Reshaping Doctoral Education

International Approaches and Pedagogies

Alison Lee, Susan Danby, Alison Lee, Susan Danby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136498732
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The number of doctorates being awarded around the world has almost doubled over the last ten years, propelling it from a small elite enterprise into a large and ever growing international market. Within the context of increasing numbers of doctoral students this book examines the new doctorate environment and the challenges it is starting to face. Drawing on research from around the world the individual authors contribute to a previously under-represented focus of theorising the emerging practices of doctoral education and the shape of change in this arena.

Key aspects, expertly discussed by contributors from the UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand, China, South Africa, Sweden and Denmark include:

• the changing nature of doctoral education
• the need for systematic and principled accounts of doctoral pedagogies
• the importance of disciplinary specificity
• the relationship between pedagogy and knowledge generation
• issues of transdisciplinarity.

Reshaping Doctoral Education provides rich accounts of traditional and more innovative pedagogical practices within a range of doctoral systems in different disciplines, professional fields and geographical locations, providing the reader with a trustworthy and scholarly platform from which to design the doctioral experience. It will prove an essential resource for anyone involved in doctorate studies, whether as students, supervisors, researchers, administrators, teachers or mentors.

Part I

Old Basics/New Basics?

Chapter 1

Framing Doctoral Pedagogy as Design and Action

Susan Danby and Alison Lee

Introduction

In the last forty years or so, the doctorate has moved from a small, elite endeavour, designed primarily to replenish an academic-disciplinary workforce, to a strong and growing international enterprise and market. There is a growing momentum of international debate about the future and shape of the doctorate, which is rapidly expanding and diversifying. In Australia, as in many European countries and in the UK, numbers almost doubled in a ten-year period. In the USA, there are more than 40,000 doctoral graduates each year. China, India, South East Asia and countries in South America and Africa are developing doctoral education programs at a rapid pace as part of plans for economic growth (Cyranoski et al., 2011). This expansion is associated with the doctorate’s strong connection to policy rationalities associated with a globalised ‘knowledge economy’, where doctoral education is understood as producing knowledge workers to replenish national or regional innovation systems and develop human capital in knowledge industries (Callejo Pérez et al., 2011).

Along with the increasing numbers of doctoral students have come policies and regulations designed to maintain and improve the quality of doctoral programs, to increase efficiency in completions, reduce attrition and enhance the relevance of doctoral education to the needs of industry and the professions, as well as to the university sector. Furthermore, developments in bringing doctoral qualifications into ‘harmony’ across the boundaries of national systems, such as the Bologna Process in Europe, have engendered the need for greater visibility, explicitness and comparability of forms of provision. These developments have, in general, shifted the nature and status of doctoral work from largely private and implicit forms of one-to-one practice to more public and debatable ones. Alongside the interest in explicitness and structure has been expansion and diversification of the demands of the doctorate to deliver an expanded range of outcomes (Bitusikova, 2009). A key element of these developments is the move, across national systems, to describe and to develop ‘generic capabilities’ in doctoral graduates, in addition to disciplinary knowledge and expertise. These pressures create tensions within disciplinary communities in relation to the specific knowledge and expertise required and gained through undertaking a doctorate in a particular discipline or specialist field, and impact on the capacity to engage in inter- and transdisciplinary research work.

A Burgeoning of Doctoral Programs and Pedagogies

In this environment of doctoral expansion and reshaping of the doctoral policy and practice context, there is increasing pressure and a growing demand for the development of doctoral programs and a move towards pedagogy. The term ‘program’ encompasses, and goes beyond the idea of, ‘coursework’, understood in the North American sense as programs of advanced study in specialist knowledge fields that shape engagement with research education. Doctoral programs can encompass structured sets of activity designed and delivered to produce the required research capabilities and outcomes, both specific and generic. The focus on doctoral programs implies organised sequences of activity with groups of doctoral students designed to engage systematically with key elements of research training. These can include induction to doctoral study, methods courses, information literacy training, proposal development workshops, research work-in-progress seminars, writing groups and workshops and career preparation and advancement seminars. Other emerging factors in designing doctoral programs are increasing international mobility in doctoral candidature, the expansion of scholarly fields beyond the traditional disciplines (for example in the professions, such as teaching, architecture and nursing), and linking doctoral work to the knowledge economy.

