Identity and agency: pleasures and collegiality among the challenges of the doctoral journey

How do doctoral students develop their identities as academics? In this analysis, we explore identity from the perspective of agency – humans as active agents. The analysis was based on the collective data from three earlier studies in different contexts. Embedded in the data were expressions of agency linked to affect – both positive and negative – in which doctoral students were acting to shape and not just be shaped by their experiences. Key findings were evidence of collective student identity as well as supervisors modeling and affirming student agency. Both these findings are pertinent in rethinking doctoral pedagogies: the latter provides a model for supervisors to explicitly model student agency, and the former suggests the value of creating opportunities for collective identity in which students act as positive agents in improving their own doctoral experiences.     

Departmental academic support for doctoral students in Russia: Categorisation and effects

Departmental academic support plays an important role in a doctoral journey. However, different types of support may be related to different outcomes. This paper aims to provide a categorisation of types of departmental academic support and analyse the relationship between these different categories of support and doctoral students' confidence that they will complete their dissertations. The empirical base for the research is data from a cross-institutional survey of doctoral students at six Russian universities. Based on the results of latent class analysis (LCA), we distinguished six types of departmental academic support depending on the functions performed by supervisors, other faculty members and department heads. Consistent with previous research, we found that departmental academic support plays a crucial role in doctoral students' experiences and outcomes, while lack of support is related to a lower level of confidence about completing a dissertation. At the same time, our results provide evidence that excessive collective engagement in doctoral students' work from departmental staff may be less effective than the strong engagement of a supervisor, assisted by informational support from other staff members.     

Changing academic identities in changing academic workplaces: learning from academics’ everyday professional writing practices

In this article we examine issues of academic identity through the lens of academics’ everyday workplace writing, offering a complementary perspective to those already evident in the higher education research literature. Motivated by an interest in the relationship between routine writing and aspects of professional practice, we draw on data from interviews with 30 academics across three different universities. Our discussion is illustrated with excerpts from interview data, and is organised around three emerging themes: ‘reconstructing academic identities in a shifting academic workplace’, ‘considering new articulations of disciplinarity’, and ‘moving on from the golden age’. We conclude that the reconstruction of academic identities, through engagement with established and emerging workplace documents, may well be enabling academics to build new identities within the changing university.     

Changing academies: exploring international PhD students' perspectives on ‘host’ and ‘home’ universities

As students move between universities on different continents, they are expected to adjust rapidly to the academic and cultural practices of their host university. Many of these students are higher educational professionals in their home country and on their return home they are faced with the challenge of how to fit back into – or whether to make changes in – their institution's established academic practices. I explored international PhD students' understanding of, and responses to, the perceived differences between academic cultures of host (UK) and home universities. Whereas some students regarded the changes made in how they conducted and wrote up educational research as temporary and strategic in order to pass the PhD course, others saw themselves as change agents. They were keen to transform academic practices once they returned home and were already actively working out politically and practically how to go about this. By reflecting on how educational research practices are changing and being influenced by the movement of academics between countries, I suggest how UK university departments can respond positively to the differing research practices in which international students engage in their home institutional contexts.     

Academic hardiness and academic self-efficacy in graduate studies

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the study was to measure graduate students’ academic hardiness (GSAH) and academic self-efficacy (GSASE) and to examine the relationships between the two. A total of 202 graduate students across disciplines were recruited to complete two questionnaires (GSAH and GSASE). Results of exploratory factor analyses showed that the GSAH and GSASE were reliable for assessing graduate students’ academic hardiness and academic self-efficacy. Comparing master’s and doctoral students’ scores in the GSAH and GSASE scales, we found that doctoral students outperformed master’s students. The findings also revealed that three dimensions of GSAH (commitment, control of affect, and challenge) were strong predictors of graduate students’ academic self-efficacy. These results confirm and strengthen the relation between graduate students’ academic hardiness and academic self-efficacy. This study calls attention to graduate students’ ability to recognize and appraise causes of their failure and to learn how to overcome academic difficulties.     

Invalidated identities: The disconfirming effects of racial microaggressions on Black doctoral students in STEM

Black students face repeated racial microaggressions that may challenge their mental health and academic performance in engineering doctoral programs. Researchers attribute this to stereotypes and institutional climates that juxtapose their STEM and racial identities as incongruent. In this article, we analyzed the perceptions of environmental, behavioral, and verbal racial microaggressions of 33 Black doctoral students and postdocs, with a focus on their interactions with non-Black peers. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with Black doctoral students from 11 Predominantly White Institutions in the United States. To analyze the experiences of our participants, we utilized two theoretical frameworks: Racial microaggressions and identity nonverification. Across the interviews, participants described various forms of racial microaggressions that greatly challenged their sense of belonging and identities as engineers. This research affirms the need to develop initiatives at the departmental and institutional levels to encourage more inclusive spaces for diverse students in STEM doctoral programs and to combat the types of exclusionary practices found in this study.     

