“Previously I thought writing was writing”: Reflections on Doctoral Writing Spaces (original) (raw)

Doctoral students writing: where's the pedagogy?

Writing occupies a key role in doctoral research because it is the principal channel students use to communicate their ideas, and the basis on which their degree is awarded. Doctoral writing can, therefore, be a source of considerable anxiety. Most doctoral candidates require support and encouragement if they are to develop confidence as writers. Drawing on interviews with two international doctoral students at an Australian university, this paper examines the writing practices the students have encountered and discusses them in the light of recent research on doctoral writing pedagogy. Analysis of the students’ experiences in terms of Wenger’s ‘communities of practice’ framework suggests that this perspective fails to account adequately for the power relations that impact on the students’ learning opportunities. Examining the students’ experiences also highlights the importance of good pedagogy in supporting the development of scholarly writing in the doctorate.

Writing through theoretical frameworks in the doctoral classroom

Studies in Graduate and Postdoctoral Education, 2020

Purpose Many doctoral students apply theoretical frameworks to writing assignments as part of their academic coursework and, later, in the practice of analyzing and reporting research. However, students often struggle to effectively apply theoretical frameworks to their writing processes. Thus, as one way of contributing to the writing pedagogies of doctoral-level instructors, the purpose of this study is to explore doctoral students’ learning experiences with analyzing and reporting organizational data using theoretical frameworks. Design/methodology/approach This study examines the perspectives of 29 doctoral students through analytical papers and reflections, letters and interviews. Findings Five themes within the context of current literature on writing were identified. These included students experiencing discomfort, even fear, about writing; students needing to write and receive honest feedback to learn how to write; the need for an instructional process that moves from concep...

Developing doctoral authors: engaging with theoretical perspectives through the literature review

Postal address: G.wisker@brighton.ac.uk CLT university of Brighton, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9PH The literature review is arguably the place in a thesis where doctoral authors convincingly engage with theory and theoretical perspectives underlying their research, situating their own contribution to knowledge in established and ongoing dialogues in the field. One difficulty doctoral candidates encounter in their learning to be researchers is articulating this understanding and engagement, how their work grows from literature informing and underpinning their research. Writing confidently at doctoral level in the discipline discourse, and breaking writing blocks are key features of engagement and articulation. Most research into academic writing concentrates on undergraduate writing development , while research on doctoral students looks at relationships with supervisors, communities and the doctoral learning journey. This research on doctoral writing in the literature review uses work on conceptual threshold crossings to identify ways in which doctoral students engage with and indicate their understanding of theoretical perspectives through successful doctoral writing.

PhD Students Learning the Process of Academic Writing: The Role of the Rhetorical Rectangle

Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie

PhD students are enculturated into scholarly writing through relationships with their supervisors and other faculty. As part of a doctoral writing group, we explored students’ experiences that affected their writing, both cognitively and affectively, and how these experiences made them feel about themselves as academic writers. Six first and second year doctoral students participated in formal group discussions, using Edward de Bono’s (1985/1992) Six Thinking Hats to guide the discussions. In addition, the students wrote personal narratives about their writing experiences. Data were analyzed according to the rhetorical rectangle of logos, ethos, pathos, and kairos. Analysis revealed that students were having struggles with their identities as academic writers, not feeling as confident as they had before their programs, and questioning some of the pedagogy of teaching academic writing.

It's a Lonely Walk": Supporting Postgraduate Researchers through Writing

Traditional views of the writing process as a solitary and painstaking task can inhibit postgraduate students from pursuing useful conversations about their writing. Recent research has suggested that spaces for opening discussion on writing are needed and are important in supporting postgraduate writers to develop their academic identity (Cuthbert & Spark, 2008; Cuthbert, Spark & Burke 2009; Kamler & Thomson, 2007; Lee & Boud, 2003). This paper explores the experiences of five students at University College London (UCL), who were the first cohort to take a writing module which aimed to introduce theoretical and practical approaches to writing and to encourage reflection and evaluation of writing practices. The three key themes to emerge from the research were related to the development of the students' confidence as writers and more generally as researchers. These were: (1) Space – the value of having a defined space for writing, providing a new focus for learning in a less for...

