Moving parts in imagined spaces: community arts zone’s movement project

ABSTRACT

Movement is relatively invisible in literacy theory and pedagogy. There has been more recent scholarship on the body and embodiment, but less on connections between movements, body and literacy. In this article, we present the Community Arts Zone movement project and ways that the study opened up spaces for creativity, experimentation, and palpable identity mediation. Embodied space locates human experience within material and spatial forms. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomal ontology and Lefebvre’s spatial theories, we examine how movement can be utilized to enliven pedagogy and to motivate people. During the research, classrooms, gymnasiums, and studio spaces became spaces that “the imagination seeks to change” by asking students to construct stories with their bodies. In the article, we present vignettes from our research study as telling instances showing the inherent strengths of movement as a form of literacy.     

The Impact of University of Zululand Structural and Cultural Contexts on Postgraduate Supervision Practice (2011–2016)

There is a constant interplay between the “people” (agency) and the “parts” (structure and culture), not only in teaching and learning, but also in postgraduate supervision practices globally. However, in South Africa, the tendency to use structure (higher education architecture, institutional history, institutional rules, policies and procedures) to address all challenges related to postgraduate (especially doctoral) studies has resulted in university managers ignoring the role that institutional research culture (social norms, expectations and practice) plays, not only in perpetuating some of these challenges, but also in understanding and resolving them. At the University of Zululand (UniZulu), these factors combine to affect not only the postgraduate supervision practices of supervisors, but also the quality of doctoral throughput (doctorateness) with overall implications for society in general. This article is a critical self-reflection on the author’s postgraduate supervision practice at UniZulu between 2011 and 2016 with a view to highlight how structure and culture combine to impact on his supervision work at the institution. The discussion shows how these factors impact on the quality of doctoral output with implications for the author’s practice and society in general. To deal with the challenges arising from the discussion, the article recommends: establishing a dedicated postgraduate studies unit headed by a director or dean as supervisors and supervisees need a support system that functions optimally; improving staff qualifications and training of supervisors to keep up with best practice in postgraduate supervision; and the Department of Higher Education and Training factoring differentiation realities into its funding modules for universities.     

Writing together to foster wellbeing: doctoral writing groups as spaces of wellbeing

ABSTRACT

Candidate wellbeing is recognised as a continual challenge for doctoral programs, with government mandates requiring an institutional response. This article explores the experiences of candidates undertaking intensive writing sessions (‘Write-Ins’) and their influence on their wellbeing. Exploratory findings demonstrate opportunities for Write-In models to contribute positively to ‘Spaces of Wellbeing’. Spaces of Wellbeing theory highlights four dimensions of space that influence wellbeing: capability, security, integrative and therapeutic spaces. Findings show the Write-Ins contributed positively to wellbeing by offering space for candidates to enhance writing productivity, to work to their own pace, to connect with others, and to work flexibly.     

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.     

‘Timescapes’ in doctoral education: the politics of temporal equity in higher education

ABSTRACT

In the twenty-first century, the politics of higher education in Australia and around the globe have become dominated by neoliberal agendas of efficiency, profitability and managerialism. This has fundamentally altered the ‘timescapes’ of higher education. In the case of doctoral education, doctoral candidates and supervisors are subjected to increasing time pressures and required to produce a wide variety of outcomes in very short timeframes. These managerial agendas of efficiency and speed impact upon all doctoral candidates and supervisors but present particular practical and epistemic difficulties for Indigenous, migrant, refugee and international students. In this article, I illustrate how fast doctoral timescapes encourage assimilationist pedagogies that have been shown to be especially detrimental for Indigenous, migrant, refugee and international doctoral candidates. Drawing upon a complex array of theoretical resources that investigate Lefebvre’s rhythm analysis and other authors’ notions of epistemic time and the ethics of time, this article argues for a reconceptualization of doctoral timescapes in order to promote a politics of temporal equity in doctoral education. This especially involves making space for epistemic, lived and eternal temporal rhythms in doctoral education policy and practice.     

