Abstracts
Abstract
En route to their final thesis examinations, doctoral students face continuous challenges. These include institutional, instructional, personal, and social issues (Cotterall, 2011). These challenges can cause students to question their competency and ability to complete their programmes, despite any previous academic successes. Developing effective and productive writing habits may be the most demanding task facing research students. Academic writing is particularly challenging where students experience conflicts between their developing writer identities (Burgess & Ivanič, 2010) and the duties or responsibilities related to their lives outside the research programme: as carers; parents; or as new arrivals unfamiliar with the language and cultural conventions of a country or institution. We draw on Lave and Wenger’s (1991) description of Communities of Practice to outline the collaborative efforts undertaken by two doctoral students when developing their academic writing skills and writer identities. Both identify as immigrants to Australia: one has English as a second language; the other has returned to university (in a new country) after a 30-year hiatus. Developing academic writing identities has involved creating an English-speaking identity/self to overcome second language and cultural differences as well as to manage extensive challenges in terms of negotiation and navigation of academic writing practice genres. Although supervisors provide writing development guidelines, in this paper we focus on the nurturing support provided via the student community to overcome the different challenges presented during the PhD journey. Adopting an auto-ethnographical approach, we outline our individual challenges when developing writing identities and address the ways in which creating a collaborative support group has helped us improve writing style and productivity. It is in these circumstances – where individual needs extend beyond the readily available resources – that a peer-led community of practice can offer the necessary support and collaborative activities to enhance the learning experience of all participants. The group dynamics have evolved alongside developing writer identities as the nature of the support required changes over time and with experience. Creating this collaborative community has contributed to the development of wider-ranging linguistic, writing, technological, emotional, and social skills that extend above and beyond the remit of the PhD programme.
Keywords:
- writing identity,
- doctoral student,
- communities of practice
Appendices
Bibliography
- Adams, T. E., & Holman Jones, S. (2008). Autoethnography is queer. In N. Denzin, Y. Lincoln, & L. T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and Indigenous methodologies (pp. 373-389). https://doi.org/10.4135/9781483385686.n18
- Atkinson-Graham, M., Kenney, M., Ladd, K., Murray, C., & Simmonds, E. (2015). Care in context: Becoming a STS researcher. Social Studies of Science, 45(5), 738-748. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312715600277
- Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control, and identity: Theory, research, critique, revised edition (Revised ed.). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
- Burgess, A., & Ivanič, R. (2010). Writing and being written: Issues of identity across timescales. Written Communication, 27(2), 228-255. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088310363447
- Cotterall, S. (2011). Doctoral students writing: where's the pedagogy? Teaching in Higher Education, 16(4), 413-425. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2011.560381
- Cotterall, S. (2013). More than just a brain: Emotions and the doctoral experience. Higher Education Research and Development, 32(2), 174-187. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2012.680017
- Danzak, R. (2020). Bilingual gifted and talented students’ expository writing: Exploring academic language features in English and Spanish. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 43(4), 405-431. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162353220956729
- Denzin, N. K. (1997). Interpretive ethnography: Ethnographic practices for the 21st century. Sage.
- Denzin, N. K. (2006). Analytic autoethnography, or déjá vu all over again. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. 35(4), 419–428. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241606286985
- Ellis, C., & Adams, E. (2014). The purposes, practices, and principles of autoethnographic research. Oxford University Press.
- Fergie, G., Beeke, S., McKenna, C., & Creme, P. (2011). "It's a Lonely Walk": Supporting postgraduate researchers through writing. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 23(2), 236-245. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ946149
- FitzPatrick, B., Chong, M., Tuff, J., Jamil, S., Al Hariri, K., Stocks, T., & Cumby, C. (2021). PhD students learning the process of academic writing: The role of the rhetorical rectangle. Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie, 31, 136-162. http://journals.sfu.ca/dwr
- Fleming, S., & McKee, G. (2005). The mature student question. Nurse Education Today, 25(3), 230-237. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2005.01.006
- Gallardo, M., & Gindidis, M. (2020). Emotional landscapes of living, learning, and teaching: A lens within, from learner to teacher-researcher. The Qualitative Report, 25(2), 291-305. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4039&context=tqr
- Gonçalves, L., Parker, M., Luguetti, C., & Carbinatto, M. (2021). ‘We united to defend ourselves and face our struggles’: nurturing a physical education teachers’ community of practice in a precarious context. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1080/17408989.2021.1891212
- Holman Jones, S. (2005). Autoethnography: Making the personal political. In N.K.Denzin & Y.S.Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 763–791). Sage.
