Living in Liminal Space

A sad goodbye

When I enrolled in this long slog of a PhD, in 2005, I had both a supervisor and an assistant supervisor. The supervisor was inspirational but rather distant, and the assistant supervisor (not my choice but appointed by the institution) was uninterested and also distant. Don't get me wrong: I didn't need handholding or close supervision; I needed inspiration and encouragement. But sometimes I would feel like no-one really cared much about what I was doing. At that time I didn't have any contact with other PhD students - twitter hadn't been invented and most of the the few PhD blogs I could find weren't in my area of interest. By mid-2006 I had set up what would eventually become my main data source - a group of students who could blog their PhDs. In the meantime I was reading and thinking and taking notes and sometimes blogging here. Two of the seminal articles I discovered, that I still return to, were "Forged in Fire: Narratives of Trauma in PhD Supervision Pedagogy" (Lee & Williams 1999) and "The PhD and the Autonomous Self: Gender, Rationality and Postgraduate Pedagogy" (Johnson, Lee & Green 2000). In mid-December of 2006 I wrote this (in which I was astounded that someone could write about PhD in Australia without referring to the work of Alison Lee), and a month later I was able to write this, a short report on a meeting that Alison initiated - she came to meet me at my campus - to talk about my work, which as the post shows, boosted my confidence greatly.

This meeting was typically generous of Alison. A few weeks later she invited me to talk to her newly enrolled doctoral students about blogging. I'm not sure how good I was that day - I was recovering from an achilles tendon repair. But she gave me the chance. We communicated occasionally, and caught up at the QPR conferences in 2008 and 2010 - in 2010 it was a pleasure to be able to congratulate her on 'making prof'. I continued to follow her work - she has now been the driving force behind three edited books on PhD theory and practice: Changing Practices of Doctoral Education (2008), Reshaping Doctoral Education (2009), and Publishing Pedagogies for the Doctorate and Beyond (2010) Her name is on more publications in my Endnote library than any other. Her latest book is about professional and practice education, a subject she told me in 2010 that she was moving on to consider. From the UTS website, this is one of her latest projects.

I know other PhD students whom she has encouraged and supported to join the small but vibrant Australian research community on doctoral theory and practice. She wasn't at QPR in April this year, because, Inger told me, she had pancreatic cancer. I was saddened and horrified that she would have to face this illness. This week she passed away and I am now so sad that she won't be contributing any more to our understanding of PhD process, boldly theorising and writing clearly from a pedagogical base in an environment where managerial considerations are paramount. She has inspired me now over seven years and will continue to inspire me with her courage and her rare ability to theorise, while always relating her thinking to actual practice and real experience. There seems to me no higher aim for someone doing academic work, and she achieved it.

Thank you, Alison. Thank you for encouraging me when I was green and uncertain, and for shaping my thinking in the biggest thing I have ever attempted.

Downunder PhD for North American readers

I've been having some interesting twitter conversations recently about how the PhD works here, so I thought I'd write a post that brings together some of the context of PhD in Australia (and in NZ and also to some extent in the UK).

First thing to know is that PhDs in Australia are usually government funded, or funded under programs that mimic the conditions of government funding. The government pays the fees of the vast majority of PhD students in one form or other, and also funds the universities on completion of the degree and provides a large number of scholarships for living expenses. This means that the government controls the time-frame of enrolment. SInce about 2001, following a government White Paper in 1999, the time-limit was established at three years, but this has since been extended to 3.5 years by the federal government. Sydney University has recently announced it will fund all PhD candidates to four years if necessary, even of the government doesn't extend the time-limits further.

The second thing to know is that there is virtually no built-in coursework in an Australian or New Zealand PhD. The short story is you enrol, you work up a research proposal with a supervisor, you submit this for some kind of approval system (which may invove a verbal presentation). Once this is accepted (usually at the end of the first year) you plan and carry out the research, and write a thesis (or a series of other publications) on it. You submit this thesis for examination, and it is usually examined by two or three people, at least one or which is outside the institution where it was written. Most universities specify in their instructions to examiners that this thesis should contain 'an original contribution to knowledge'.In the UK and NZ there is also usually an oral examination of the candidate by the examiners, called the 'viva'. In Australia some Universities mandate a public defence of some kind near the end of the thesis-writing period, although this isn't universal.

So the PhD in these countries is a research degree, not a taught degree. It is a degree that specifically aims to teach you how to research by allowing you to undertake supervised research. When you enrol you should have some kind of more-or-less formal learning needs assessment, and you may be directed to some coursework or to a seminar series held in your faculty or by the University more centrally to support your learning in areas like preparing a thesis proposal, or advanced writing skills, or advanced bibliographic or scienctific skills etc. But there is generally no formal requirement for coursework and no examinations to be passed.

In passing, I'd be interested if any North American readers would like to explain the purpose of the Qualifying Exams that students there take: I have seen them described as necessary to ensure that students know everything there is to know about the discipline, the possibility of which confounds me. Pedagogically they presemuably have an expressed purpose, and of course this may very from place to place and discipline to discipline. But' I'd love to hear what people think about this.

