DoctoralWriting to begin a new year with a post based around that theme: new year’s resolutions for better doctoral writing practice. A new year offers a turning point, an invitation to audit how the previous year played out, and to plan for a productive writing year ahead with renewed energy. Here’s 2017’s new year’s post, 2015’s and 2014’s. In 2016, our new year’s post celebrated and acknowledged guest contributors. These previous year’s reflections are inspiring posts, worth looking at again. Maybe it is reasonable to approach each new year ritualistically: it is not the particularity of each new year that matters, just that each turning point offers again the chance to review and plan ahead.

I’m wondering too whether it is common that when we academics return to work after Christmas, we have spent time reading fiction over the break. In our family, a good book is a common Christmas gift, and the Christmas break is one time of the year when there may be time to read. I find that stories often give me ideas for doctoral writing workshops.

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

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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.

Developing doctoral writing in four dimensions: Helen Sword’s baseline

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Desire to write, Doctoral writing, Emotion & writing, Researcher identity, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Susan Carter

This post is premised squarely on the base line of Helen Sword’s latest book on academic writing. She begins by asking the reader to self-audit their own strengths and weaknesses as writers. This task orients them into the book, one rich with data from interviews with successful academic writers as to how they work. Sword has recommendations for each of the dimensions in this exercise. Yet she begins not with good advice, but with an affective approach, reaching into the core of each reader by asking us to reflect on who we are as writers. To self-analyse, we are given an exercise evaluating the different aspects of academic writing that influence development.

‘But, but…’ Writing for examination and the right of reply

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Choosing doctoral examiners, doctoral examination, Examination of the thesis, Researcher identity

By Cally Guerin

One of the biggest challenges in submitting a thesis for examination is that it feels so important to get it right the first time. While students may sometimes feel that it is a one-off, make-or-break moment, in reality thesis examination is not actually as drastic as that. There are opportunities to revise and make corrections; there is a kind of ‘right of reply’ to examiners’ comments if candidates feel something might have been misunderstood. Even when further work is required, the vast majority of candidates who do in fact complete the revisions will get their degree.