Softening boundaries: Entering Academic Writing through Creative Writing

Cafe Dissensus, 2019

In this article I reflect on my experience of organising academic writing workshops for MA and MPhil students from the department of Sociology at South Asian University, where I am enrolled as a PhD Candidate. The workshop I am drawing upon was conducted in February 2017 with the intention to facilitate a process to get students to identify their academic writing challenges and gather resources-internal, interpersonal, and institutional-to inform their writing practice. The day-long workshop covered a range of topics, including discussing practices of journaling and freewriting, reverse outlining, and revising and rewriting. For this essay, I draw only on the series of activities undertaken in the first session. Even though most of the discussion was primarily in the context of ethnographic writing, I suggest that some of the ideas illustrated here could travel to academic writing across disciplines. How we approach the act of writing could hold some answers to why academic writing suffers from a certain degree of ennui. Perhaps, to be attributed to, if not blamed, on how we have been trained or not trained as far as writing is concerned. Academic writing till recently was mostly viewed as a task that didn't require training. The somewhat fallacious belief that writing begins once all the reading and thinking has been done complicates matters even more: in the linear scheme of things reading and thinking precedes writing. However, any form of analytical writing would require a more recursive approach. The aim of this workshop was to discuss among

Learning to Write a Research Article: Ph.D. Students’ Transitions toward Disciplinary Writing Regulation

This paper presents a study designed from a socially situated and activity theory perspective aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of how Ph.D. students regulate their academic writing activity. Writing regulation is a complex activity of a highly situated and social nature, involving cyclical thought-action-emotion dynamics and the individual’s capacity to monitor his/her activity. The central purpose was to analyze how writing regulation takes place within the framework of an educational intervention, a seminar designed to help Ph.D. students write their first research articles. The seminar not only focused on teaching the discursive resources of disciplinary articles in psychology but also sought to develop students’ recognition of epistemic stances (ways of knowing) and identities (ways of being) of their academic and disciplinary communities. While doing this, the seminar also aimed at helping students overcome the contradictions they encountered as they constructed their identities as researchers and writers through writing. We collected data on seminar participants’ perceptions (through analyses of interviews, diaries, and in-class interaction) and practices (through analyses of successive drafts and peers’ and tutors’ text revisions). Contradictions represent a challenge for which the individual does not have a clear answer. Consequently, solutions need to be creative and often painful, that is, the individual needs to work out something qualitatively different from a mere combination of two competing forces. The unit of analysis was the “Regulation Episode,” defined as the sequences of discourse and/or action from which a contradiction may be inferred and which, in turn, lead to the implementation of innovative actions to solve it. Results showed that contradictions regarding students’ conceptualizations of their texts—as artifacts-in-activity versus as end-products—and of their identities as disciplinary writers—become visible through certain discursive manifestations such as “dilemmas” and “critical conflicts.” Dilemmas were more difficult to solve than other discursive manifestations, and they mostly appeared in regulation episodes when students were grappling with their identities as disciplinary writers. Regulation of writing identity was slower and more difficult than regulation connected to text conceptualization as an artifact-in-activity. The development of students’ disciplinary writing identity was affected by their perceptions of peripheral participation in the disciplinary community and of contradictions between different communities. Two successful ways students resolved contradictions and regulated their writing activity were to redefine the output and consider the text as a tool to think; implementing these solutions resulted in substantial changes to drafts.. These results might be used to design socioculturally oriented educational interventions and tools to help students develop as disciplinary writers.

Threshold Concepts in Doctoral Education

Nurse Educator, 2018

Pedagogical practices for writing development in doctoral programs are often the by-product of completing dissertation research and may lack deliberate strategies to assist students with complex genres of writing. This article proposes a framework for doctoral education to assist students with mastery of threshold concepts in writing. Threshold concepts in writing are examined for their applicability to the evolution of writing in PhD nursing students as they begin to think and write like nurse scientists.