Troubling identities: teacher education students' constructions of class and ethnicity

Working with diverse student populations productively depends on teachers and teacher educators recognizing and valuing difference. Too often, in teacher education programs, when markers of identity such as gender, ethnicity, ‘race’, or social class are examined, the focus is on developing student teachers' understandings of how these discourses shape learner identities and rarely on how these also shape teachers' identities. This article reports on a research project that explored how student teachers understand ethnicity and socio‐economic status. In a preliminary stage of the research, we asked eight Year 3 teacher education students who had attended mainly Anglo‐Australian, middle class schools as students and as student teachers, to explore their own ethnic and classed identities. The complexities of identity are foregrounded in both the assumptions we made in selecting particular students for the project and in the ways they constructed their own identities around ethnicity and social class. In this article we draw on these findings to interrogate how categories of identity are fluid, shifting and ongoing processes of negotiation, troubling and complex. We also consider the implications for teacher education.     

参与学术创业对工科博士生教育的影响探析

在知识经济时代,越来越多的工科博士生参与大学的学术创业活动,作为科研训练的一种重要方式,学术创业对工科博士教育产生了重要影响。基于对16名工科博士生深度访谈材料的扎根分析,本研究发现,参与学术创业,促进了工科博士生科研能力的提升,非学术技能的习得,广阔的学术观和多元职业观的形成。为回应学术创业对工科博士教育的影响,建议培养单位形成多元培养观,优选和拓展学术创业项目,提升工科博士生的科研能力和学术创业能力。     

Academic socialization of doctoral students through feedback networks: a qualitative understanding of the graduate feedback landscape

ABSTRACT

Scholars focus on the social nature of academic writing to refine an understanding of feedback interactions in higher education. However, studies on the various sources of feedback – feedback networks – have been scarce, particularly during the initial years of doctoral education. Using a qualitative case study approach, multiple sources of feedback for four students in one doctoral program in the United States were identified in line with broader trends focusing on feedback as a social practice. Informed by the academic socialization framework [Duff, Patricia A. 2012. “Second Language Socialization.” In Handbook of Language Socialization, edited by Alessandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs, and Bambi B. Schieffelin, 564–586. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell], this study aims (1) to navigate the landscape of graduate feedback, including interactions beyond class as well as oral and written feedback, and (2) to elucidate the socialization process. Findings suggest that academic writing development is defined as how feedback is situated within disciplinary, academic communities of interaction. This article describes how the larger network of feedback creates the types of interaction that characterizes the community.     

Juggling competing activities: academic staff as doctoral candidates

ABSTRACT

This article explores the experiences of a group of established academic staff in New Zealand and the UK, as they undertake a doctorate in their home institutions. Our interest is in how individuals negotiate this dual status from a cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) stance that explores how rules, tools, community and divisions of labour, and interacting activity systems, shape doctoral experiences. The focus in this article, having analysed their detailed narrative accounts, is on how academics experience three interdependent activity systems: those surrounding the thesis, the institutional context, and the home-life spheres. Issues related to time, workload and supervision issues, variability in collegial support and impact on personal priorities and time emerged. There is a range of particularities – from easy access to resources/supervisors to inflexible institutional regulations – applicable to this group of doctoral candidates. Negotiating life as an academic with concurrent doctoral candidature provides positive outcomes in terms of teaching, research confidence and general personal and professional development. However, a range of difficulties can also be encountered, particularly in relation to personal and professional relationships, and workload management.     

博士生的学术经历、学术志趣与科研能力增长的关系

博士生的学术经历和学术志趣对科研能力增长的重要作用已得到实证研究的支持,不过很少有研究能够综合考察不同方面的学术经历以及学术志趣对科研能力增长的预测作用。基于1286份博士生调查数据进行相关探索,结果发现：（1）博士生的学术志趣对科研能力增长的正向预测作用最大,超过了前沿涉猎、导师指导、课程学习等学术经历的预测作用;（2）导师指导是对博士生学术志趣正向预测作用最大的变量;（3）与人文社科博士生相比,理工科博士生的学术志趣与科研能力增长具有更强的关联;（4）学术志趣在前沿涉猎、导师指导、课程学习等学术经历与科研能力增长之间存在中介效应。上述结果支持了学术志趣在博士生学术训练中的重要性,而导师在博士生学术志趣的激发方面扮演着关键角色。     

The gown and the korowai: Māori doctoral students and the spatial organisation of academic knowledge

This paper draws on 38 student interviews carried out in the course of the team research project ‘Teaching and Learning in the Supervision of Māori Doctoral Students’. Māori doctoral thesis work takes place in the intersections between the Māori (tribal) world of identifications and obligations, the organisational and epistemological configurations of academia and the bureaucratic requirements of funding or employing bureaucracies. To explore how students accommodate cultural, academic and bureaucratic demands, we develop analytical tools combining three intellectual traditions: Māori educational theory, Bernstein’s sociology of the academy and Lefebvre’s conceptual trilogy of perceived, conceived and lived space. The paper falls into six parts. Section 1 is an overview of the research and is followed in Section 2 by identification of intersecting ‘locations’ in which Māori students’ theses are produced. In Section 3, Henri Lefebvre’s spatial analysis highlights connections between students’ multiple allegiances and affinities. Drawing on Bernstein, Section 4 relates the theses to the organisation of ‘Western’ academic disciplines. Section 5 addresses students’ cultural locations beyond the reach of ‘Western’ disciplines. We conclude with implications for supervision.     

