The CETL was contacted by a postgraduate student who attended a conference on doctoral education. His comments raise interesting questions about the nature and purpose of skills training for doctoral students. The full text is available from the CETL website, and a snippet is provided below. We think his ideas warrant further discussion, and invite you to respond!
"I came to this event with something of (I would have thought typically academic) antagonism towards the 'key skills' approach to postgraduate training. However, after listening to the presentations, I am warming to the ideas discussed, but I believe that the current means of implementing this agenda is highly ineffective.
"The current assessment that postgraduates are lacking in generic skills seems to ave been translated into the idea that post-graduates should have available to them generic skills courses ('managing your research project', 'effective time management' etc). To be frank these courses are not held with any regard by most PhD students. I am certainly amongst this category I believe these courses are at best patronizing, and at worst form an un-imaginative and ineffective response to the lack of generic skill development within postgraduate research. The idea that you can aid a PhD's management skills by sending them on a half day work shop on management skills, in short, ridiculous."
Read more on our website, at http://www.learning.ox.ac.uk/cetl.php?page=268
Friday 23 March 2007
A personal perspective on developing academic practice
Nick Hopwood, Research Officer for Centre for Excellence in Preparing for Academic Practice (see also his website, offers this as a personal view of academic practice, focusing on the shift from being a doctoral student to a contracted researcher. Please feel free to comment below - how is this similar or different to your experience? Are there any issues you think are important? (The text is also available from the CETL website).
"In many ways my situation is not untypical of many other PhD graduates – I spent three years developing expertise in one area (geography education), and now work as a contract researcher in a different field (higher education). Academic career paths seem to involve all sorts of lateral jumps (between fields or institutions), insecurities (short contracts, getting funding), and tensions (eg. how to balance research, teaching and service).
Notions of identity and participation in communities are useful to me in thinking about where I’ve come from, where I am now, and where I would like to be. Thinking back to my experiences as a doctoral student, I can see changes in the ways I identified myself and was identified by others. I started as a novice, feeling very un-academic because I’d produced no knowledge and written no articles.
As I progressed through the cycle of data collection, analysis and writing up, my identity as a doctoral student shifted from newcomer to finisher. At the same time my identity as a becoming academic was also developing. I had a few conference and journal papers behind me – a written down, ‘out there’ kind of identity. Others started to treat me as an academic – asking me to referee for journals, emailing in response to papers, introducing me as someone who does a certain kind of research. This made me feel like I’d managed to infiltrate academic communities (albeit in a rather fraudulent-feeling way).
There is something of a rite of passage about getting a doctorate. Around the time of my viva I felt that going through the process gives you some sort of shared experience and understanding with other academics, and in some ways proves your worth in the face of ultimate peer review.
The tensions between student and academic identities have passed to the extent that I feel more (but not totally) secure in outwardly presenting myself as an academic. I’m now faced with a series of different tensions. On the one hand I want to develop my identity by doing more teaching, getting accredited as a higher education teaching practitioner, engaging in consultancy work, and writing for publication in journals and books. On the other hand I don’t feel I’ll benefit from my current job unless I get fully involved in what is a new field to me, and I’m anxious to get my hands dirty in new research. After all the progress I made in the world of geography education, I’m now a newcomer to higher education, lacking a shared knowledge of literature and people to legitimise my interaction in that community.
The UKGRAD course on careers in academia gave me valuable insights into everyday life as an academic, and helped me think strategically about moving up the academic career ladder. I now see academic practice as an ongoing developmental journey, of which knowledge production, publications, and teaching are but parts."
Please feel free to comment on this post!
"In many ways my situation is not untypical of many other PhD graduates – I spent three years developing expertise in one area (geography education), and now work as a contract researcher in a different field (higher education). Academic career paths seem to involve all sorts of lateral jumps (between fields or institutions), insecurities (short contracts, getting funding), and tensions (eg. how to balance research, teaching and service).
Notions of identity and participation in communities are useful to me in thinking about where I’ve come from, where I am now, and where I would like to be. Thinking back to my experiences as a doctoral student, I can see changes in the ways I identified myself and was identified by others. I started as a novice, feeling very un-academic because I’d produced no knowledge and written no articles.
