Designing a new doctoral research project and factoring in writing

Tags

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.

Acknowledgements in a doctoral thesis: Humanising the examination process?

Tags

Researcher identity, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Dr Vijay Kumar

University of Otago, New Zealand.

Dr Vijay Kumar is a leading figure in the research field of doctoral education, experience and pedagogy. He applies linguistics methodologies to considering doctoral writing and the relationship between candidate-author and supervisor-reviewer as to how feedback on writing works best. He offers his reflection on the acknowledgements, and the results of his research on whether or not acknowledgments influence examiners–do click on the link to his interesting article.

I am beginning to get the notion that acknowledgments humanise the examination process.

One of the first sections I read when I get a thesis to examine is the acknowledgments.  I want to know the person who wrote the thesis and the journey the candidate had to go through to submit this work for examination. At times, I am affected when the candidate writes about their struggles – leaving family behind to pursue their dreams, death of loved ones, hardship while doing the PhD and also the time it took for them to submit as this may reflect financial hardship. I become extremely sympathetic reading about parents who have to balance the PhD and care for children during the journey – these struggles speak to the human side of an examiner and I expect other examiners to be the same.

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.

Scholarship as collaboration: Towards a generous rhetoric

Tags

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

Tags

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

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.