Special Quality in Postgraduate Research Conference (QPR 2016)

The Quality in Postgraduate Research conference (QPR) has been held in Adelaide, South Australia, every two years since 1994. The conference is a collaboration between three local universities, the University of Adelaide, Flinders University and the University of South Australia and a brief discussion of its development can be found in McCulloch and Picard (2015). As noted there, over this period, the conference has provided ‘an increasingly important space for those involved in doctoral education across the world as supervisors, managers, academics interested in doctoral education as a research area, students, research administrators and government and institutional policymakers to come together to discuss matters of common interest and share good practice.’ (p. 5) In recent years, prior to each conference, a special conference edition of a journal has been negotiated and, following the conference, a call for papers issued to all delegates. This special edition of Innovations in Education and Teaching International comprises largely articles developed from papers first delivered at the 2016 conference, and follows earlier special editions of Quality in Higher Education (Houston, 2015, from the 2012 conference), and the International Journal for Researcher Development (McCulloch & Picard, 2015, from the 2014 conference).

The issue comprises nine articles which, between them, address perennial issues in doctoral education, all but one focusing to a significant extent on supervision, the quality of which is recognised as determining to a large degree the nature and quality of a doctoral student’s experience. Over time, supervision has come to be seen less as a dyadic activity involving a single supervisor and one research student and more as a set of relationships involving the student, a discipline-specific supervisory team and others who can contribute to the doctoral candidate’s development as a researcher and also as an individual. These relationships, the lived experience of students and supervisors, and also the broader support environment for research students, are discussed in a number of the articles, including some addressing the complexities of cross-cultural supervision.

In the first article in the collection, Gina Wisker and her colleagues use the metaphor of the dramatic production to explore the experiences of doctoral students. Drawing on their experience across three countries (Denmark, South Africa and the UK), the authors seek to throw light on the wide range of actors who contribute to the research student’s performance. While acknowledging the leading role played by the supervisors, they use the theatrical setting as a way of pointing to and bringing front-of-stage the ‘many positive, supportive, meaningful others, including family members, translators, editors, research assistants, fellow doctoral students, and critical friends’ contributing to the doctoral student’s development and seek to bring them into the light rather than leaving them in the back-stage darkness to which they are often consigned. Backstage is also the place where, in addition to finding these ‘coaches, mentors, guardians or extra unofficial supervisors … (who mediate) the work of the more formal supervisor’, some of the darker arts of doctoral education are practiced. Practitioners of these arts include the ghost-writer, the thesis-mill and the ‘Royal Explorer’, a kind of accompanied Cook’s tour at the end of which lies a (presumably) oven-ready thesis. The paper concludes by questioning the extent to which the PhD should be seen as an individual rather than a collective endeavour and calls for further research into the extra-institutional inputs to the creative system at the centre of which the research student and her supervisor act out their roles.

As doctoral education becomes increasingly internationalised, cross-cultural supervision becomes more common. The issues this can throw up for both students and supervisors have been increasingly explored over recent years and Eli Bitzer and Fulgence Matimbo bring a new perspective to the discussion. The authors are, respectively, a senior academic at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University, a research-intensive institution regarded as one of the continent’s top universities, and a Tanzanian public official who previously studied in Norway. In the article each reflects on their own experience and learning in the context of three theoretically-informed perspectives, habitus, transformational learning and doctorateness. The reflections remind us that the processual view of a candidate’s doctoral experience does little justice to the reality of the lived doctoral experience with Matimbo having to deal both with problems common to many research students (in his case gaining access to research sites - private Tanzanian universities) but also some work-specific (requiring government permission to travel back to South Africa to undertake his viva, and also the withdrawal of support for his studies as a result of a change in personnel at his employing organisation). Bitzer also surfaces the lived experience of the doctoral experience, bringing to the fore the importance of respect for the qualities and competencies the candidate brings to their study, a recognition that there may be cultural reasons for students failing to maintain communication with their supervisors, and emphasising the way in which a focus on the academic can provide a means through which other possible issues can be addressed. This article provides a new perspective on cross-cultural supervision and the journey or quest undertaken by the doctoral student as they move into ‘new territories’ both literally and metaphorically.

The current trajectory of doctoral education involves an increasingly closer link between research degrees and the professional world of work and, by implication, the greater use of the doctoral degree as a vehicle for continued professional development. In her article on the supervision of doctoral candidates who have had successful professional careers prior to embarking on their programmes of study, Margaret Kiley draws on some of the concepts used by Bitzer and Matimbo, but initially originating in some of her own earlier work, most notably those of Threshold Concepts and doctorateness to address some of the challenges brought to supervision by this development. Using data gathered as part of a larger study, she outline three types of candidate which will be familiar to more experienced supervisors (those who know the answer on commencement, those with an over-reliance on practice rather than research, and those whose major motivation is making a difference) and ties each of these to key doctoral Threshold Concepts (argument, analysis, theory and knowledge creation). Kiley offers advice to supervisors on how to help overcome these issues, and also makes suggestions to institutions including the notion of the Scholars Hub which would offer a structured setting in which individuals from outwith the University could write for academic publication but NOT for examination. Such a development would offer a very practical contribution to the development of genuine lifelong learning to the highest levels.