As I progressed through the cycle of data collection, analysis and writing up, my identity as a doctoral student shifted from newcomer to finisher. At the same time my identity as a becoming academic was also developing. I had a few conference and journal papers behind me – a written down, ‘out there’ kind of identity. Others started to treat me as an academic – asking me to referee for journals, emailing in response to papers, introducing me as someone who does a certain kind of research. This made me feel like I’d managed to infiltrate academic communities (albeit in a rather fraudulent-feeling way).
There is something of a rite of passage about getting a doctorate. Around the time of my viva I felt that going through the process gives you some sort of shared experience and understanding with other academics, and in some ways proves your worth in the face of ultimate peer review.
The tensions between student and academic identities have passed to the extent that I feel more (but not totally) secure in outwardly presenting myself as an academic. I’m now faced with a series of different tensions. On the one hand I want to develop my identity by doing more teaching, getting accredited as a higher education teaching practitioner, engaging in consultancy work, and writing for publication in journals and books. On the other hand I don’t feel I’ll benefit from my current job unless I get fully involved in what is a new field to me, and I’m anxious to get my hands dirty in new research. After all the progress I made in the world of geography education, I’m now a newcomer to higher education, lacking a shared knowledge of literature and people to legitimise my interaction in that community.
The UKGRAD course on careers in academia gave me valuable insights into everyday life as an academic, and helped me think strategically about moving up the academic career ladder. I now see academic practice as an ongoing developmental journey, of which knowledge production, publications, and teaching are but parts."
Please feel free to comment on this post!
What does 'academic practice' mean?
Here we invite comments on 'What we mean by Academic Practice: Unpacking the meaning" (see http://www.learning.ox.ac.uk/cetl.php?page=263).
As a starter, here is one section of the full text - What is Academic Pracitce?
There are multiple representations of academic practice. However, globally, there are commonalities, shared notions of how academic work is distinct from other kinds of work (e.g., business, industrial, governmental, voluntary sectors). In other words, this practice is academic partly because it takes place in institutions with mandates to provide higher education, and usually to contribute to knowledge. This impacts their structural nature, which is distinct from say a business. Further, the fact that most academics have strong loyalties to their discipline, in some cases, stronger loyalties than to their institution also makes the practice distinct. At the same time, there are diverse disciplinary, departmental and institutional cultural-historical traditions that underlie the variation in what is understood as academic. However, across this diversity, academic practice has been traditionally understood to encompass three forms in varying degrees:
(1) forms of inquiry, from scholarly examination of documents to empirical research – whether applied or pure, commissioned, individual or collaborative
(2) forms of teaching, working with undergraduates, postgraduates and postdoctoral fellows in the broadest sense - including, for instance, planning, assessment, supervision, advising and mentoring
(3) forms of service to the institution, the discipline, profession and larger community, e.g., chair/member of an institutional committee, organizer of a disciplinary conference, consultant for a charity.
Please feel free to comment on this or any part of the full document. We hope to stimulate a lively online debate, and particularly welcome perspectives from particular disciplines.
As a starter, here is one section of the full text - What is Academic Pracitce?
There are multiple representations of academic practice. However, globally, there are commonalities, shared notions of how academic work is distinct from other kinds of work (e.g., business, industrial, governmental, voluntary sectors). In other words, this practice is academic partly because it takes place in institutions with mandates to provide higher education, and usually to contribute to knowledge. This impacts their structural nature, which is distinct from say a business. Further, the fact that most academics have strong loyalties to their discipline, in some cases, stronger loyalties than to their institution also makes the practice distinct. At the same time, there are diverse disciplinary, departmental and institutional cultural-historical traditions that underlie the variation in what is understood as academic. However, across this diversity, academic practice has been traditionally understood to encompass three forms in varying degrees:
(1) forms of inquiry, from scholarly examination of documents to empirical research – whether applied or pure, commissioned, individual or collaborative
(2) forms of teaching, working with undergraduates, postgraduates and postdoctoral fellows in the broadest sense - including, for instance, planning, assessment, supervision, advising and mentoring
(3) forms of service to the institution, the discipline, profession and larger community, e.g., chair/member of an institutional committee, organizer of a disciplinary conference, consultant for a charity.
Please feel free to comment on this or any part of the full document. We hope to stimulate a lively online debate, and particularly welcome perspectives from particular disciplines.
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