The Impact of a Pedagogy of Teacher Education Seminar on Educator and Future Teacher Educator Identities

Educators require support as they move from classroom to higher education settings. This collaborative self-study provides insight into one such support space, a doctoral seminar titled Pedagogy of Teacher Education, and how our identities as educators and future teacher educators developed through participation in the course. Several important themes emerged as we negotiated and adopted new identities as educators, and future teacher educators and researchers. These themes include our development of a collaborative mindset, a teacher educator-researcher perspective, and a critical self-awareness. The findings draw on our professional and personal histories to explore the prominent features that influenced and shaped our identities as educators and future teacher educator-researchers. In sharing our development as educators and future teacher educators, this article provides insights into the ways in which doctoral students in education begin to develop their identities and pedagogies through guided support from more experienced teacher educators.     

Using wikis to promote quality learning in teacher training

This paper discusses writing as a social practice and speculates on how wikis might be used to promote higher quality academic writing and support collaborative learning. This study of undergraduate teacher trainees’ online learning activities focuses on how shared spaces – wikis – might be used to communicate ideas and generate course‐specific content. The study also explored how students, through such activities, were able to improve their academic writing skills and engage more critically in learning. Data captured from student discussion boards and a post‐module email questionnaire (n = 35) were used to map student perceptions of the usefulness of wikis in support of their academic studies. The data indicate that most students raised their skill level in writing directly to the publicly viewable wiki space, in sharp contrast to the more informal content they posted on the discussion boards. The scope of collaborative writing was limited due to students’ reluctance to edit each others’ work, but students appreciated the shared environment as a means of discussing their work and the content of the course. Students reported that their academic writing skills had improved through their formal participation in the wiki.     

Doctoral students on the university–industry interface: a review of the literature

Doctoral students are highly important in university—firm relationships, since they are significant producers of knowledge in collaborative research projects, they are an important channel for knowledge transfer between universities and firms, and are vital in network configurations between firms and universities. An increasing number of doctoral students interact with firms, but we know relatively little about the experiences of these students or how collaboration influences their training, research and subsequent careers. With this in mind, this paper presents a literature review of (1) theoretical assumptions concerning the roles doctoral students are expected to fulfill in university–industry relationships, and (2) empirical research of doctoral students’ interaction experience and outcomes of doctoral student-industry interaction. The aim of the paper is to develop hypotheses for further research on doctoral student—industry interaction.     

Doctoral Student Satisfaction: An Examination of Disciplinary, Enrollment, and Institutional Differences

Previous research suggests that it is the department, not the graduate school that bears the greatest responsibility for doctoral students’ progress and success (Ehrenberg et al., Doctoral education and the faculty of the future (pp. 15–34). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009) dictating the need to examine and understand how doctoral students experience their education at the department level. In the present study, we analyzed the NAGPS’ 2000 National Doctoral Program Survey (NDPS) data in an effort to understand the differences in the satisfaction levels of doctoral students (current, recent graduates, and former) across various academic disciplines (e.g. social sciences, humanities, engineering) and different institutional types (e.g. research extensive and research intensive). Employing both traditional (ANOVA) and item-level (Rasch Rating Scale Model) analyses we found that although overall satisfaction with doctoral experiences appears to be equivalent/similar across multiple disciplines, student satisfaction within disciplines varied significantly and consistently with respect to specific academic experiences.     

学术活跃度与博士生学术产出的实证分析——以中国某研究型大学为案例

本文以我国某研究型大学自然科学领域的博士生为研究对象,分析博士生在读期间的学术产出状况;构造了以学术研究投入时间、国内国际会议报告、与导师交流频率为维度的学术活跃度概念,并利用负二项分布的回归模型,证实了学术活跃度与博士生学术产出之间的关系。本研究认为,应努力创造良好的博士生教育环境和氛围,通过提高博士生的学术活跃度,进而提高其学术产出,这对提高我国博士生教育培养质量具有十分重要的意义。     

The interaction of academic and industrial supervisors in graduate education

In this study we explore the work and the cooperation of academic and industrial supervisors concerning single graduate students in so called industrial research schools, which are financially supported by a national research foundation and involve universities and industrial enterprises. Academic and industrial supervisors of totally eleven graduate students have been interviewed with focus on their cooperation. This cooperation entails negotiating the contract and monitoring the progress of the research project and the student. When students have problems this cooperation is particularly important. The places new demands on both the academic and industrial supervisors. In our study these demands were dealt with differently by different academic supervisors, depending whether their main orientation was towards industrial projects or traditional academic research. The way the industrial supervisors dealt with the new demands depended on their previous acquaintance with academic research, basically whether they had a doctoral degree or not. Another important finding was that academic knowledge had a strong position while the supervisors from the industry accepted a minor role. The main findings of the study are that industrial graduate students often require joint engagement in a way that differs from other forms of knowledge transfer between the academy and the industry. To explain the features of this type of knowledge transfer, we use the analytical concepts boundary subject and phronesis.