Living in Liminal Space

Networking on the Network

Phil Agre Department of Information Studies University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, California 90095-1520 USA

via vlsicad.ucsd.edu

UK report on PhD

This National Teaching Fellowship Scheme (NTFS) project set out to investigate how doctoral students (PhD and Professional Doctorates) across the disciplines of Humanities, Social Sciences, Health, Education and Arts can be best supported to make ‘learning leaps’ - to recognise and cross conceptual and skills thresholds in their research.

via www.heacademy.ac.uk

Report on PhD in the UK

Reading list : home cooked theory

Posted on | January 13, 2011 | 2 Comments

via homecookedtheory.com

Ambivalence – can it help you with your PhD? « The Thesis Whisperer

Early this week I read an interesting article by Shirley Wang in the Wall Street Journal on ambivalence. It got me thinking again about the personal qualities one needs to cultivate while doing a PhD. Apparently some people tend to ambivalent states of mind more easily than others. The central claim in Wang’s article, based on various bits of psychological research, is that a tendency towards high levels of ambivalence – the state of having mixed feelings – can have profound effects on your life and career path.

via thethesiswhisperer.wordpress.com

Excellent post on the way that doing a PhD can change who you are.

Why so stubborn?

I have been trying to write about the (lack of anything resembling) curriculum for PhD in Aus today (unsuccessfully). And I keep getting stuck on this question: Why are PhD practices in Aus proving so resistant to change? The first public discussions were held on the subject in the mid-eighties; why are people so reluctant to even examine their practice, let alone think about changing it? How many people who are PhD supervisors could confidently answer the question "How do you educate or train researchers in your discipline?" on any but a skills-based level?

I don't have any answers, although I have come up with this:

Having adopted the Oxbridge model quite consciously in the 50s and 60s (without, however, the essential viva - why not? it's common in NZ), Australia enthusiastically adopted its new model. In an interview Steve Dinham pointed out that the first full generation of people who mostly got their PhDs in Australia (having been supervised by people who got theirs overseas) began supervising in the 80s, about the time when the numbers of candidates began a very fast increase, partly fuelled by the merger of CAEs (most of whose staff didn't have PhDs) into the University system, where they were under strong pressure to get one. So maybe lack of experience of 'the way it's done' in other countries may have combined with the necessity to incorporate into the PhD cohort and bring to completion greatly increased numbers of students, some of whom were one's colleagues - or at least were not 'traditional' candidates in their mid-twenties - may have mitigated against reflective practice in this small, but rapidly expanding and vital area of Higher Education. This pressure, along with the changes in Government funding of the late 1980s and early 1990s, could quite reasonably be seen to have supported continuation of practices that are essentially unchanged from 19th-century British pedagogies - practices that are currently being highly modified in the UK.

Maybe some kind of post-colonial reluctance to adopt parts of other models exists in Australia. There is certainly a large conservative force operating from the standpoint of 'it's not broke; don't meddle with it' - which could be partly the result of the increase in academic workloads. Except, of course, it may be broke. How would we know? We never examine it. Lee and William's groundbreaking 1999 article 'Forged in Fire' and Johnson, Lee and Green's 2000 followup article "The PhD and the Autonomous Self' began limited debate among the few people who were prepared to look at the issues from a conceptual viewpoint. Ruth Neumann wrote a long report for the Federal Government in 2003, pointing out a wide range of problems. None of these have systemically addressed in institutions until very recently, and then in a generally managerial rather than conceptual way. Ticking more boxes does not necessarily equate with increasing reflective practice, improving the lived student experience or examining the barriers to satisfactory completion.

Do any of you have any thoughts or insights on this? (This is the first time I've announced a blog update on twitter - will it make a difference to commenting?)

Meeting with Peter

Our discussion was wide-ranging, but I have a writing plan for the next month or so. I will also think about epistemic fluency (he's sent me his paper) and work out how that can be applied to thinking about the kinds of skills needed to supervise and more importantly to do a PhD.

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?!?!?