‘Untold’ doctoral stories: can we move beyond cultural narratives of neglect?

Abstract

This article examines the stories of 24 social sciences doctoral students in three universities, one in Canada and two in the UK, who experienced challenging roads to completion. While their stories confirm earlier findings, they also provide insight into how students' agency and personal networks of relationships may be critical, both as resources and constraints. We argue that these ‘untold stories’ of student agency coupled with supervisor narratives of students ‘not measuring up’ can contribute to a culture of institutional neglect. Pedagogies emphasizing an ethic of care and relational rather than regulatory practices are essential if these conditions are to change.

Keywords:

• doctoral education
• doctoral pedagogies
• student agency

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to other research team members for their contributions: Nick Hopwood, Susan Harris-Huemmert, Patrick Alexander and Cheryl Amundsen. We also thank the anonymous reviewers who provided helpful comments. This research was partially funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (through the CETL initiative).

Notes

Institutional ethical approval was granted for both studies.

Various formal benchmarks (e.g. comprehensive exams) were mentioned by the students. These bear different names in the different institutions and countries, but they are related in that (1) they are expected to take place at certain times in the student's program and (2) they assess the extent to which the student is progressing as expected.

Students also reported positive instances of support from supervisors and departments, for example as Diane described at her first institution.

Our point is not that these students did not generally have networks or a sense of agency like those in the longitudinal studies (see Hopwood, 2010), but that in these cases some networks appeared to carry more sustained responsibility or were more geographically distant and the enacting of intentions was more constrained.