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Psychological Safety in the Doctoral Context

by Jayne Carruthers

The doctorate is a subjective experience demanding the re-evaluation of ways of thinking, the navigation of intense emotions, and the adaptation of behaviours by the candidate to achieve new learning goals, transforming the candidate from a consumer to a creator of knowledge. Candidates often face uncertainty and enter a state of liminality during this process, feeling caught between old beliefs and new insights, which can lead to discomfort and feeling ‘stuck’. To navigate this liminal space, candidates benefit from a change in perspective supported by transformative learning. While much of the focus in doctoral support is on the candidate avoiding negative experiences during this process, there is limited attention given to the candidate’s role of self-awareness and self-management. Reflexivity provides one such option to consider.

Reflexivity is a cognitive, or thinking, process that enables individuals to move beyond simple reflection, fostering self-awareness and exploring different options for progress. While candidates have demonstrated its usefulness in understanding their doctoral journeys, further research is needed on initiating and sustaining this process independently. This ability to learn and develop autonomously is essential, as doctoral programs require candidates to show evidence of becoming independent researchers. In organisational literature, reflexivity has been demonstrated to enhance information processing, helping employees understand what, why, and how of learning and change. It enables adjustments in both task execution and personal approach. Moreover, team psychological safety has been demonstrated to be crucial for effective team reflexivity. However, variations in terminology and definitions related to psychological safety limit the extension of this construct beyond the organisational context.

A body of conceptual research adopting a Theoretical Integrated Review (TIR) approach was conducted, with findings highlighting historical use, providing theoretical insights, and clarifying a generalised definition of psychological safety with relevance beyond the organisational setting. Psychological safety is an internal process that helps individuals manage distress, influencing their thoughts, feelings, and actions. It plays a crucial role in growth and development by connecting motivation and goal-directed behaviour, providing the opportunity for a generalised definition:

Psychological safety is a dynamic intrapsychic construct drawn on by individuals to mitigate actual or foreseen distress. The presence or absence of psychological safety is influenced by context, the individual’s existing psychological frames of reference, and current and future motives relating to an endeavour.

This understanding allows the absence or presence of psychological safety to be considered in broader contexts, including independent learning settings like doctoral programs. To explore this potential, a body of qualitative research was conducted with six volunteer PhD candidates enrolled at a regional Australian university awaiting feedback on their theses.

Using the vignette methodology technique to present short fictional scenarios regarding experiences of doctoral knowledge uncertainty, the researcher conducted semi-structured interviews to understand how doctoral candidates deal with knowledge uncertainty. This approach encouraged interviewees to discuss their experiences without the pressure of direct questions, facilitating open discussions about managing uncertainty. At the end of the interviews, findings from the conceptual research were shared, and feedback was gathered on their benefit as a basis for candidate support. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and thematically analysed.

All six interviewees described experiences with knowledge uncertainty and agreed that the conceptual research findings on psychological safety could improve opportunities for candidate support and warranted further investigation. The analysis of the interviews revealed that the interviewees’ experiences of uncertainty stemmed from intrapersonal, interpersonal, and university governance-level interactions. While similarities existed based on stages in the doctoral program, no strong recurring theme of uncertainty emerged. Notably, the differences lay in how the interviewees discussed their experiences of uncertainty.

Some interviewees emphasised the importance of interpersonal support to help them progress:

… the Confirmation panel Chairperson insisted that I rework my research question … I found it confusing. I felt that I must have grossly mistaken something …. my supervisor just said, okay, well, rebuild methodology … I felt uncertain. But she was very encouraging and supportive … I got through the second time, no questions asked …                                                                                                                                                                                                 Interviewee Steve

… my methodology was underdeveloped … I was asked to resubmit this section to the confirmation panel … I was stressed about it having to be perfect because I thought failing would be the worst thing in the world.  … I remember that being a big thing … I was embarrassed, … an extra hurdle because no one else I knew needed to resubmit … my supervisors were empowering … they both said, redo what you need to … You’ll get through. You’re going to be okay.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Interviewee Amy

Other interviewees’ narratives shifted from reflection to reflexivity, demonstrating self-awareness and developing metacognitive strategies to navigate their uncertainties.

So yeah, it was an unhappy period. It was a couple of months of really hating what I was, what I’d done to myself in choosing this particular topic…I just had to ride that wave, you know, think it through, think, really think about what I was doing and why I was doing it, what the product was, what the process was and what the result needed to be in the end. 

