Stirring doctoral candidates into academic practices: a doctoral course and its practice architectures

Abstract

This article reports on the experiences of 104 doctoral candidates who participated in six offerings (2008–2015) of an intensive 5-day course for doctoral candidates associated with the research programme of an international research network. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate how higher education practices, like those of this course, can be understood through the lens of a particular form of practice theory, namely the theory of practice architectures. The analyses show how the practice architectures of the course enable and constrain candidates’ academic practices such as presenting and discussing their own research, chairing seminar presentations and being discussants for research papers whose authors are present. The candidates entered some new academic practices in the course but sometimes contested these practices, for example by requesting greater structure in some sessions, perhaps reflecting their expectations that the course would be more similar to other doctoral courses they had attended. Using the lens of the theory of practice architectures, the analyses shows how these new practices were enabled and constrained by specific arrangements built into the design of the course that served both as practice architectures for learning in the course and for the academic practices being learned.

• academic practices
• theory of practice architectures
• doctoral coursework
• enabling research collaboration
• international networking
• higher education

Note

Notes

1 In this article, we adopt current Swedish (and other) nomenclature in which the overall doctoral education includes units of coursework called ‘courses’, which comprise a particular part of the studies for the degree.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karin Rönnerman

Karin Rönnerman is a professor in the Department of Education and Special Education at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research is in the fields of action research, professional development, practice theory, leadership and research circles. She has been conducting action research in educational contexts for almost 20 years. She is a leader of the Nordic Network for Action Research and a co-leader of the international research network Pedagogy, Education, Praxis. She recently published the book Lost in practice: Transforming Nordic educational action research (Rönnerman, K. and Salo, P. (2014) Rotterdam: Sense Publishers).

Stephen Kemmis

Stephen Kemmis is a professor emeritus at the Research Institute for Professional Practice, Learning and Education, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, Australia. His recent books include Changing practices, changing education (Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P. & Bristol, J. (2014) (Singapore: Springer)) and The action research planner: Doing critical participatory action research (Kemmis, S., McTaggert, R. & Nixon, R. (2014) (Singapore: Springer)).