The Routledge Doctoral Supervisor's Companion

Supporting Effective Research in Education and the Social Sciences

Melanie Walker, Pat Thomson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136971709
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Accompanying The Routledge Doctoral Student's Companion this book examines what it means to be a doctoral student in education and the social sciences, providing a guide for those supervising students. Exploring the key role and pedagogical challenges that face supervisors in students' personal development, the contributors outline the research capabilities which are essential for confidence, quality and success in doctorate level research. Providing guidance about helpful resources and methodological support, the chapters:

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• frame important questions within the history of debates
• act as a road map through international literatures
• make suggestions for good practice
• raise important questions and provide answers to key pedagogical issues
• provide advice on enabling students' scholarly careers and identities.

While there is no one solution to ideal supervision, this wide-ranging text offers resources that will help supervisors develop their own personal approach to supervision. Ideal for all supervisors whether assisting part-time of full-time students, it is also highly suitable for helping academics to support international students who confront Western doctoral traditions and academic cultures, helping both supervisor and student to understand why things are as they are.

Part 1
Introduction

Why The Doctoral Companions?

M. Walker and P. Thomson

The Doctoral Companions are designed for doctoral researchers and their supervisors/advisers to read separately and together. The two volumes are neither advice books nor commentaries on the experiences of doctoral research and supervision. Their purpose is to provide complementary and situating commentary about doctoral research and to map key debates that work in and around the burgeoning research methods and doctoral literatures.

Indeed, there are an ever-expanding number of books available to support doctoral research – doing it-guides, toolkits and advice books, methods books, research and evidence-informed policy and practice and how-to-get published. There are countless methodology and methods texts. There is a growing literature on the changing nature of the doctorate, on the doctorate in different parts of the world, on the doctorate and the knowledge economy, on supervision, student experiences and the viva. However, this extensive literature is difficult for doctoral researchers and their supervisors to navigate and will thus not necessarily take students forward in their own doctoral projects. Supervisors are often unaware that their students are consulting advice books and, due to the existence of postgraduate methods training courses, may assume that students understand the nature of the enterprise in which they are involved. Their own intensifying work load also militates against supervisors taking time away from the details of specific supervision projects to engage in more general conversations about the doctorate and the processes of doctoral researchers becoming scholars. Students therefore may well end up confused, with the result that they may follow unproductive methodological and philosophical explorations. Alternatively, they may simply feel inadequate when apparently straightforward advice fails to do the trick. Holbrook and Johnston (1999) explain that such books are unhelpfully decontextualised and fail to acknowledge the messiness of real lives, not amenable to easy control or resolution. They write that, ‘Tears and tantrums, frustrations, phobias and personal agendas are missing, so are the supervisors who do have the correct answer or students with unmanageable problems’ (1999: 7). Our goal is to support doctoral researchers and their supervisors to interrogate the many catalogues of texts now available for doctoral purchase.

The widely read and highly successful books (Cham 2008a; 2008b; 2008c) and the comic strip titled ‘Piled Higher and Deeper’ (PhD), developed by graduate student Jorge Cham, offer a humorous take on the life of a graduate student inhabiting a ‘world of grant deadlines, employment worries, political correctness and other sources of relentless angst’ (Marcus 2009: 1). The most common response to Cham’s comic books and the lectures he gives at universities in the USA on the graduate experience is, he says, about students’ sense of alienation and isolation so that doctoral students, ‘feel like they’re the only ones having these difficulties with their advisers or their funding agencies, that they’re lost or they don’t really know what they’re doing with their lives … they see that there are other people out there like them’ (Marcus 2009: 2). Cham’s books develop comic characters who resonate with readers and take on a life of their own, characters such as ‘Mike Slackenerny’ and ‘Cecilia’. Of academics Cham says, that while being a graduate student is hard going, ‘being a professor is even worse’ (Marcus 2009: 2). His website is replete with comments from doctoral students at different stages of their endeavour from around the globe (see www.phdcomics.com), suggesting that he has managed to capture, in ways that advice books often do not, the everyday experience of doctoral research.

The reason Cham’s cartoons resonate so strongly with doctoral researchers is, we think, because he addresses one of their key challenges. ‘Getting’ the doctorate is always much more than simply completing the research – in reality it is about becoming and being a scholar. Being scholarly and becoming a scholar are tasks integral to becoming part of, and belonging to, an academic community. Doing a quality doctorate in contemporary times requires more than the technical skills required of a research process; it involves coming to see oneself as a researcher and taking on a confident and articulate researcher identity. This book, therefore, has an integrating theme of exploring how identity and knowledge formation happen together. Producing ‘an original contribution to knowledge’ is also to construct oneself as a scholar. These two volumes address a set of interlocking and overlapping big questions that run through the practice of knowledge/ identity work.