                                                                                                                                 Interviewee Julie

… a big part of my uncertainty was about paradigms … I couldn’t write my methodology. … I was just not convinced … if I can’t believe in these views about knowledge and reality, I can’t write about this stuff. So that was a hurdle …  I was sometimes reading without knowing what would come of it. … then it felt like, oh, this is it … what had been a major period of uncertainty had also been a cognitively shifting one that changed my perception of the world.                                                                                                                Interviewee Jack

The extracts illustrate how interviewees navigated uncertainties and liminal spaces, utilising various strategies to move forward. Some narratives show less use of self-awareness, relying on interpersonal support, while others reflect and use reflexivity as a proactive, independent approach to managing uncertainty.

Understanding psychological safety as a multi-dimensional construct and appreciating its demonstrated moderating effect on reflexivity in the workplace provides an opportunity for further investigation. The differences in interviewees’ narratives offer valuable insights regarding reflexivity and the doctoral experience of uncertainty, collectively establishing a basis for exploring psychological safety in the doctoral context.

Jayne Carruthers is a PhD candidate in SORTI, a research centre based in the School of Education at The University of Newcastle, Australia, where she works as a Research Assistant. With a background in Adult Education and Positive Psychology, she has a well-developed interest in fostering autonomous learners. Her PhD research explores psychological safety within doctoral learning and development. Her recent publications include “Conveying the learning self to others: doctoral candidates conceptualising and communicating the complexion of development”


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Doctoral progress reviews: managing KPIs or developing researchers?

by Tim Clark

All doctoral students in the UK are expected to navigate periodic, typically annual, progress reviews as part of their studies (QAA, 2020). Depending on the stage, and the individual institutional regulations, these often play a role in determining confirmation of doctoral status and/or continuation of studies. Given that there were just over 100,000 doctoral students registered in the UK in 2021 (HESA, 2022), it could therefore be argued that the progress review is a relatively prominent, and potentially high stakes, example of higher education assessment.  However, despite this potential significance, guidance relating to doctoral progress reviews is fairly sparse, institutional processes and terminology reflect considerable variations in approach, empirical research to inform design is extremely limited (Dowle, 2023) and perhaps most importantly, the purpose of these reviews is often unclear or contested.

At the heart of this lack of clarity appears to be a tension surrounding the frequent positioning of progress reviews as primarily institutional tools for managing key performance indicators relating to continuation and completion, as opposed to primarily pedagogical tools for supporting individual students learning (Smith McGloin, 2021). Interestingly however, there is currently very little research regarding effectiveness or practice in relation to either of these aspects. Yet, there is growing evidence to support an argument that this lack of clarity regarding purpose may frequently represent a key limitation in terms of engagement and value (Smith McGloin, 2021, Sillence, 2023; Dowle, 2023). As Bartlett and Eacersall (2019) highlight, the common question is ‘why do I have to do this?’

As a relatively new doctoral supervisor and examiner, with a research interest in doctoral pedagogy, in the context of these tensions, I sought to use a pedagogical lens to explore a small group of doctoral students’ experiences of navigating their progress review. My intention for this blog is to share some learning from this work, with a more detailed recent paper reporting on the study also available here (Clark, 2023). 

Methods and Approach

This research took place in one post-1992 UK university, where progress assessment consisted of submission of a written report, followed by an oral examination or review (depending on the stage). These progress assessments are undertaken by academic staff with appropriate expertise, who are independent of the supervision team. This was a small-scale study, involving six doctoral students, who were all studying within the humanities or social sciences. Students were interviewed using a semi-structured narrative ‘event-focused’ (Jackman et al, 2022) approach, to generate a rich narrative relating to their experience of navigating through the progress review as a learning event.

In line with the pedagogical focus, the concept of ‘assessment for learning’ was adopted as a theoretical framework (Wiliam, 2011). Narratives were then analysed using an iterative ‘visit and revisit’ (Srivastava and Hopwood, 2009) approach. This involved initially developing short vignettes to consider students’ individual experiences before moving between the research question, data and theoretical framework to consider key themes and ideas.

Findings

The study identified that the students understood their doctoral progress reviews as having significant potential for supporting their learning and development, but that specific aspects of the process were understood to be particularly important. Three key understandings arose from this: firstly, that the oral ‘dialogic’ component of the assessment was seen as most valuable in developing thinking, secondly, that progress reviews offered the potential to reframe and disrupt existing thinking relating to their studies, and finally, that progress reviews have the potential to play an important role in developing a sense of autonomy, permission and motivation.

