Living in Liminal Space

Framing of learning in PhD

It's hard to talk about a curriculum in PhD. Pedagogy is difficult enough. The discussion of graduate attributes for PhD should mean that there is some kind of plan for what these are, why they are important and how they are to be delivered and/or tested - ie a curriculum. I wonder if curriculum mapping (Harden 2001) might give some kind of useful framing. His ideas of the declared, taught and learned curricula might be worth looking at.

Pedagogy

Untangling the threads of the papers offered at QPR conferences, a thought occurs to me: If I'm taking pedagogy to mean 'the theory of how and what people learn', there are several pedagogies involved in PhD. Obviously (and this is my focus) there is how and what candidates learn in the process of doing the PhD. There is also how and what the supervisor learns before they are able to supervise effectively - the focus of a lot of QPR stuff under the guise of 'quality assurance'. But there is little indication that this second pedagogical experience includes the first - in other words, that 'trainee supervisors' are encouraged to think about how and what candidates learn; it seems to be more of an exercise in teaching management. The exception would be 'the old program', now abandoned as too unweildly, at Sydney, during which supervisors in training were asked to write a reflection on their own experience as students before they could get their certificates. But the idea of using the PREQ as a tool for developing supervisor pedagogies hasn't come up so far - as indeed it was invisible in the recent report on the PhD at Sydney.

The pedagogical experience which isn't mentioned at all so far (despite the lip service many supervisors give to it) is any discussion of how and what the supervisor learns through supervision. And of course you can't separate the supervisor from the supervisory dance - they are always already supervising!

Talk on what examiners want

Excellent talk this morning from Prof Philip Jones, who has been on PhD awards subcommittee for a long time.. Emphasised the importance of strong conceptualisation, writing early and often, and attention to detail in finishing. The talk was really well-attended and some good questions were asked. His talk was really a good summary of the literature that I'm reading.

Maybe the sense of powerlessness that is often manifest in the PhD process by students really comes to the crunch around examination. This is when you let your work go, send it out into the world to be judged by unknown forces. When I was teaching writing in Palmerston North, Karen Rhodes used to say how Freudian writing was: like a baby's shit, it comes from an unknown place within the self, is extruded to the outside - sometimes in pain and with some difficulty, and is then instinctively clung to - its removal seems to cause resentment and even fear as it symbolises a lack of control over the product. It does feel about right...

Another link

McGill Doctoral pages

And for the universe: why can't I get Delicious to work with typepad any more?!?!?

Another question

What do the various people involved in PhD process understand about the pedagogy of the process?
This ties in to the question I've asked all participants so far: "What metaphor, or word, or phrase, comes into your mind when you think about supervision?

Also relevant is Barbara Grant's thesis on the pedagogy of graduate supervision.

Feminist pedagogy resources

Here. From Gill Kirkup's blog,

Interesting website to follow up

From Lilia's honest and moving post on publishing a thesis. It is a series of 'conversations' held at Stanford called 'How I write'. Has audio, video, transcripts and commentary. It includes a group of grad students, too.

Another interview and a reflection

An interesting interview with A/Prof Tony Masters in Chemistry. He is the first pure scientist I have interviewed, and I really valued his reflective and reflexive opinions. Really good stuff.

Thinking about interviewing Prof Michael Jacobsen after his defence of the US PhD.

And still have to line up interviews with Derek and Jill Trewhalla. Nearly ready to make a list of questions for them.

Have also critiqued the PhD WP draft report, which was a pedagogical black hole and very poor on evidence.

I'm not sure that there's that much more I can usefully learn about the way the PhD is understood at Sydney at the moment. One thing that's clear is the tension between the rationalists (ie those who are interested in improving the mangement of the process, because they believe (generally without any evidence) that that will somehow (magically?) improve the experience for the students, and those who are more reflective and want to improve the student experience by trying to find out more about what that experience actually is and what is presently lacking in it.

Working Party to review PhD at Sydney

My first thoughts on reading the draft report of this committee was that it seemed overly managerial. Nowhere are pedagogical concerns addressed or even alluded to. Lots of discussion on improving the student experience, but scant reference to what students have said they want. Many of the recommendations have huge workload implications for staff or resourcing implications for faculty, and are therefore pie-in-the-sky.

I am lucky that I was recently asked to join the Doctoral Studies Committee in the Faculty of Education, which gives me a channel to feed these concerns back. It will be interesting to see the final report.

Research as change agent

I recently had a discussion with someone in health area about the number of people who want to change that way something works (especially in health and education), so they undertake a research project to 'prove' that the change needs to happen. "Research has shown us that...". I've noticed this myself in the EDSW faculty.

But just doing research can, in itself and regardless of its outcomes, change systems and make them better for people. A few times in my interviews the interviewee has learned, from something I've said, how things are done in another faculty, and that has given them an idea about how they could do things in their faculty. Near the ends of interviews these kinds of things happen quite often. So although I'm doing the research primarily to find something out, to build a picture, to tell a story, I do hope that my work will result in change, or at least in more understanding of a common process. It might give administrators, students and supervisors a reason to look again at their preconceptions around PhD. But it might not, and that's not primarily why I'm doing it. But I want it to.