The third thing that might be of interest is this paragraph from my thesis on the growth of the student body in Australia:

Pearson (1999, citing DEETYA, 1998) says that in 1989 (the year that the Dawkins reforms began) there were 14,751 higher degree research students, and in 1997 this had increased to 34,070, of whom 23,390 were doctoral candidates (Pearson, 1999, p269, citing DEETYA, 1998). This indicates approximately a 250% increase in PhD students in just eight years.  Marginson and Consedine (2000), also citing DEETYA’s 1998 figures, put the increase in HDR students at 314% in that period, and they also point out that the proportion of HDR students had increased from 7.1% of total enrolments; by 1998 they constituted 13.1%, thus almost doubling their proportion of the total student body. In 2006 (the last year for which official figures are presently available) the number of PhD students went over 40,000, and they presently seem to continue to increase by about 1,000 each year.

This 'massification' of the numbers of PhD studnets has (rather belatedly) created a great deal of interest in exactly who is doing a PhD and why they are doing it. (Margo Pearson, in publications listed below, has looked at this question in some detail and come up with surprising results: PhD students in Australia are older and more diverse than it was earlier believed.) The government has recently stated that it wants even more PhD enrolments, as it is anticipating an outflow of baby-boomer academics, peaking in 2016, who will need to be replaced. It is unclear whether the greatly increased numbers of PhD graduates in the last ten years will want to fill these places; those who haven't taken jobs in academia already may or may not wish to return.

If you're interested in reading more about PhD in Australia here's some bibliographic information that will be of interest.

The reports of the Quality in Postgraduate Research conference can be found here. (Click on past conferences.) This conference has mostly focused on institutional responses to changes in Government policy, particularly managment of supervisory relationships, since its inception, rather than on pedagogical theory, but it is an important place where matters about PhD have been discussed in Australia.

Alison Lee has been writing about PhD since the mid-nineties. She theorises research writing and pedagogy (the first person in Australia to do this), and identity issues.

Here's a few of her journal publications:

Green, W., & Lee, A. (1995). Theorising postgraduate pedagogy. Australian Universities' Review, 38(2), 40-45.

Lee, A., & Williams, C. (1999). 'Forged in Fire': Narratives of trauma in PhD supervision pedagogy. Southern Review, 32(1), 6-26.

Johnson, L., Lee, A., & Green, W. (2000). The PhD and the autonomous self: Gender, rationality and postgraduate pedagogy. Studies in Higher Education, 25(2), 135-147.

Lee, A., & Boud, D. (2003). Writing groups, change and academic identity. Studies in Higher Education, 28(2), 187-200.

Boud, D., & Lee, A. (2005). ‘Peer learning’ as pedagogic discourse for research education. Studies in Higher Education, 30(5), 501-516.

Lee, A., & Kamler, B. (2008). Bringing pedagogy to doctoral publishing. Teaching in Higher Education, 13(5), 511-523.

Lee, A., & McKenzie, J. (2008). Evaluating Doctoral Supervision: Qualitative Steps and Emerging Issues. Paper presented at the Quality in postgraduate research: Research education in the new global environment.

Lee, A., & Green, B. (2009). Supervision as metaphor. Studies in Higher Education, 34(6), 615-630.

 

Alison has also co-edited two books about international PhD pedagogy and practice:

Lee, A., & Boud, D. (Eds.). (2009). Changing Practices of Doctoral Education. Oxford and New York: Routledge.

Aitchison, C., Kamler, B., & Lee, A. (Eds.). (2010). Publishing pedagogies for the doctorate and beyond. Oxford and New York: Routledge.

 

Barbara Kamler is another person who has been thinking abut the pedaogoical underpinnings of PhD in Australia and the UK for 15 years, and the following book that will be of interest to anyone who is writing a thesis or who is involved in the supervision or managment of PhD thesis writing:

Kamler, B., & Thomson, P. (2004). Helping doctoral students write: pedagogies for supervision. London: Routledge.

 

Margo Pearson has published widely on the history, demographics, politics and institutional management of the PhD in Australia.

Pearson, M. (1999a). The Changing Environment for Doctoral Education in Australia: implications for quality management, improvement and innovation Higher education research and development, 18(3), 269-287.

Pearson, M. (1999b). Rethinking the past and future of the PhD in the humanitites and social sciences. Southern Review, 32(2), 186-190.

Pearson, M., & Brew, A. (2002). Research training and supervision development. Studies in Higher Education, 27(2), 135-150.

Pearson, M., Evans, T., & Macauley, P. D. (2004). The working lives of doctoral candidates: Challenges for research education and training. Studies in Continuing Education, 26(3), 347-353.

Macauley, P. D., Evans, T., Pearson, M., & Tregenza, K. (2005). Using digital data and bibliometric analysis for researching doctoral education. Higher education research and development, 24(2), 189-199.

Pearson, M. (2005). Framing research on doctoral education in Australia in a global context. Higher education research and development, 24(2), 115-118.

Pearson, M., Evans, T., & Macauley, P. D. (2008). Growth and diversity in doctoral education: assessing the Australian experience. Higher Education, 27(3), 357-372.

 

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?)

Preparing for QPR abstract

Presently preparing a poster for QPR so I'm looking at all the papers on their website, and it's interesting how difficult it is to categorise them. I'm trying to do it in detailed categories, which I can then conflate, rather than trying to tease them out later. But it's really not easy. I've decided to record secondary themes as well; if there are enough to show trends I can graph that as well as the primary ones. But there are 400 papers, so I can't spend too much time on any one. Most are only abstracts anyway.

I'd also like to do a paper on student experience of the examination process, so will prepare an abstract on that topic. However, I'm not sure whether I will have enough material from students in time to actually write a paper. Still, I can give it a go as it's stuff I'm going to need for my thesis anyway and it would be good to capture it now.