In terms of design and practice, the value of the dialogic aspect of the assessment was seen as being in its potential to extend thinking through the assessor, as a methodological and disciplinary ‘expert’, introducing invitational, coaching format, questions to provoke reflection and provide opportunities to justify and explore research decisions. When this approach was taken, students recalled moments where they were able to make ‘breakthroughs’ in their thinking or where they later realised that the discussion was significant in shaping their future research decisions. Alongside this, a respectful and supportive approach was viewed as important in enhancing psychological safety and creating a sense of ownership and permission in relation to their work:

“I think having that almost like mentoring, which is like a mini mentoring or mini coaching session, in these examination spots is just really helpful”

“I’m pootling along and it’s going okay and now this bombshell’s just dropped, but it was helpful because, yeah, absolutely it completely shifted it.”

“It’s my study… as long as I can justify academically and back it up. Why I’ve chosen to do what I’ve done then that’s okay.” 

Implications

Clearly this is a small-scale study, with a relatively narrow disciplinary focus, however its value is intended to lie in its potential to provoke consideration of progress reviews as tools for teaching, learning and researcher development, rather than to assert any generalisable understanding for practice.

This consideration may include questions which are relevant for research leaders, supervisors and assessors/examiners, and for doctoral students. Most notably: is there a shared understanding of the purpose of doctoral progress reviews and why we ‘have’ to do it? And how does this purpose inform design, practice and related training within our institutions?

Within this study it was evident that in this context the role of dialogic assessment was significant, and given the additional resource required to protect or introduce such an approach, this may be an aspect which warrants further exploration and investigation to support decision making. In addition, it also framed the perceived value of the careful construction of questions, which invite and encourage reflection and learning, as opposed to seeking solely to ‘test’ this.

Dr Timothy Clark is Director of Research and Enterprise for the School of Education at the University of the West of England, Bristol. His research focuses on aspects of doctoral pedagogy and researcher development.


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Doctoral Borderlands: an exploration of doctoral education and its possible futures

by Namrata Rao, Anesa Hosein, Rille Raaper, Harry Rolf, Karen Gravett, Karen Smith, Neil Harrison and Susan Carter

At the SRHE conference 2021, we (Karen S, Neil and Susan) facilitated a symposium in two parts on Doctoral Borderlands. Together, the parts gave a guided tour through doctoral borderlands, the metaphor underpinning the Teaching in Higher Education Special Issue: ‘Working in the borderlands: Critical perspectives on doctoral education’ (Carter, Smith & Harrison, 2021). The reference to borderlands, drawing from Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) work, emphasised the transitionary and liminal nature of doctoral education, the crossings into the unknown, and the emergence or surfacing of (multiple) identities. In the symposium, ten authors shared overviews of seven of the Special Issue articles as starting points for open discussion around doctoral education and its future possibilities.

This blog post picks up three doctoral borderland trajectories taken by some of the SRHE symposium presenters. First, Karen Gravett starts by looking at how the form of the doctorate is changing and its impact on perceptions of the doctoral journey. Then Namrata Rao, Anesa Hosein and Rille Raaper discuss being, becoming and belonging, particularly in the context of precarity. After this, Harry Rolf considers power in doctoral education, from the starting point of doctoral publishing.

Karen Gravett

Critical perspectives on doctoral education are needed now more than ever. It is increasingly apparent that the prevalence of new routes and possibilities for study, including professional and publication-led doctorates, combined with a competitive academic landscape, have reshaped the doctoral experience in new ways (Gravett, 2021). What it is to be a doctoral student and what it means to do a doctorate is evolving, and traditional stereotypes, of young, full-time, funded students are no longer fit for purpose.

And yet, the literature on doctoral education is rich with metaphors that describe doctoral study as a pathway or trajectory, while institutional rhetoric often evokes ideas of linearity and regularity. In my recent work (Gravett, 2021), I explore the power of these tropes and depictions, in order to ask: what do spatial narratives do? Are conceptions of linear journeys, or pathways from student to academic, from novice to expert, still fit for purpose? I invite readers to think with two of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) theoretical concepts, rhizome and becoming, to foreground the multiple and messy becomings that researchers experience, as they evolve throughout a doctorate and beyond.

In reconsidering narratives of the doctoral journey, I offer an irruption to widely accepted notions of learning as a linear pathway with a fixed end-point, and reflect on how new and traditional forms of doctoral study might be understood differently. Thinking differently about doctoral study offers new opportunities for writing: offering spaces to disrupt the traditional monograph that has dominated the doctorate to date, and openings for intertextuality and connection.

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Just as the form of the doctorate and the pathway through it are changing, the context in which doctorates are done and the impact on doctoral students’ identities are also changing, picked up by Namrata, Anesa and Rille.