Pasts and futures that keep the possible alive: Reflections on time,space, education and governing

Abstract

Over the last years, the European Commission has heavily promoted various forms of digital education. In this article, we draw upon two recent European policy documents as key articulations of Europe’s contemporary governing apparatus: Opening Up Education and the Digital Education Action Plan. The article more particularly conceives of both policy documents as offering a point of departure to analyze how this apparatus is presently seeking to enact a specific mode of existence of the contemporary learner. We argue that this educational mode of existence is being enacted by the fabrication of highly specific sorts of time and space. In order to highlight the particularity of the enacted sorts of time and space exemplified in the policy documents, we start this article with a discussion of how a traditional, modern governing apparatus aims to fabricate linear time and institutional space. The article proceeds by arguing that the present-day European governing apparatus that is concerned with digital education fabricates different sorts of times and spaces, namely potential (rather than linear) temporalities and ecological/networked (rather than institutional) spatialities. Likewise, the concrete instruments (such as platforms, portals, credits and certificates) presently adopted in order to do so largely differ from modern instruments. Conclusively, we argue that the presence of these newly emerging (often digital) instruments, and the times and spaces that are fabricated through these instruments, call for an opportunistic mode of existing as a contemporary learner.     

The Experience of Disseminating the Results of Doctoral Research

Postgraduate study is something of growth industry with, worldwide, a substantial increase in the number of courses offered and students enrolled (Kerlin, 1995). A substantial part of the requirements for the successful completion of a research degree is that the research conducted should be in some way original and also make a worthwhile contribution to knowledge. Given these requirements it would be expected that the dissemination of the results of the research should be a routine part of the process of postgraduate study and its aftermath. However, it would seem that this is not the case and that the progression from completed dissertation to publication is not the universal experience. Certainly, those publications which deal with 'how to' get a research degree rarely if ever specifically address the issue of dissemination at any length. One would assume that supervisors of postgraduate research would see advice about the matter as one of their duties but it is not at all obvious whether this is the case. This article reports the results of two international studies of the experience of 'doing the degree' conducted with samples of 139 and 53 doctoral holders. Specifically, it concentrates on the participants' experiences of disseminating, or otherwise, the results of their research.     

Positive and negative experiences related to doctoral study conditions

ABSTRACT

During their doctoral studies, students undergo an emotionally and intellectually intensive process involving a wide range of positive and negative experiences. This article analyses PhD students’ perceptions of the most positive and negative experiences related to doctoral study conditions. Previous researchers have primarily focused on analysing experiences that negatively affect doctoral work and have related these experiences to institutional, social and individual variables. However, little is known regarding positive experiences and how both positive and negative experiences are interpreted and related to variables connected with doctoral study, such as discipline, funding, enrolment type, and the stage of the doctoral process. In total, 1173 doctoral students from 56 Spanish universities completed an open-ended online survey. The findings indicate that opportunities for PhD students to communicate their scientific advances, receive expert feedback and interact with other researchers have a high positive influence on their doctoral journey. However, funding difficulties, particularly for students in the social sciences, and relationships with the research community, principally with the supervisor, were perceived as the main negative challenges. Experiences related to research design, data collection and analysis were perceived either negatively – primarily for mid-level students – or positively. These results should be considered in future doctoral programme policies to determine when, how and why to provide specific support during the doctoral process.     

Restorying as political action: authoring resistance through youth media arts

ABSTRACT

This article explores the lived realities for young people growing up and learning in a climate of racial discrimination, religious intolerance, misogyny, and xenophobia, and how school-sponsored and school-supported uses of digital media can afford young people opportunities to navigate their experiences of social injustice and resist exclusionary discourses and practices. In a collaborative inquiry into the practices of two youth media producers, we explore how these counternarrative efforts are forms of restorying, in which young people write themselves into existence in ways that can reconfigure school spaces. Framed in Black feminist and critical cosmopolitan perspectives, this article considers how young people use new media tools in school to engage the narrative imagination and build the worlds they want to live in, simultaneously representing the political histories and realities of their everyday worlds and imagining alternative futures. We explore the ways schools can create opportunities for youth to engage in these new media practices that re-author themselves and the institutional spaces they encounter – and how these opportunities are situated within broader intersectional forms of systemic inequity and oppression.     

25 Hours in Family: How Family Internships Can Help School Leaders Transform from Within

This article describes the ways in which a 25-hour internship with families who have children with disabilities impacted four doctoral students in educational leadership. We discuss the lessons we learned as a result of our experiences and provide insight into the structural components of the internship experience that were critical to enhancing our professional development. Key lessons include: (1) the realization that disability is a socially-constructed term that does not describe the talents, feelings, and aspirations of individuals with disabilities; (2) increased knowledge and strategies about how school leaders can provide support to families by listening to their hopes, dreams, and challenges; and (3) the critical need to include families in decision-making processes to ensure that the family perspective is represented. Important structural components of the internship experience included spending time with families in their homes and communities for extended periods of time. Implications for the preparation of educational leaders are discussed.     