- Hyland, K., & Jiang, F. (2017). Is academic writing becoming more informal? English for Specific Purposes, 45, 40-51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2016.09.001
- Ingram, S. (1998). Gender modes of collaboration in engineering: Technical communication as a social process. Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie, 14(1), 21-40.
- Ivanič, R. (1998). Writing and identity: The discoursal construction of identity in academic writing. John Benjamins.
- Jackson, C. (2019). Data Snapshot 2019. Universities Australia. Retrieved November 09, 2021 from https://www.universitiesaustralia.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Data-snapshot-2019-FINAL.pdf
- Kaufhold, K. (2015). Conventions in postgraduate academic writing: European students' negotiations of prior writing experience at an English speaking university. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 20, 125-134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2015.08.007
- Kelleher, F. (2011). Women and the teaching profession. UNESCO. Retrieved June 23, 2021 from http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/FIELD/Brussels/pdf/women%20and%20the%20teaching%20profession.pdf
- Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
- Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (2016). Communities of practice (Lave and Wenger). Retrieved October 10, 2021 from https://www.learning-theories.com/communities-of-practice-lave-and-wenger.html
- Lee, A., & Williams, C. (1999). Forged in fire’: Narratives of trauma in PhD supervision pedagogy. Southern Review, 32(1), 6-26.
- McGrath, K. F., & Van Bergen, P. (2017). Are male teachers headed for extinction? The 50-year decline of male teachers in Australia. Economics of Education Review, 60, 159-167. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2017.08.003
- Monash University. (2021). Monash at a glance. Retrieved December 01, 2021 from https://www.monash.edu/about/who/glance
- Oliver, R., Vanderford, S., & Grote, E. (2012). Evidence of English language proficiency and academic achievement of non-English-speaking background students. Higher Education Research and Development, 31(4), 541-555. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2011.653958
- Poe, M. (2022, in press). Learning to unlearn the teaching and assessment of academic writing. Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie, 32(2022).
- Pokhrel, S., & Chhetri, R. (2021). A literature review on impact of COVID-19 pandemic on teaching and learning. Higher Education for the Future, 8(1), 133-141. https://doi.org/10.1177/2347631120983481
- Power, K. (2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the care burden of women and families. Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 16(1), 67-73. https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2020.1776561
- Ramsay, S., Jones, E., & Barker, M. (2006). Relationship between adjustment and support types: Young and mature-aged local and international first year university students. Higher Education, 54(2), 247-265. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-006-9001-0
- Spry, T. (2006). A “performative-I” copresence: Embodying the ethnographic turn in performance and the performative turn in ethnography. Text and Performance Quarterly, 26(4), 339–346. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462930600828790
- Stouck, J., & Walter, L. (2020). Graduate transitions: Canadian master’s and PhD writing experiences. Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie, 30, 264-289. http://journals.sfu.ca/cjsdw
- Torka, M. (2020). Change and continuity in Australian doctoral education. Australian Universities Review, 62, 69-82. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1267338.pdf
- Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS). (2021). Mature students’ guide. Retrieved December 09, 2021 from https://www.ucas.com/file/35436/download?token=2Q6wiw-L
- University Rankings. (2015-2021). International student university enrolment numbers. Retrieved November 30, 2021 from https://www.universityrankings.com.au/international-student-numbers/
- Wenger, R. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and idntity. Cambridge University Press.
- Whatman, S. (2017). Establishing online communities of practice: The case of a virtual sports coaching community. In L. Rowan & P. Grootenboer (Eds.), Student engagement and educational rapport in higher education (pp. 45-65). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46034-5