Namrata Rao, Anesa Hosein and Rille Raaper

The marketisation of higher education (HE) has seen a growing number of HE staff being employed on short term hourly paid contracts, which has also triggered much of the recent University and College Union (UCU) Four Fights Campaign in the UK. Our paper (Rao, Hosein & Raaper, 2021) explored doctoral students engaged in HE teaching in an era of precarity; within this context of increasing casualisation, the doctoral students, ‘the budding academics’, are seeking ways of getting their foot in the door and ‘becoming’ an academic. This desire for ‘belonging’ in the academy has seen them take up casualised contracts with the hope that they would one day land up a permanent contract.

Aside from the damage often caused by such casualised contracts to their developing professional identity, there is a growing concern that the precarious employment circumstances lead to them developing a fractured ‘cleft’ teacher identity, where they are continuously straddling the demands of being a researcher (as a doctoral student) and being a teacher negotiating the uncertainties created by such working conditions. Doctoral students’ understandings of university teaching are often framed by their own experiences of being a university student. We suggest their teaching should be shaped by a professional development programme. Access to such programmes is limited due to the nature of their casualised contracts and often very disparate depending on the institutional context.

These structural inequalities and precarious support practices compromise candidates’ holistic development as researchers and teachers. It’s more difficult for them to be fully productive university teachers, which in turn has a knock-on impact on the quality of university teaching and their experience as doctoral students. Therefore, there is a pressing need for universities to consider ways in which doctoral students can belong to and become and be (remain) active citizens who are aware of their responsibilities, but whose rights are addressed both as students and aspiring academics.

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Doctoral student engagement with and in the academy is underpinned by power, a theme continued by Harry.

Harry Rolf

The landscape of doctoral education is contradictory and conflicting, shaped by invisible power structures and taken-for-granted practices arising from research performance and productivity measures. An emphasis on publishing in doctoral pedagogy means that this is increasingly a landscape that doctoral students must cross to achieve academic and future career success.

My analysis (Rolf 2021), applying a lens of data feminism to publications by doctoral students at an Australian university, shows a borderland where crossings by students and supervisors were frequent but where few stayed for long. Travellers crossed in teams which over time exhibited different approaches to the practice of publication, from teams led by a strong ego-centric researcher to teams where publication was a collaborative effort, but where power was not evenly distributed. Travelling with an experienced guide provided doctoral students with greater access to networks, and if they travelled frequently, more opportunities to publish along the way.

The analysis raises important questions about power and experience in doctoral supervisory and publishing teams, including questions that go beyond the scope of publication data; for example, what does good collaboration look like in doctoral supervisory teams, how are those doctoral supervisory teams formed, what practices do those supervisors bring, and are more diverse expertise or experience brought to supervisory teams and properly recognised? And looking beyond the immediate supervisory team, how can doctoral students find other networks and teams with the knowledge and tools to help them find safe passage, and success, on their borderland crossing?

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Our 2021 SRHE conference symposium managed to cover many of the uncertainties, transitions, dangers and hopes of doctoral borderlands, doing pretty well at representing the Special Issue, which houses thirteen full articles and two Points of Departure (think-piece provocations) covering a range of topics relating to doctoral education. The Teaching in Higher Education Special Issue, the stimulus papers and the discussion in the SRHE symposium that followed demonstrated the changing landscape of doctoral education in terms of the different forms and format of the doctorate, the context of doctoral study, the nature of doctoral research with research that crosses disciplines and professions, the roles and responsibilities that doctoral students have and the expectations that are placed upon them, and the different backgrounds and multiple identities that doctoral researchers bring to their studies. This changing landscape means that doctoral students have different challenges to negotiate, and that the guides through the landscape, and the guidance and support for doctoral students needs also to change. Such changes can open up new possibilities for future doctoral education, which, as the SRHE symposium showed, will benefit from productive professional conversations about doctoral pedagogy and its development.     