Exploring whakaaro: A way of responsive thinking in Maori research

Abstract

The experience of researching as a Māori student within academia will often raise questions about how and whether the student’s research privileges Māori world views and articulates culturally specific epistemologies. This study offers some theorising, from the perspectives of a Maori doctoral student and her Maori supervisor (the authors of this study), on the metaphysical nature of research for Maori. It emphasises that there is a space for speculative, creative and responsive thinking as a central method in the student’s doctoral research and describes how access to free thinking has been only partly recognised in currently dominant methods of research. We describe this approach as ‘whakaaro’, and note its relationship to language itself, to the researcher and the interviewee, and in particular to the researcher’s intuitive and largely unknowable response to what an interviewee utters. In that act, the student envisages that she will expansively hint at (but not pretend to grasp) the deep expression of the profoundly mysterious. Here, our thinking resonates with various Western and indigenous writings about research and adumbrates the potential of the whakaaro method without foreclosing against its various permutations.     

To valerse por si misma between race,capitalism, and patriarchy: Latina mother-daughter pedagogies in North Carolina

This article examines mujer-oriented mother-daughter pedagogies that are narrated and discursively embodied, improvised, and contested in the conversations and oral life histories of a group of Latina mothers in rural North Carolina. The teaching and learning that occurs between mothers and daughters through consejos (advice),cuentos (stories) and la experiencia (experience) are wrought with tensions and contradictions yet open with spaces of possibility. Latinas evoked patriarchal ideologies about being a mujer de hogar (woman of the home), while simultaneously negotiating these in discourses about knowing how to valerse por si misma (to be self-reliant). A conceptual framework built around ''funds of knowledge,'' educacion, and third space feminism serves to illuminate how mothers teach daughters to be submissive, rebellious and comforming, all at the same time, as they maneuver between race, patriarchy, and capitalism.     

PhD by Publication: innovative approach to social science research,or operationalisation of the doctoral student … or both?

ABSTRACT

The PhD by Publication offers doctoral students an opportunity to focus on publishing during their candidature. A considerable body of literature has explored questions of legitimacy, consistency and quality of this model of scholarship, while students have reflected on how this approach helped build a publishing track record and develop skills associated with writing scholarly articles [Jackson, D. (2013). Completing a PhD by publication: A review of Australian policy and implications for practice. Higher Education Research & Development, 32(3), 355–368; Robins, L., & Kanowski, P. (2008). PhD by publication: A student’s perspective. Journal of Research Practice, 4(2), 1–20]. However, there is a need to explore how this approach both shapes and reflects the student experience of doctoral studies. This auto-ethnographical article analyses my own experience of the PhD by Publication. On the one hand, this method suited my multidisciplinary research topic and approach to research and assisted the flexibility and creativity of my research. On the other, I began to view my value as a researcher and the value of my research, in terms of the quantitative performance metrics of research in output, citation counts and h-index. Concept of performativity, I analyse how the PhD by Publication potentially reshapes what it is to be a doctoral student, and how the value of doctoral students is construed by themselves and others within their university.     

The Experienced Meaning of Working with a PhD Thesis

There is a variation in terms of how researchers perceive the nature of research work. Previous research has mainly looked at the members of academia who already have established themselves in the scholarly community. We aimed at exploring the ways in which doctoral students perceived their thesis project and further, the relations of such perceptions to well-being and study engagement. The participants were 669 doctoral students from medicine, humanities, and behavioral sciences from a Finnish university who answered a questionnaire, including both structured and open-ended questions. The analysis was conducted by triangulating qualitative and quantitative data. The results showed that students' perceptions varied, ranging from perceiving the thesis as a product to viewing it as a process of developing expertise. Further, the results indicated that perceiving work on the thesis as a process was most advantageous in terms of experienced well-being and study engagement.     

From ‘Year 9 dropout’ to doctoral candidate: An autoethnographic journey of becoming (with friends)

ABSTRACT

In this article, I am joined by two academic colleagues to explore my personal narratives and experiences as a doctoral student, and to explicate the challenges and achievements of my pathway into doctoral studies. Positioning itself within the growing field of doctoral research, the article focuses on an exploration of three vignettes which identify important points in my unfolding stories of formation in becoming a doctoral student as an older person. This autoethnographic study draws on Transformative Learning Theory and the critical discourse understandings of Gee to examine my stories of becoming from school-leaver at 15 to doctoral student over four decades later. The study has three implications. First, it is important to recognise and appreciate alternate pathways to doctoral education. Second, that there is a need to better understand the complex formation of doctoral students within an academic research community; especially in regard to those from diverse or challenging backgrounds. Finally, the significance of seeing doctoral education as identity work and work of the soul, built as much on affective experiences and reflexivity as learning to perform and write as an academic, is key.     

