I’m a bit late posting this week. This is largely down to running a writing workshop and then trying to do all the catching up. But since the workshop I’ve had a nagging wondering … Let me explain.

This recent writing workshop had a big emphasis on literatures work. The ‘literatures chapter’ is a key place where doctoral researchers have to write evaluatively and authoritatively. And that’s hard. There’s a strong temptation to put in everything, rather than a selection relevant to the thesis. And to write the chapter (or sections) as a list of summaries organised around major themes. This is what Barbara and I call the laundry list.  The laundry list is easily recognised by the he said he said she said they said sentence beginnings.

Of course, listing summaries in chunks is often a necessary step in literatures work. But it’s the step before you get to writing the literatures draft.( I have lots of posts on literatures work.)

Anyway to get to the point. In Day One of the workshop I gave out three papers aboutand asked people to use my skimming approach – read the title, abstract, introduction and conclusion and, if there is time, one other part – usually the methods. I used a  jigsaw group strategy (everyone only reads one paper, but then shares). I then asked people to discuss how the papers might fit together – what did they have in common?

I typically use papers about the doctoral experience in this exercise, with two of the papers speaking to each other relatively easily, but one being a less obvious fit.  The papers I used this time were:

These are all good reads and fairly generally available.

This skim reading exercise is designed to do three things at once – to offer a way to get the gist of a paper quickly, to engage with content that is relevant to participants’ doctoral experiences and then to synthesise the three papers and to find an angle on them. As is usual, different table groups in this workshop saw different ways to bring the papers together, and that is a fourth ‘lesson’ – there are often multiple possibilities for bringing literatures into conversation.

And as is generally the case with this exercise, these workshop participants found the content of the papers as interesting and useful as the reading strategy itself. In particular, it was reassuring that other people besides themselves experienced challenges, uncertainties and tensions in the process. It was helpful to know that they weren’t the only ones feeling they were a bit at sea. It was reassuring to read and hear that this was all part of hard learning. It was helpful to know that intellectual understandings and elegant writing don’t happen at the first go but emerge and evolve.

The exercise seemed to work well. But the activity led me to my current wondering. How much and how often do doctoral researchers get into the literatures about the doctoral experience ?

Higher education research is a growing field with  a number of journals, learned societies and conferences. The higher ed research covers a range of concerns, including doctorates. But I’m speculating that if you are not actually researching higher education, you perhaps don’t encounter these literatures. And perhaps your supervisors don’t either.

This seems a real pity to me. How many doctoral researchers are missing out on research that directly addresses their everyday experiences  – not only its diversities and complexities but also some of the often experienced emotions, difficulties and elations? I know there are supervisors and research developers who do use the higher ed research and communicate it, but maybe more could be done and more systematically…

If I’m right, and I suspect I am, then maybe it’s particularly grad schools that could do more – there is so much good and useful stuff out there which would/could really inform and support doctoral researchers. How about more time on steering doctoral researchers to this body of work and using it as conversation starters and in courses?