The term ‘pedagogy’ refers to the sets of relations among learners and teachers and the knowledge generated through these relations (Lusted, 1986; Green and Lee, 1995). The conceptual importance of this term goes well beyond its often common-sense application as a description of programs, or courses. The concept of pedagogy draws attention to ‘the process through which knowledge is produced … asking under what conditions and through what means we “come to know”’ (Lusted, 1986: 2–3). As Lusted (1986) points out, ‘pedagogy addresses the “how” questions involved’ (pp. 2–3) in teaching and learning. Gaining insight into how individuals ‘come to know’ is crucial if those of us involved in doctoral education are to enhance the specific kinds of learning required for successful doctoral study. Doctoral learning involves not only coming to know, but also coming to be, in that the doctoral student gradually acquires an identity as researcher and scholar (Green and Lee, 1995: 41). This idea of knowledge construction as transformation is also central to Lusted’s understanding of pedagogy: ‘What pedagogy addresses is the … transformation of consciousness that takes place in the interaction of three agencies – the teacher, the learner and the knowledge they together produce’ (1986: 3). But Lusted’s definition must be modified if it is to account for the complex relations at the heart of doctoral learning.

In particular, the learner, teacher and their co-produced knowledge are not the only ‘agencies’ that contribute to pedagogy; they also interact with the academic discipline. Evans and Green argue that the disciplinary character of doctoral pedagogy distinguishes it from teaching at other levels: ‘it is not so much what the supervisor literally “transmits”, pedagogically, as what (s)he enables by … setting up a critical exchange … between the student and the discipline’ (Evans and Green, 1995: 4). In other words, the discipline is an invisible presence in the pedagogical relationship. The supervisor, as Green (2005) notes, ‘represents, or stands in for, the Discipline itself, and also the Academy’ (p. 162). The relationship is made even more complex when interdisciplinarity comes into play, or when hybrid ‘mode 2’ knowledges are generated at the interface between university and industry, as with contemporary forms of industry-linked doctoral programs, or when the Internet presents potentially infinite access to information such that the supervisor no longer controls or even knows what the student finds through online search technologies. This relationship is made more complex and rendered visible in the design of programs of education or training in which the nature of what is to be learned and developed must be made explicit and accountable. As Green (2005) notes, doctoral pedagogy is best understood ‘eco-socially’ in terms of a total environment in which knowledges and identities are co-produced.

Perhaps due in part to the urgent imperatives of rapid expansion and the dearth of conceptual resources for grappling with the changes required, there has not been a sustained reflexive engagement with what might be termed the cultural politics of doctoral pedagogy. Questions of what is being produced through the dynamics of supervision and other modes of doctoral pedagogy remain substantially under-theorised, as Green and Lee (1995) noted more than fifteen years ago. Green and Lee’s project has been to ask questions of what the pedagogical practices entailed in doing doctoral work are seeking to produce, by way of knowledges and forms of subjectivity (Green and Lee, 1995; Green, 2005; Lee and Green, 2009).

In the following sections of this chapter, we consider ways of framing the moves towards building pedagogies that address a wide range of the skills, knowledges and trainings required of doctoral students. We present a conceptual frame for engaging with pedagogical work that goes beyond the traditional focus on supervision, understood as an individual relationship between a qualified researcher and a doctoral candidate. Our focus is on the diverse array of activities associated with doctoral programs and we draw on the twin concepts of design and action in relation to the pedagogies inscribed in, or implied by, these programs.

We draw our ideas of design and action from rhetorical (e.g. Miller, 1984; Aitchison and Paré, Chapter 2 of this volume) and ethnomethodological (Garfinkel, 1967; Llewellyn and Hindmarsh, 2010) understandings of social action. We conceptualise these in relation to doctoral pedagogies, while taking into account the necessary inter-relationship between principles of pedagogy and pedagogic practice. We believe that the inter-related ideas of design and action can supplement what is available within the literature on doctoral pedagogy, offering visual and dynamic resources for representing doctoral work. We start from the position that working from a design model supports systematic and rigorous documentation and development of pedagogy.

