Accompanying The Routledge Doctoral Student’s Companion this book examines what it means to be a doctoral student in education and the social sciences, providing a guide for those supervising students. Exploring the key role and pedagogical challenges that face supervisors in students’ personal development, the contributors outline the research capabilities which are essential for confidence, quality and success in doctorate level research. Providing guidance about helpful resources and methodological support, the chapters: frame important questions within the history of debates act as a road map through international literatures make suggestions for good practice raise important questions and provide answers to key pedagogical issues provide advice on enabling students’ scholarly careers and identities. While there is no one solution to ideal supervision, this wide-ranging text offers resources that will help supervisors develop their own personal approach to supervision. Ideal for all supervisors whether assisting part-time of full-time students, it is also highly suitable for helping academics to support international students who confront Western doctoral traditions and academic cultures, helping both supervisor and student to understand why things are as they are.

This book places at its centre the interwoven questions of what it means to be a doctoral student in the social sciences, what is involved in becoming and being a researcher and clearly shows how the role of the supervisor is key to the student's personal development.

Helping Doctoral Students Write offers a proven approach to effective doctoral writing. By treating research as writing and writing as research, the authors offer pedagogical strategies for doctoral supervisors that will assist the production of well-argued and lively dissertations. It is clear that many doctoral candidates find research writing complicated and difficult, but the advice they receive often glosses over the complexities of writing and/or locates the problem in the writer. Kamler and Thomson provide a highly effective framework for scholarly work that is located in personal, institutional and cultural contexts. The pedagogical approach developed in the book is based on the notion of writing as a social practice. This approach allows supervisors to think of doctoral writers as novices who need to learn new ways with words as they enter the discursive practices of scholarly communities. This involves learning sophisticated writing practices with specific sets of conventions and textual characteristics. The authors offer supervisors practical advice on helping with commonly encountered writing tasks such as the proposal, the journal abstract, the literature review and constructing the dissertation argument. The first edition of this book has helped many academics and thousands of research students produce better written material. Now fully updated the second edition includes: Examples from a broader range of academic disciplines A new chapter on writing from the thesis for peer reviewed journals More advice on reading and note taking, performance and conferences, Further information on developing a personal academic writing style, and Advice on the use of social media (blogs, tweets and wikis) to create trans-disciplinary and trans-national networks and conversations. Their discussion of the complexities of forming a scholarly identity is illustrated throughout by stories and writings of actual doctoral students. In conclusion, they present a persuasive and proven argument that universities must move away from simply auditing supervision to supporting the development of scholarly research communities. Any supervisor keen to help their students develop as academics will find the ideas and practical solutions presented in this book fascinating and insightful reading.

Recognising that graduate supervisory practice is not an abstracted academic pursuit, but an activity that is subjectively bounded by content and context, impacted by the experiences and beliefs of supervisee and supervisor, this text explores the unique dynamics of graduate supervision in the Global South, as perceived and experienced by students and academics within those same contexts. Bringing together contributions which reflect a rich diversity of perspectives on supervisory practices at regional universities in the Caribbean and South Pacific, Graduate Research Supervision in the Developing World explores how supervisors navigate unscripted supervisory terrain; contextualise supervisory best practices; establish roles and relationships, and work to understand supervisees’ needs. By highlighting the effect on graduate supervision of complex sociocultural interplay and the relationship between learning environments and student success, contributors look to locate best practices through analyses of stories of success and failure. As the contributors demonstrate, there is a need to restructure the standardised operation of graduate supervision across diverse faculties. This text will be of great interest to graduate supervisors and their supervisees as well as scholars in the fields of continuing professional development and higher education, in international and comparative education and Sociology of Education.

In the contemporary world it is clear that the need to study beyond Masters Level is increasing in importance for a wide range of practitioners in diverse professional settings. Students across the world are choosing doctorates not only to become career academics, but to go beyond the academic arena, in order to make a personal and educational, as well as an economic investment, in their workplace careers and their lives. However for many doctoral students, both full-time and part-time, navigating the literature and key issues surrounding doctoral research can often be a challenge. Bringing together contributions from key names in the international education arena, The Routledge Doctoral Student’s Companion is a comprehensive guide to the literature surrounding doctorates, bringing together questions, challenges and solutions normally scattered over a wide range of texts. Accessible and wide-ranging, it covers all doctoral students need to know about: what doctoral education means in contemporary practice forming an identity and knowledge as a doctoral student the big questions which run throughout doctoral practice becoming a researcher the skills needed to conduct research integrating oneself into a scholarly community. Offering an extensive and rounded guide to undertaking doctoral research in a single volume, this book is essential reading for all full-time and part-time doctoral students in education and related disciplines.

The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts is a major collection of new writings on research in the creative and performing arts by leading authorities from around the world. It provides theoretical and practical approaches to identifying, structuring and resolving some of the key issues in the debate about the nature of research in the arts which have surfaced during the establishment of this subject over the last decade. Contributions are located in the contemporary intellectual environment of research in the arts, and more widely in the universities, in the strategic and political environment of national research funding, and in the international environment of trans-national cooperation and communication. The book is divided into three principal sections – Foundations, Voices and Contexts – each with an introduction from the editors highlighting the main issues, agreements and debates in each section. The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts addresses a wide variety of concepts and issues, including: the diversity of views on what constitutes arts-based research and scholarship, what it should be, and its potential contribution the trans-national communication difficulties arising from terminological and ontological differences in arts-based research traditional and non-traditional concepts of knowledge, their relationship to professional practice, and their outcomes and audiences a consideration of the role of written, spoken and artefact-based languages in the formation and communication of understandings. This comprehensive collection makes an original and significant contribution to the field of arts-based research by setting down a framework for addressing these, and other, topical issues. It will be essential reading for research managers and policy-makers in research councils and universities, as well as individual researchers, research supervisors and doctoral candidates.

This book addresses a set of interlocking and overlapping big questions that ‘sit’ behind the plethora of doctoral advice texts and run through the practice of knowledge/identity work.