For the British Library team, the impacts of technological advancements (particularly digital technology) are key to longterm planning regarding improving the doctoral experience.
This links to some of the issues we've been raising at St Andrews around journal availability, and digital thesis embargo issues. For me the biggest issue has to be the system of academic publishing which makes journals so expensive for university libraries and as such soaks up so much of the materials budgets.
The morning session will be conducted under Chatham House rules, so no names :) in the afternoon the THE (Times Higher Education) will be in the room... Although I don't suppose it'll be the same person who runs the excellent twitter feed.
The first talk is about the researcher development framework, looking at what makes a great doctoral researcher (skills, knowledge, behaviours, quality, attributes). They asked 1000 respondents and clustered the responses down to 'engagement, influence and impact', 'knowledge and intellectual abilities', 'personal effectiveness' and 'research governance and organisation' key domains. I'll upload the framework to the PGSoc homepage when I get back so you can see for yourself. The professional respondents (I.e. Those in the profession of academia) identified the 'personal effectiveness' domain as being the most important, this is where factors such as passion, commitment and enthusiasm come into play.
The second talk, from a rep from the Research Information Network, focussed on information literacy and built on the 'The Role of Research Supervisors in Information Literacy' Report. I have to say that the term 'information literacy' is a bit too much of a buzz term for me, but they state that they interpret it in the broadest possible way (from gathering information, analysing it and publishing information). Evidently legal frameworks, open access and data analysis are the areas in which supervisors ay the greatest role in developing the student's IL. Interestingly, where students regarded the supervisor as the primary source of information and advice, the supervisors tended to view institutional agencies (libraries and training programs) as particularly important in supporting and developing IL. Students, unsurprisingly to hear, are much less engaged with these sources of training and support. So what can be done? 1. Is important that supervisors stay up to date on IL training, and are given the opportunity to develop personally (interpersonal support is key here). 2. Supervisors have to support and discuss their student's skills assessments and 3. We need to consider more carefully how to position information literacy within each institution.
Third talk given by rep from www.learning.ox.ac.uk/overview/cetl/research focussing on researching the development of researcher- how do you know if you are developing? Should research skills be part of the examined component of a PhD? Although they say that this isn't something which they particularly want to pursue, it is an issue of contention at St Andrews (as those of you who have been here long enough to see logbooks arrive, fade out and be reintroduced again will recognise). They give ethical, conceptual, practical and structural reasons why activities and assignments should not be assessed. He was lovely, but a bit monosyllabic (makes me sleepy).
Now it's the NUS rep talking about 'what researchers want'- pointing out the potential difference between what they actually want, and what we might think that they ought to want. Some things that researchers might want: a research community; attention from academics; interdisciplinarity; and to 'have a say'. Curiously missing is 'to be left alone', which seems to be the main thing St Andrews PGRs want! They also bring up whether student led initiatives (like PGSocs) are seen as 'core' or 'extra' to the PhD experience, what signals departments and supervisors send about them being core or not, and whether they should be seen as such.
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First break out session was really interesting, most of the people attending seem to be from Southern UK Metropolitan universities, but many if the issues still reflect generic problems that affect St Andrews. Oe thing that bothers me in this session is that sometimes doctoral students paint themselves as a rather hapless bunch, prey to the weaknesses of poor systems and careless supervisors. As such I pushed the point that students have a personal responsibility to hold their supervisors, schools and universities to account for shortcomings in programme delivery or support. We can't rely on universities to push report findings and guidelines into the practical level of supervision delivery unless we tell them how important this is and ask them to prioritise.