We take the view that becoming a researcher involves engaging with a range of ideas and issues mediated through a particular research project. We believe that our texts will enable students and their supervisors to navigate their way through the vast library of doctoral and research books by bringing together questions that are generally scattered through a range of texts. For example, discussions about the importance of public intellectual work rarely sit alongside questions of getting started on a research project, or discussions about how to choose a research method together with a conversation about the power relationships embedded in scholarship. Yet, in today’s internationalised higher education systems and globalised societies, not to bring these things together is to create myopic and unnecessarily parochial and partial understandings of the institutionalised enterprise of knowledge production.

Moreover, these are not yet more books on competing paradigms, how to do a piece of doctoral work from beginning to end, a view of the doctorate that comprises ‘tips and tricks’, approaches to ‘writing up’ a thesis, or a set of researcher biographies. Rather, The Doctoral Companions place at their centre the interwoven questions of what it means to be a doctoral student in the social sciences, and what is involved in becoming and being a researcher. They further ask what ‘capabilities’ through research are key to confidence, quality and success. We also provide pragmatic and practical thinking about progressing research/scholarly career and identity.

The rationale behind the two volumes is not simply that the concerns of doctoral researchers and their supervisors are both shared and different, rather we hope to promote dialogue. However important it is that students establish and join peer communities amongst whom they exchange and circulate the nascent knowledge they are producing and the joys and tribulations that accompany this process, it is in the interrelationship of student and supervisors that young scholars are produced as confident and successful researchers, or where confidence is as easily diminished. The books, therefore, address the sorts of questions that need to be taken up by developing researchers and which can fruitfully be discussed with supervisors. We suspect from our conversations with doctoral researchers at our own institution, at national and international conferences, and from a variety of reports and research articles, that doctoral candidates want more than conversations about their substantive research. They also want focused ‘insider’ discussion about ‘the rules of the game’, what it means to be a scholar, and the purposes and practices of higher education. Much of what appears in the doctoral companions is directed to this end. Authors do not seek to provide answers, but rather to raise issues, which can then be pursued further.

The organisation of The Doctoral Companions

Briefly, now, something about the design of each Volume. We have organised both books into large sections, each addressing a key theme associated with becoming and being a doctoral scholar. Volume 1 addresses doctoral students and Volume 2 their supervisors. There is some deliberate repetition of material across the two volumes but we also envisage supervisors finding much of interest in Volume 1, and students locating material of interest in Volume 2.

We begin both volumes by outlining the current global and national policy climate for doctoral education and explain the rapid rise up higher education policy agendas of doctoral students. In Volume 1, Part 2, we take up the theme of becoming a doctoral student and some of the issues students are likely to confront early in their journeys. In Part 3, we address a range of issues around coming to terms with research practice. Chapter authors take up issues and questions; they do not try to address the practical detail of doing a research project but offer ways into thinking about what it means to do and be a doctoral student. We then address the question that sits at the heart of the doctorate but is often rather vaguely explained, that of making a contribution to knowledge (although see Yates 2004). Quite what does it mean to make an original contribution? Do different kinds of knowledge count? Who are the students and does their knowledge count at all? We then draw together these interlocking and overlapping themes in our concluding chapter. After the introductory section in Volume 2, we focus on supervision pedagogies, creating productive doctoral education cultures, making contributions to scholarly knowledge and then draw these together in our conclusion. In Volume 2 we also summarise and link as appropriate back to Volume 1.

The brief we gave to the chapter authors was broad and open. We invited specific contributions, sent everybody the outline for both volumes and then trusted authors to decide how they might take up the specifics of their own contribution. We think they have all risen magnificently to this challenge. In many cases there are references to further helpful work by authors, which can be followed up; while their references provide further access to additional helpful resources.

We want to emphasise that these books are not necessarily linear in their workings. Each chapter in and of itself offers a challenge and an invitation to doctoral readers to reflect on their own learning to become and to be, and to provide also resources to support and reflect on this becoming. We imagine readers moving backwards and forwards across the big themes, revisiting early themes and engaging later themes even at an early stage of their studies. We hope that readers will continue to draw on the resources of the book in ways that support their own individually staged doctoral development.

Our understandings, ambitions and acknowledgements

We embarked on this extensive editorial project because of our commitments to the value and process of high quality in doctoral education. We understand the doctorate as a relational and pedagogical project of student/supervisor development and identity formation, grounded in the shared project of addressing significant questions and making knowledge under specific contextual and policy conditions. This sounds serious but we also believe that the doctoral experience ought to be about excitement, engagement and achievement. We know it is also often one of remaking identities, of considerable intellectual challenge, and of emotional bumps and bruises.

Doctoral education and the experience of doing a doctorate ought, we think, to be a period when students develop knowledge, ‘capabilities’ (Sen 1999) and relationship resources for continuing their ‘life-long’ professional journeys, including new and unpredictable doctoral study challenges. Experiences of doctoral education – positive and life-enhancing, or narrowing horizons and self-belief – will, we believe, shape life-long learner identities. As supervisors, we hope for the former rather than the latter, while recognising that each doctoral venture is biographical, complicated and partly unpredictable. As with any pedagogy or educational process, we cannot p...

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Using this book
• Part 1 Introduction
• Part 2 Supervision as pedagogy/ies
• Part 3 Challenges in supervision pedagogy/ies
• Index