For more information, please contact Dr Karen Smith, School of Education, University of Hertfordshire, email: k.smith27@herts.ac.uk

References

Anzaldúa, G (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute

Carter, S, Smith, K, & Harrison, N (2021) Working in the borderlands: Critical perspectives on doctoral educationTeaching in Higher Education, 26 (3): 283-292 doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.1911098

Deleuze, G, and Guattari, F (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia London: Continuum

Gravett, K (2021) ‘Disrupting the Doctoral Journey: Re-imagining Doctoral Pedagogies and Temporal Practices in Higher Education’ Teaching in Higher Education 26 (3): 293–305 doi:10.1080/13562517.2020.1853694

Rao, N, Hosein, A & Raaper, R (2021) ‘Doctoral Students Navigating the Borderlands of Academic Teaching in an era of Precarity’ Teaching in Higher Education 26 (3): 454–470 doi:10.1080/13562517.2021.1892058 

Rolf, HG (2021) ‘Navigating Power in Doctoral Publishing: A Data Feminist Approach’ Teaching in Higher Education 26 (3): 488–507 doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.1892059


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What comes next after Covid 19 in re-setting doctoral education?

by Rosemary Deem

Like many other aspects of higher education teaching, supervising and research worldwide, doctoral education in higher education institutions (HEIs) has been massively affected by the pandemic. The effects include campus closures and lost experimental and fieldwork data, rapid transition to online supervision and viva defences, cancelled or online conferences hampering networking, lack of wellbeing, study progress being hampered by lack of suitable non-campus work spaces, home schooling children and poor or no internet connectivity (Else, 2021 ; European University Association Council for Doctoral Education, 2020 ; Jackman et al, 2021; Levine et al, 2021). As we are still in the throes of the pandemic at the time of writing, it is difficult to know whether some of the changes made in haste to doctoral education, such as remote supervision and examinations, will be permanent or not. Some adaptations, such as online seminars and conferences and a move away from physical international mobility to blended or virtual mobility, will probably continue, as they permit international participation without high costs or environmental damage. The legacy for doctoral researchers caught up in the Coronavirus chaos will certainly live on for quite a while, although hopefully over time the shock of the impact of lockdowns, working from home and universities being very selective over who gets an extension or extra funding may gradually fade.  However, for those with their eye on future academic jobs, the precarity regime of HE posts remains sadly intact in many HE systems (Deem, 2021b). The availability of jobs outside academe has also been affected by the pandemic, as countries struggle to manage politics, promote public health and provide support for the business, public and third sectors.

The experience of doing a doctorate in times of Covid-19 has brought both good and less good elements, from acquiring more resilience and online learning skills to experiencing poverty, poor mental health and having a lack of motivation to finish writing a thesis.  Some supervisors have also struggled to support their doctoral researchers alongside other students and their own research, particularly where HEIs have indicated that doctoral education is not a pandemic priority, a short sighted view sometimes brought about by difficult HEI financial situations and recruitment uncertainty. Despite the avalanche of articles about the Covid-related impact on doctoral education and doctoral researchers submitted to journals during 2020 and 2021, there are still many things we  know less about, such as: how part-time doctoral researchers have fared compared with full-time candidates; how STEM and Arts/Humanities/Social Sciences candidates compare in the obstacles they face; or how the doctoral research experiences of women and people of colour differ from those of men or white doctoral candidates. There has been relatively little investigation about how supervisors have been affected by remote supervision and the pandemic (UK Council for Graduate Education, 2021) compared with the literature on the effects on students. It is also hard to tell at this point whether the percentage of doctoral theses referred for further work, or even failed, has changed, as many of those due to submit in 2020-21 have deferred or interrupted their studies and have not yet been examined. There has been some advice offered to institutions on this (Houston & Halliday, 2021 ) but in quite a few countries, national regulations on doctoral study don’t make flexibility in doctoral submission and examination very easy.

We are also beginning to see some big differences in the coping strategies of HEIs. It appears that countries with high degrees of marketisation in their HE systems, and with a significant dependence on international students for income, have not fared particularly well under Covid (Drayton and Waltmann, 2020b ; Le, 2021; Marinoni, Hillijge, and Jensen, 2020 ; Startz, 2020 ), whereas countries with low degrees of marketisation or with previous experience of campus lockdowns, such as in the SARS epidemic, did better (Jung, Horta, & Postiglione, 2020). Furthermore, doctoral education was already in something of a crisis before Covid, with a long running critique of its failings, ranging across: so-called ‘overproduction’ of doctoral graduates relative to academic jobs (Nerad, 2020); completion and dropout rates; access to doctoral programmes for applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds; and quality of doctorates and future employment prospects. The state of mental health amongst doctoral researchers is also now a common concern in many contexts (Deem, 2020a; Hazell et al, 2020; Levecque et al, 2017).  However, tackling all these challenges is not straightforward and there is a tendency to tackle each problem on its own in a single HE system or HEI, without thinking how each different challenge relates to all the others.  