Managing the delicate matter of advice giving: accomplishing communicative space in Critical Participatory Action Research

ABSTRACT

Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) requires communicative space to develop shared understandings and decisions. We examine the interactional accomplishment of such a space between a classroom practitioner and an academic researcher when meeting to reflect on a lesson and agree on future action to bring about change in the practitioner’s classroom practice. Conversation analysis of an audio recording of the meeting establishes how advice giving emerged and was managed as a delicate matter that required achieving shared understandings of what actually happened in the lesson, what could have happened, and what should happen in future lessons. Findings provide insights into how participants used reported and hypothetical speech to manage advice and reach agreement, produce and maintain intersubjectivity through interaction, and address epistemic asymmetry related to the differing experiences and roles that they brought to the action research study. Overall, the article contributes understandings of the ways that interactions produce communicative space in CPAR.     

Researcher development through doctoral training in research integrity

ABSTRACT

The article explores research integrity training for PhD-students as a site of production of academic cultures and researcher development. Based on ethnographies of four courses in research integrity, conducted in four faculties of a large comprehensive Danish university, the article explores the vital role of academic developers, teachers, and course participants in the active translation of institutional, national, and international policies into research practices. We argue that doctoral training in research integrity does not entail the direct implementation of policy and codes from above; rather, it is a site for the development and negotiation of the meaning of research integrity in disciplinary cultures and standards, and, critically, for the responsibilisation of individual researchers in policy enactment. We show how doctoral training has become a key site for the emergence of research integrity as a field. It is also a privileged site for researching contested and multidirectional processes of policy formation and implementation.     

Is the classroom obsolete in the twenty-first century?

Abstract

Lefebvre’s triadic conception of spatial practice, representations of space and representational spaces provides the theoretical framework of this article, which recognises a productive relationship between space and social relations. Its writing stems from a current and ongoing qualitative study of innovative teaching and learning practices in new technology-rich flexible learning spaces, characterised by large open spaces, permeable boundaries and diverse furnishings emphasising student comfort, health and flexibility. Schooling in the twenty-first century, certainly in the developed world, is required to ensure that children and school-leavers have appropriate life-long skills in preparation for participation in the twenty-first century knowledge economy. This world is characterised as complex and dynamic, deeply influenced by globalisation and the revolution in digital technology. Developing these skills calls into question ‘outmoded’ transmission models of teaching and requires teachers and school leaders to approach their work in radically new ways. Open school design encourages flexibility in learning and teaching, and allows collaborative, team teaching, with designers claiming significant educational benefits. This arrangement of multiple classes using innovatively designed, technology-enriched common space, facilitated by multiple teachers, working in collaborative teams, is far-reaching in its likely implications for community expectations and responses, relationship-building, assessment, student learning, teachers’ work and initial teacher education.     

Exploring the connection between impostor phenomenon and postgraduate students feeling academically-unprepared

ABSTRACT

Impostor phenomenon refers to an overwhelming feeling of being an intellectual fraud despite evidence to the contrary, and it affects highly capable individuals in many fields, including those in postgraduate education. This project sought to answer the following question: in what ways do postgraduate students enrolled in a large, American institution experience impostor phenomenon during their postgraduate education? Interviews and a survey showed that the majority of the participants experienced impostor phenomenon, and that many of those feelings related to the participants feeling academically-unprepared, including concerns related to reading, writing, and discussing academic work. This article explores this connection between impostor phenomenon and participants feeling like they lacked sufficient academic skill sets to succeed in their programmes. The results build a case for doing literacy work as a way to address impostor phenomenon among postgraduate students.     

The doctorate unbound: relationality in doctoral literacy research

What do literacy events look and feel like for doctoral students, and how do these events overlap intertextually, materially and relationally? The last three decades have seen a rapid diversification in doctoral education where new opportunities for study, combined with an increasingly competitive landscape, have disrupted what it means to undertake a doctorate, as well as reshaping the literacy practices that comprise doctoral experiences in new ways that have not been fully explored. To understand literacies in new ways, we put to work the construct of literacy-as-event, and engage ideas from assemblage theory, to theorise the relationality of literacy practices. Crucially, our study seeks to examine how literacies are emergent and entangled within a wider network of relations. This article draws on data from interviews involving critical incidents with 12 doctoral students, in order to unpack the literacy moments, beyond the thesis, that comprise students' experiences. Our data suggest that we can understand doctoral literacies, not as bounded occurrences, but as assemblages of practices. We contend that thinking with concepts of assemblage and of event offers new insights into the evolving experiences of doctoral students, as well as offering an enriched understanding of literacies and literacy research.