A task-based approach to doctoral education: Designing a toolkit for PhD students and supervisors
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 has worked 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 resourceshave been organised into several broad themes encompassing: developing researcher identity, understanding the disciplinary context, understanding doctoral literacies and working with genres - and are 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
Outputs
Watch our video here on how to use the toolkit
Tasks for Doctoral Education Toolkit Introduction Video
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Impact Outcomes
- The team have co-constructed a series of tasks and guidelines with doctoral students, to be used in doctoral supervision. Tasks focus on self regulation, disciplinary acculturation, development of researcher identity, understanding genre in reading and writing.
- The resources are now downloadable across the websites of all three partner institutions, open access, for a period of five years.
- The impact of the resources is being 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 is to elicit feedback from supervisors and doctoral students from a range of disciplines to evaluate the utility of this innovative task-based approach.