A task-based approach to doctoral education
Start date
February 2024End date
October 2024Overview
Recent research has highlighted the changing nature of doctoral education, which is viewed as a 'practice' within research, with little recognition of the role of pedagogy, the method and practice of teaching. The changing landscape of doctoral education has also had an impact on supervisors who need guidance on how to best support their doctoral students.
This ESRC IAA funded project focused on this need for doctoral education to be planned, intentional, and scaffolded by purposeful tasks. Dr Marion Heron along with her partners will work with doctoral students, to co-construct a set of pedagogic principles and a series of resources for doctoral education, evaluating their impact on supervisors and students. The resources will be organised into several broad themes encompassing: developing researcher identity, understanding the disciplinary context, understanding doctoral literacies and working with genres - and will be made available online through open access.
Team
Principal Investigator
Dr Marion Heron
Associate Professor in Educational Linguistics
Biography
I joined the Department of Higher Education in January 2017. I am responsible for overseeing and supporting the Surrey Excellence in Teaching (SET) Framework, as well as contributing to the MA in Higher Education and Continuing Professional Development (CPD) workshops and sessions. Prior to this I was Senior Lecturer in TESOL in the Sheffield Institute of Education at Sheffield Hallam University, teaching both undergraduate and postgraduate modules in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), Second Language Acquisition, Research, and English for Academic Purposes (EAP). From 2009 - 2015 I worked as a lecturer at Zayed University, Dubai where I taught courses in the Department of English and Writing Studies and the Department of Education. From 1990 - 2009 I taught at Bilkent University, Ankara, in the School of English Language and the Graduate School of Education, working with pre-service English language teacher trainees.My doctoral research focused on the construction of teaching knowledge in pre-service trainees. This interest in the application of sociocultural theory to different learning contexts continues to be my main area of scholarly work. See the section on Research for a list of current research areas.
Co-Investigator
Gill Adams
Reader in Education, Sheffield Hallam University
Helen Donaghue
Senior Lecturer, Queen Margaret University
Lisa McGrath
Associate Professor, Sheffield Hallam University
Planned Impact
The team will co-construct with doctoral students a series of tasks and guidelines to be used in doctoral supervision. Tasks will focus on self regulation, disciplinary acculturation, development of researcher identity, understanding genre in reading and writing.
The resources will be downloadable across the websites of all three partner institutions, open access, for a period of five years.
The impact of the resources will be evaluated through a survey, interviews with doctoral supervisors, and focus groups with doctoral students in all three institutions, and will feed into a final report. The aim will be to elicit feedback from supervisors and doctoral students from a range of disciplines to evaluate the utility of the task-based approach.
Impact will be evidenced in the following ways:
Conceptual: There will be awareness amongst doctoral supervisors of the relevance of a pedagogic approach to doctoral education including a need for focused tasks.
Capacity building: Doctoral students will develop skills of materials design and experience of a co-constructed project working with doctoral supervisors.
Instrumental: There will be some uptake of the Tasks to support doctoral education which will evidence a change in pedagogic approaches to doctoral education.
Networks and connectivity: The investigators in the 3 institutions will develop closer working relationships and research / practice networks for further developments and iterations of this current project e.g. improve and enhance the tasks to support doctoral education.
Success will have been achieved if the project provides the researchers with greater insights into the needs of supervisors and students in terms of the tasks, guidance and resources needed to support doctoral education. This would inform further iterations of the project and the materials.