![Sample our Education journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5932/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Education.jpg"})
Abstract
Increasingly learning advisors provide generic support for doctoral students. The terms ‘genre’ (a category, type or family) and ‘generic’ (ambiguously both ‘of a category’ and ‘non-specific’) are interrogated here in relation to such support. Literary studies scholars divide texts by genre for the purpose of analysis. It is helpful to see the doctoral thesis as a literary genre and discuss generic writing support in this context. Taking a theoretical position, I suggest that doctoral writing support can be theorised and conceived differently to complement supervisory support within disciplines. Ideas about the social significance of genre translate well to doctoral writing, which is also socially situated, speaking back to the discourse by which it is produced. Generic learning support is a contested phrase in higher education, a non-specific bolt-on process suspected of being never pertinent because it is not embedded in a discipline. Yet it is highly useful for doctoral students, a fact recognised in burgeoning practice. Around the world, generic support for doctoral study is increasingly provided as universities strive to sustain a healthy completion rate and ensure that discipline-specific, mainly supervisory, support is firmly complemented. Arguing for the thesis as genre enables the term ‘generic’ to have traction for those providing doctoral support across campus and opens up a theoretical way of discussing practice.
Acknowledgements
The IDERN meeting of 2010 prompted and stimulated this paper. I must also thank the HERD reviewers whose wise observations have enabled me to find stronger focus.