What is needed post-pandemic (assuming the world gets there) is a concerted attempt to undertake, certainly at the institutional level, a more holistic approach, but also an approach which relates to the grassroots as well as institutional hierarchies. Such an approach has already been found to be effective in relation to schemes for increasing the numbers of women who get promoted to full professor (Morley, 2013). This initiative focuses first on looking at and fully supporting the people involved (doctoral researchers and supervisors) whilst ensuring their diversity and wide access to doctoral education for those who could benefit from it. Organisational factors are also important, such as valuing doctoral candidates’ academic and social contribution for its own sake, not as a source of cheap research and teaching labour, making doctoral researchers more visible and more important in their institutions, and ensuring organisational processes and procedures reflect this,. Joined-up change also means taking on board issues related to the kinds of knowledge that are valued in doctoral theses: whether that knowledge is from the global north or south; whether it is interdisciplinary or framed in a single discipline; which language or culture it relates to; and encouraging knowledge which values methodological or empirical foci as much as theoretical knowledge, irrespective of whether or not knowledge has immediate economic or social impact. Such an approach, aligned to a clear strategy and implementation process, could in time transform how doctoral education operates, to everyone’s benefit. This is not a change programme for the faint-hearted but unless something like this is adopted, long after the pandemic is over we will still be talking about doctoral crises and the challenges to be addressed, whilst failing to take a more holistic lens to transforming doctoral education than has so far been the norm in many HE systems and HEIs.  We owe it to our current and future doctoral researchers to attempt to develop a more humanistic and more equality-based approach to doctoral study after the rigours of the Corona virus outbreak.    

SRHE Fellow Rosemary Deem OBE is Emerita Professor of Higher Education Management and Doctoral School Senior Research Fellow, Royal Holloway (University of London), UK. She was the first woman to chair the UK Council for Graduate Education and was a member of three UK Research Assessment Exercise Sub-Panels on Education (1996, 2001, 2008).  An Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences since 2006, she is a co-editor of Higher Education (Springer) since 2013, a member of the Peer Review College of the European Science Foundation and a co-convenor of the Higher Education Network in the European Educational Research Association

References (not embedded via URLs)

Deem, R (2020a) ‘Rethinking doctoral education: university purposes, academic cultures, mental health and the public good’ in Cardoso, S, Tavares, O, Sin, C and Carvalho, T (eds), Structural and Institutional Transformations in doctoral education: social, political and student expectations (pp. 13-42). Cham, Switzerland Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature

Deem, R (2021b) ‘The early stage academic and the contemporary university: communities of practice meet managerialism?’ in Sarrico, C, Rosa de Pires, MJ and Carvalho, T (eds), Handbook on Managing Academics Cheltenham Edward Elgar

Marinoni, G., Hillijge, V. t. L., & Jensen, T. (2020 ). The Impact of Covid on higher education around the world:  IAU Global Survey Paris International Association of Universities

Morley, L. (2013). Women and Higher Education Leadership: Absences and Aspirations.

Nerad, M. (2020). Doctoral Education Worldwide:  Three decades of change In M. M. Yudkevich, P. G. Altbach, & H. de Wit (Eds.), Trends and Issues in Doctoral Education Worldwide: A Global Perspective (pp. 33-52). London and Thousand Oaks, California Sage.


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Support for doctoral candidates during the pandemic at the University of Melbourne

by Ai Tam Le

This blog is based on the author’s contribution to a special issue of Studies in Higher Education published online in January 2021. The special issue includes a range of commissioned articles from academics worldwide about their  experiences of Covid19 restrictions in 2020.   Many of the authors featured in the Special issue will be speaking about their contributions at the SRHE Webinar being held on 27 January 2021.

There is little doubt that doing a PhD can be hard; doing a PhD during a pandemic certainly makes it harder. But the diversity of PhD projects, the resources required to undertake them, and the differences in our situations mean that each PhD candidate has faced a rather different set of challenges and experienced varying degrees of disruption due to the pandemic. In my university, the University of Melbourne (henceforth the university), for some students, the pandemic has made little impact on their progress; for others, however, the lack of access to lab facilities or fieldwork means that their project came to a halt.

In a recent paper for a Special Issue of the Studies in Higher Education, I took a closer look at the support provided to doctoral candidates at the university and discussed some of the arising issues. In this blog, I summarise the situation and highlight two major issues with the university’s approach to supporting doctoral students.

University’s support and graduate researchers’ Open Letter

When the pandemic was escalating in March 2020, alongside advising students to work from home, the university gradually introduced different support measures in terms of finance (emergency funds), psychological well-being (counselling services) and candidature (extension of candidature and stipend). Yet the following months saw a rising uneasy sentiment among a group of graduate researchers (masters and doctoral candidates) at the university who then drafted and sent an Open Letter to the university outlining their requests for ‘real’ support. The letter has been signed by more than 640 graduate researchers and academics.