Elements of Pedagogy as Design

There are three key elements of the metaphor of design that we have found to be particularly salient for our conceptualisation of doctoral pedagogy. First, those elements that are concerned with arrangement of form and appearance make visible the pedagogical work of setting up the circumstances and conditions under which students may engage in activities conducive to advanced doctoral research learning. Following Evans and Green (1995: 4), we suggest that what is important in a consideration of such doctoral pedagogy is not so much what an educator ‘transmits’ but what they ‘enable’ by ‘setting up a critical exchange’ between the student and the discipline, field or domain of research. This is, above all, an effect of pedagogical design, or perhaps ‘choreography’ (Johnson et al., 2000). Design in this sense has a great deal to do with the idea of a doctoral curriculum (e.g. Gilbert, 2004), the selection and sequencing of elements within a domain of knowledge and research practice. As Kamler and Thomson (2006: 18) note: ‘Pedagogy is a question of design … The pedagogue deliberately designs experiences, tasks, events, conversations which create the opportunity for the student to … move both identity and knowledge simultaneously.’

A second salience in the concept of design is its insistence on the collective nature of the endeavour of doing doctoral work. As an antidote to the individualising of the experience of the doctoral student dominant in much of the literature, the concept of design draws attention to regularities, patterns, freedoms and constraints that are socially produced, and produced as the accomplishment of ongoing actions, rather than as a predetermined and fixed design. What this means is that attention is given to the ordinary work practices or ‘doings’ of doctoral work, as accomplished within social domains.

Third, and of particular interest to us, what is salient in the concept of design is the related concept of enactment, which is the translation of designs into the practices and products of doctoral work. These enactments occur within particular disciplinary and organisational contexts; they are never purely a translation of a pre-designed program but are always shaped by and shape the research and knowledge domains of which they are a part. When viewed in this way, commitment to ‘knowing’ is undertaken through practices in use (Gherardi, 2001; Llewellyn and Hindmarsh, 2010); that is, as a socially constructed activity. We describe this interest here as a focus on pedagogy-in-action, a concern in closely observing how pedagogy is enacted. For example, this interest is sometimes achieved through observing ‘live performance’, such as the talk and interaction of a research group meeting, and sometimes this is achieved through glossing or seeking themes derived from ethnographic studies of practice. It is this third interest where we will focus our attention for the remainder of this chapter.

Design as Enactment

So what are the core principles and assumptions that represent and guide the design practices of doctoral education? We can begin by asking: where does pedagogic design begin and end within the doctoral process, and how does design function within the doctoral practices and settings? In Llewellyn and Hindmarsh’s (2010) ethnomethodological considerations of organisations and work practices, they ask if the term ‘organisation’ is a ‘neat lexical gloss’, ‘an entirety’ or ‘a set of practices’ (p. xi). They use the analogy of being in a shop to argue that, while analysts might have issues to do with theorising the constraints and possibilities of behaviour in the shop, members daily go about shaping their everyday behaviours within the shop, and routinely play out their parts within the social orders of that interactional space. The members know how to ‘do shopping’, and the task of the analyst is to find out how these practices happen (Llewellyn and Hindmarsh, 2010).

Similarly, we can draw on this same analogy to consider the concept of design within the practices of doctoral pedagogy. Design supposes an orientation to shaping what follows in guided ways. Members (those involved in the doctoral education) have methodic, everyday ways of organising (designing) doctoral conduct. At the same time, while members orient to such conduct, their actual everyday practices may differ through the unfolding of the scenes and settings of organised everyday activities. Practices can be shaped depending on how the members construct those practices and orient (or not) to existing elements of the organisation (design). Such practices often go unnoticed and therefore unexamined.

An examination of doctoral pedagogy by observing the practices of pedagogy draws on the conception of pedagogy-in-action (elaborated from Danby, 2005). We can attend to this concept by investigating how the pedagogy of doctoral work is made explicit through the very doing of that work, and by working from an assumption that doctoral...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part I: Old Basics/New Basics?
• Part II: Disciplinary and Transdisciplinary Pedagogies
• Part III: International and Intercultural Pedagogical Spaces
• Index