There is an increasing emphasis on the part of both government policy-makers and universities on the employability of doctoral graduates but, as Margaret Robertson points out in her Australian-focused contribution to this special edition, too often this emphasis takes as its starting point ‘the stereotype that new research graduates are entering employment in the field for the first time.’ The article takes issue with this stereotype and the deficit discourse it promotes and encourages universities to take account of the different life and work skills already gained by doctoral students when making policy and developing support services. As with many of the articles in this special issue, the importance of supervisors in this respect is emphasised with Robertson noting that the ‘greatest challenge to (this group of students’) … identity was a lack of value placed by supervisors on their industry knowledge and experience’, a challenge felt greatest by mid-career doctoral students. The article challenges stereotypes upon which much policy is made and points to the increasing diversity exhibited by doctoral student cohorts, introducing us to differences in motivation, issues of transition and identity, differential support needs (and the role of support networks external to the University), and different forms of capital brought to doctoral study by students. It reinforces the need to recognise support provided by the back-stage actors identified by Wisker et al. in their opening contribution.

Linlin Xu and Barbara Grant provide a rich case study of a Chinese international student’s becoming, showing how the roles played by both supervisors and peers play a vital part in this process. The article draws on Bakhtin’s notion of dialogical relationships to interrogate the student’s interactions with ‘alien voices’ (that is those outside the individual subject) and to show how development or transformation occurs. These interactions lie at the centre of cross-cultural supervision and the emergence of doctoral identity and the paper emphasises the importance of ongoing dialogues in which the student is but one interlocutor. In the case study, the imperative to show ‘critical thinking’ emerges as the most transformative voice, while the ‘dominant (culturally) enrooted voice is the imperative to show ‘respectful dependence’’. Much of the paper is concerned with the student’s relationship and interactions with her supervisors, and the importance of recognising, dealing with and balancing the potentially unequal power relationship between student and supervisors. This requires recognising that a student’s cultural assets can act as a resource in this balancing act. Before concluding, and echoing Wisker et al.’s contribution, this paper also points to the importance of friends and professional colleagues outside the immediate supervisory relationship who ‘can push a student to assimilate an alien voice through their role modelling’ through taking on a ‘speaking’ role.

Meeta Chatterjee-Padmanabhan and Celeste Rossetto’s contribution returns to the theme of the broadening out of the participants in the supervisory team with a piece discussing and reflecting on an initiative at the University of Wollongong in which doctoral students whose writing involves English as an Additional Language can request a doctoral writing advisor as a formal member of the supervisory team. This initiative brings into the team those who have been previously positioned outside the supervisory space space, implying a very different type of engagement with the student, the project and their own professional practice. In addition to reflecting on the practice dimension of the innovation, questions about the resource implications of providing this level of support to all students, equity issues arising from not being able to do so, and the extent to which a doctoral writer’s ‘home’ discipline can influence their ability to work effectively with a student as a supervisor are also raised. The authors’ reflections on their experiences in this new space make a valuable contribution to the discussions about the changing nature of supervision.

Continuing the theme of the broadening of the system of support for research students, Dorothy Economou and Bronwyn James discuss the development of a Research Writing Tool designed to support both doctoral students and also their supervisors in medical-related fields. The tool was developed following a series of interviews whose design drew on previous work in academic language and learning and assessment and evaluation in higher education. A number of key findings are presented, some of which support existing thinking in the area of writing development and others of which (for example the finding that face-to-face feedback was said to be the most useful in development terms by all the students) challenge some current and emerging orthodoxies. The piece then shows how the tool built on these findings and involved the development of a number of annotated texts for use by both students and supervisors in their academic practice. This article will resonate well-beyond the cognate area of medicine as it helps provide a means of bringing together the sometimes separated roles of supervisor and those whose purpose is to work with research students on their academic writing.

Universities are increasingly looking for ways of recognising excellence or good practice in academic practice and the article by Stan Taylor and Alistair McCulloch explores for the first time the topography of awards for supervisory practice across Australia and the UK. The intention of these awards differs with some seeking to recognise excellent or exemplary supervision and others wanting to identify a supervisor of the year, outcomes which are not necessarily of the same order. Supervisory awards were initiated in Australia in the 1990s, the UK following a few years later. The nature of the awards differs significantly across the two countries, many of the differences stemming from the fact that the Australian schemes are predominantly led by institutions while the UK schemes are predominantly student-led. The indications from this initial exploration are that, in terms of ‘identifying, recognising and rewarding exemplary supervision’, institution-led award schemes currently do this better, but that they could be improved by a greater involvement of one of the key stakeholders, that is, the students.

Finally, the professional doctorate constitutes one of the relatively under-researched areas of doctoral education so Ben Wadham and Nicola Parkin’s contribution to this special edition is especially welcome. The article draws on a series of conversations between the Director of a (professional) Doctorate of Education and one of the candidates on the programme to construct a discussion on ‘the changing relationship between the professional and traditional doctorate that turns on the axis of a difficult question: Can the professional doctorate be both a tool of the neoliberal project, and a means for its release?’. This question is posed within the context of an apparent coming together of the professional and the traditional doctorate as the issues of graduate employability and the instrumental value and outputs of doctoral education come increasingly to the fore and the notion of a form of doctoral curriculum emerges in the Anglo tradition to reflect the long-standing North American model. The free-flowing conversation ranges widely with the two discussants concluding that the professional doctorate offers a space and an ‘opportunity to reassert tradition while forging innovation – ethically, sustainably and existentially.’

The editors of this special edition are sure that you will find much of interest and much that is thought-provoking in the articles we have included and we thank the authors for offering their work to us. We also hope that the articles’ quality and the breadth of topics they address will encourage you to consider attending and presenting at a future Quality in Postgraduate Research conference.

Alistair McCulloch
Teaching Innovation Unit, University of South Australia, Australia
[email protected]
Gina Wisker
Centre for Learning and Teaching, University of Brighton, UK