What was requested in the letter? Two major requests were put forward: a special category of leave (a period of non-active enrolment) for reasons related to COVID-19; and a six-month universal extension for all students. Six months was requested because, I suppose, there was an expectation at the beginning of the pandemic that it would take at least six months to be back to ‘normal’. (The reality has proven that this expectation was overly optimistic.) Similarly, the Graduate Student Association at the university at first advocated for three-month universal extensions and later ‘the commitment to six-month extensions as standard or more where needed’.

The university did not respond – and has not, according to my understanding, officially responded –  to the Open Letter; however, their support measures have addressed these concerns to a large extent. Specifically, a new category of leave was created to support students who were not able to continue their research due to the pandemic. Extension of stipend from 3 to 3.5 years was automatically granted to students at a certain stage of their candidature*.  Stipend beyond 3.5 years (up to 26 weeks of extension) can also be requested given that the student can provide sufficient documents to support their case.

The ‘hidden’ issues

It is fair to say that, overall, these measures have accommodated the needs of most students. But there are some ‘hidden’ issues as highlighted below.

First, the university’s ‘business-as-usual’ expectation could create undue pressure for doctoral students. While the university’s commitment to supporting its students to make progress was well-intentioned, the expectation of ‘business-as-usual’ in an unusual time could be misinterpreted as a pressure to work, which was not possible for some students. Failing this expectation can be seen as a sign of weakness by the students, hence creating further stress.

Second, the application process for leave or extension was deemed as bureaucratic by some students. In the application, a student must demonstrate the ‘exceptional circumstance’ under which their research has been disrupted. Some students argued that the existence of the pandemic itself constituted an ‘exceptional circumstance’ that would qualify all students for leave or universal extension. The requirement to demonstrate ‘exceptional circumstance’ was deemed as just another layer of documentation and reporting. Moreover, some changes and disruptions can be documented and quantified such as days of lacking access to lab or fieldwork; other disruptions are not quantifiable such as lack of appropriate workspace or psychological stress due to isolation and the pandemic threat. For example, it would be challenging to quantify and document the loss of productivity due to sitting on a dining chair instead of an ergonomic chair, or due to distractions caused by homeschooling kids. There could be students falling through the cracks by not being able to accumulate ‘sufficient’ documents to support their case for leave or extension.

Looking back, these issues were hidden – acquired by inside knowledge and detail – and seemed trivial compared to the support provided; they can easily be forgotten as time goes by. With the advantage of hindsight, it is now easier to make sense of the contestation between the university’s support and the students’ demands. On the one hand, constrained by financial resources, mostly due to the loss of revenues from international students, the university had to strike a balance between, among other things, organisational survival and doctoral students’ needs. The mechanisms set up – bureaucratic as they could be – were necessary for allocating limited resources for those deemed most in need. On the other hand, research students did not know what situation they were getting into and how or when they were getting out of it, so that any barrier to getting support – regardless of how small it was – added to the existing chaos and would seem significant to the students.

Concluding thoughts

Even though the situation has improved in Australia and some parts of the world, the pandemic is not over yet. No one can confidently say when things are going back to ‘normal’ and how that ‘normal’ would look like. As many PhD candidates are still unable to go back to campus and go about conducting their daily business, the question of how effective these supports are in the long-term remains open.

Moreover, given that research students make a significant contribution to research and development in Australia (ABS 2020), there is a need for further monitoring and reporting on how research students have been affected by the pandemic. This would provide a nuanced understanding of the impact of the pandemic on research workforce capacity in Australia.

*In a recent announcement, the extension has reverted to standard procedures through which students must have approval from their supervisory committee instead of being granted automatically.

Ai Tam Le is a PhD candidate at the Melbourne Centre for the Study in Higher Education and Melbourne Graduate School of Education (University of Melbourne, Australia). Her PhD project explores aspiring academics’ understanding of the academic profession in Australia. She is a contributor to the Early Career Researchers in Higher Education Blog (echer.org). She tweets @aitamlp.