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Interestingly, the librarians also pick up on a couple of points that students brought up:
- student involvement in development of provision
- the need to build better community between PGRs and staff
- the need to provide dedicated study space for PGRs
The 'staff supporting researchers' also highlighted issues discussed by the students:
- Needs based, supported, tailored, integral and expected and valued training is needed for doctoral students, and it should be intrinsic to the doctorate
- they also brought up the need for supervisors to have proper training
- Understanding the individual needs of PGRs
- space is key- every PGR should have a desk, they need space to do their work appropriately
- fully funded doctorate programs are best (and they should be able to go to different types of conferences)
- more mentoring for PGRs who teach (fits into the broader importance of community)
Supervisors, amongst other things, think that students need:
- better space and funding and management of expectations from the very beginning of the PhD
- improvements in time a location (for supervisors and stayed ts- give the time that students deserve)
- more supervisor buy-in and peer support as regards training and development
Overall, there was quite a big overlap then, but there were a few distinct student issues:
- students should have a say in the supervision process, and there should be greater transmission of codes of practice and so forth
- although other groups discussed diversity of PGRs, the students also brought up the diversity of the research itself
- there was a lot of discussion about sources of support, about PGR communities being about professional as well as social development
- the issue of trust was very important- trust between supervisor, supervised and other people involved in the PhD process
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Then we had a very interesting talk from Chris Park (emeritus at Lancaster) titled- "Doctoral researchers: Worker ants in the academic ego-system".
Some of the key thought points he drew out were:
- are we PhD students or doctoral researchers?
- are we 'worker ants' serving a 'queen ant'
- the academic system is inherently individualistic (in terms of reward) you're only as good as... Well... You are (regardless of how good your supervisor is)
- PhD as apprenticeship, license / supervisor as trainer, someone looking to advance career, someone looking for research assistants
- are graduate students the stewards of the discipline?
- doctoral students as contributors to UK Plc (innovation, creativity, cultural capital... Blah blah blah)
- there are now more professional than teak Ito la doctorate students (which are considered by European academia to be of a lower quality than traditional)
- the emphasis of a PhD is both on the product (thesis) and on the process (ongoing professional development)
- in terms of supervision satisfaction, students are least satisfied with the help their supervisor gives them in their literature search- sounds familiar (not personally, but locally)
- "we are an eccentric bunch, we have passionate interests in things that nobody else cares about"
He also brought up PhD comics a lot, which made me love the presentation- check out the "academic ego-system" strip to see the first one, although the "thesis title" one was my favourite Also, he sounded just like Lewis from Inspector Morse, which is awesome.
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Lunch
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Doctoral students, communities of learning and collaborative cultures: challenges for research degree programmed in the 21st century. (Rosemary Deem, Royal Holloway)
The doctorate is no longer seen as a magnum opus. Not only the nature and population increase of doctoral programmed is changing, the profile of doctoral candidates is also in flux (more international, more science). Although there's been a lot of chat about changing natures and supervisory arrangements and the student experience, there has not been much about collaborative learning, or learning communities.
The PRES data shows that the intellectual climate of PGR programmes needs to be improved upon- but how do we interpret the notion of intellectual climate? Who is and should be involved in the community of practice that constitutes the doctoral research group and generates this intellectual climate. How do departments try and fail to generate communities- a few bottles of wine and a packet of crisps does not a fun departmental party make!
She brought up the issue of self distancing by foreign students (through a piece of research she had done). Although people make an effort to be friendly to international students they often still feel "other", feel like a foreign student who doesn't really fill in.
Also, what counts as a supervision? My supervisor quite clearly delineates time which is strictly about supervision, which are clearly demarcated from those times when other things like collaborative writing or representation issues are discussed. However, other supervisors, particularly those who see their students a lot- do these frequent meetings count or do students not get sufficient attention for their own research during these meetings?
However, regardless of how well collaborative learning is working at the moment, research councils are moving towards funding in this way and according to this model. It would appear that this is for economic and political reasons rather than being academically motivated, but it is happening and thus we need to deal with it. A more structured approach has been (expensively) trialled in Germany - and there it has shown little benefits in terms of benchmarks (completion rate...)
And finally, harking back to our earlier discussion of the forgotten masses, collaborative learning (especially when funded from above) has the potential to be exclusionary to certain groups of students (non-funded, part-time, international students).
And that's not even mentioning the fact that these "collaborative learners" will be judged on individual output (I.e. The thesis). Does this make sense? Should we be looking towards inter institutional supervision? Collaborative theses?
Are the closed viva, the lobe scholar and the long thesis all outdated?
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Location:London,United Kingdom
