Supporting doctoral writers as writers

research writing encouraged

A community blog, on doctoral supervision relationships and pedagogies

This is a guest post by Dr Rachael Cayley (@rachaelcayley), Associate Professor (Teaching Stream) in the Graduate Centre for Academic Communication, School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto. Rachael edits the Explorations of Style blog, all about academic writing, and is currently working on a book about thriving as a graduate writer. The piece below is based on her research into how supervisors support doctoral writers.

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

During the initial stages of a research project about the supervision of doctoral writing, I got an excellent piece of advice from a senior scholar. Instead of delving into well documented weaknesses in the way supervisors support doctoral writing, why not investigate what parts of doctoral writing supervisionareworking? Why not seek out doctoral writers who got good writing support and then ask their supervisors what they did to support writing?

In…

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Our Coach from the Global HE Super League advises

Satire for satyrs on a saturday

Academic Irregularities

The UK’s vice chancellors have often looked to football metaphors to legitimise their more Darwinian activities and to burnish their street cred with a bit of reflected laddishness. Now, in turn, football is repaying the compliment by modelling their own exclusive cartel on the university sector’s Russell Group.

So as a thought leader and influencer from the Global HE Super League, I decided to offer some coaching to our football partners as they branch out into this new joint venture.

Your players may, naively, have formed the idea that football is about creating trust within a cohesive unit, scoring goals and winning games. This rigid, short-term thinking is typical of those working in silos whose behaviour has been steered by outdated incentives. However, the territory has shifted from satisfaction for supporters to engagement. Engagement of £££. You need to increase gate receipts and you need to increase player name recognition…

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Teaching Qualitative Inquiry

teaching qual research – great resource and links to other resources

QualPage

There are numerous ways to learn how to teach qualitative research methods. Prior to the advent of formal coursework, scholars were quite literally assigned to develop and teach coursework on qualitative methods that they had not taken themselves. Over the last 20 years, however, qualitative scholars have been generous in sharing resources to do with learning and teaching qualitative inquiry. For example, see Ron Chenail’s Compendium of Teaching and Learning Qualitative Research Resources.

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Crafting your personalised soundscape for writing

soundscape for writing!

DoctoralWriting

By Dr Kay Guccione, a Senior Lecturer in Academic Development at Glasgow Caledonian University.Kay has been a teacher and educational development professional since 2010, working in Researcher and Academic Development at the University of Sheffield for nine years. Her specialism is in Dialogic Learning, as applied to Mentoring, Personal Tutoring and PhD Supervision. She was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in 2018 in recognition of her national profile in these areas, and she edits a blog on Research Supervision, and edits the Journal of Imaginary Research

Selfie by Kay Guccione wearing her ‘obnoxious headphones’

Researchers in music psychology (of which I am not one, to be transparent) have produced a huge body of evidence, documenting how music affects human behaviour and emotion within a wide range of performance contexts, varying music genera and tempo, task type, volume and the presence or absence of vocals. Writing to the right musical…

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