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Supervising and assessing ‘the new generation of researchers’: the power of posing questions and sharing perspectives

by Bing Lu

The SRHE event on doctoral supervision and assessment, followed by a celebratory book launch, in February this year had at first struck me as pretty ambitious. The description on the website said that, as members of the research community, we should strive to undertake new research through supervising and assessing ‘the new generation of researchers’. With doctoral supervision being my own doctoral research field, I cannot help contemplating whether our research community has already moved into a new generation. How does this ‘new generation of researchers’ differ from the older generation in terms of research interests when they first embark the research journey? And how much intellectual tradition we should keep in such a fast expanding community which is increasingly marked by globalization and individuality? With this curiosity in mind, I arranged my trip to London, hoping to find answers from the presenters and other attending researchers.

The six speakers were authors of the six newly published books in the Success in Research series. Referred to as being ‘interactive and practical’, these publications aim to add value to doctoral education, and cover six themes: inspiring doctoral researchers, collaboration and engagement, seeking funding, publishing, mentoring, as well as doctoral assessment and supervision. The event was attended by a wide range of researchers coming from different universities, experienced and novice supervisors, research developers, recently graduated doctoral students, and postgraduate students who are undertaking doctoral studies like myself. It was a pretty fun and productive day led by the positive and energetic ‘lady gang’, as Pam Denicolo from University of Surrey amusingly called themselves.

As the first presenter, Pam articulated ‘inspiring’, a major theme that would go through the whole session. By inviting the audience to think over the question, ‘what is inspiring supervision?’, she reminded supervisors and researchers of proactive participation in the research community by doing things like deliberately creating ‘lucky opportunities’, and reflecting on actions that make supervising/being supervised enjoyable. Julie Reeves, a research developer from University of Southampton, then presented on the value of collaboration and engagement. We were invited again to reflect and discuss with other members the nominal value of inspiring collaboration and why it matters in research supervision. It was a fun-filled experience of listening to others and sharing my own views with them in the group discussion. Also I noticed how effectively the first two presenters led us to think by deliberately posing reflective questions and encouraging us to talk. By doing so, I felt the boundary between presenters and audience was blurred, as we all contributed to each theme by listing our ideas on posters, with many of them indeed being ‘inspiring’.

The four presenters in the afternoon also demonstrated their topics with the same strategy, posing enlightening questions and prompting original thoughts. Marcela Acuna Rivera, research development manager, from Royal Holloway, University of London contributed a practical speech on seeking funding. Her presentation kindly provided a nuts-and-bolts guide navigating research funding with an emphasis on preparing the application, and reminded us why having a holistic view of the research landscape matters so much. The presentation up next was on publication, given by Dawn Duke from University of Surrey. She offered 10 top tips regarding publication strategies, and posed powerful questions about why impact matters in research community and who cares/should care about one’s own research. Funding and publication are always valued and even prioritised in research community, and sometimes the two issues cause anxiety among novice researchers. The two speakers presented both topics in a fun and productive way, pinpointing the significance of being confident and prepared for success.

Mentoring in the research community is a field I had known less about before, but was able to gain more understanding thanks to the fifth speaker, Alison Yeung, from University of Surrey. As an experienced mentor in helping postgraduates with writing skills, Alison explained the relationship between mentor and mentee, narrated her own stories of mentoring students, and invited us to think over the value of mentoring in assisting supervision. Sue Starbuck, from Royal Holloway, University of London contributed the wrap-up speech on doctoral assessment. She declared that doctoral assessment should be inspiring and empowering, and invited us to work in groups reflecting on the factors and motivators stimulating us to improve productivity in the assessment process. Again it was a quite fun discussion.

Have the questions that I posed at the beginning of this post been answered? I think yes. The global research community is fast expanding and changing today, and the rate is being accelerated by different facilitators like technology and increasingly professional training support. Having said that, in the doctoral education, as the main site for cultivating modern researchers and an area of practice for a large number of researchers/supervisors, there still exist essential traditions that can be followed. These traditions are people-oriented, characterized by inventiveness, curiosity and everlasting pursuit of answers. This productive event again verified the power of posing questions and sharing perspectives as a strong support to any volatile situation in the research community.

SRHE member Bing Lu (Warwick) is a second-year doctoral researcher from Education Studies, investigating how academics who have returned after a doctorate abroad conduct doctoral supervision in their home countries. Twitter @BingluAlice


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Boundaries, Buddies, and Benevolent Dictators within the Ecology of Doctoral Study

by Kay Guccione and Søren Bengtsen

In March we co-delivered a seminar at SRHE based on our complementary research studies into doctoral support, supervision, and relationships. In recognition that very many and varied players contribute to supporting doctoral researchers along the way, we spoke to the idea of the ‘Ecology’ of doctoral study. Through both of our research and practice areas, we raise issues of:

Boundaries, for example: Who is responsible for which aspects of doctoral development? Continue reading →