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.

International Doctoral Education Research Network (IDERN) Online Meeting, 26 Aug 2020

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COVID 19, IDERN, online conference, online writing group, Supervising online, writing online

By Cally Guerin

One activity of the DoctoralWriting blog is to report on conferences and events we’ve attended. Of course, this year that has been hugely disrupted: most of us have seen our favourite meetings cancelled and have consequently missed out on the interactions with our research community that are usually a source of inspiration and encouragement. Luckily, online alternatives are appearing to fill that gap.

On 26 August, the first online meeting was convened for IDERN, the International Doctoral Education Research Network (this group had previously planned to meet in Denmark in June 2020). The topic was “Distance supervision and its discontents: what do we need to understand?”, facilitated by Gina Wisker (University of Bath), Swapna Kumar (University of Florida) and me (Australian National University). We had about 60 attendees from 17 different countries around the world.

Any discussion of supervision inevitably touches upon issues around doctoral writing, and this meeting was the same, even though writing wasn’t our specific focus. The sudden shift to online supervision in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that many supervisors have been forced into developing different practices for working on writing with doctoral candidates.

Life online: Zoom survival and etiquette in supervision

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meeting your supervisor online, Supervising online, zoom ettiquette

Claire Aitchison

Can you see me?  She’s muted, she can’t hear you. Turn up your volume.  Write it into the chat function. Hello – can you hear me? That background is amazing.  I still can’t see you.  Down on the bottom, on the left, the picture of a microphone: press it.  And, so it goes – even still, even 100s of zoom meetings later…

Before Corona, whether in the laboratory or the office, by chance or scheduled, most supervisors met with their students face to face on campus. With students readily on hand, the expectation was for synchronous, physically co-present meetings – and for most, there was simply no need to consider alternatives. However, virtual supervision had been increasing with the growth in transnational doctoral study options and to meet the need for student and supervisor flexibility more generally. With the Covid-19 pandemic, what was a trend, now seems quite routine.

So, how do we best operate in this new environment? What are the etiquettes, traps and advantages of virtual meetings and of giving and receiving feedback on virtual platforms such as zoom?