Blaming the graduate student

A new article in University Affairs highlights the pervasive deficit model that many faculty at universities implicitly buy into when it comes to graduate student failure.

You can find the article here:

http://ww.universityaffairs.ca/opinion/speculative-diction/failure-of-graduate-education-is-no-joke/?c=1#comments

Managing writing tension in the supervision relationship

Another useful blog from ‘Doctoral Writing SIG’. I’ve had several discussions with students recently about student/supervisor tensions. This post has a unique approach to the issue.

DoctoralWriting

By Susan Carter

We’ve had a useful series of posts on technology for doctoral writing, but this post turns from the technical to the social. Human beings have their own complexities. It isn’t uncommon for tension to arise between doctoral students and their supervisors over the writing processes.

Commonly this occurs when supervision crosses different cultural protocols for talking across hierarchies. Gender, age, experience—even things like whether both have children or not—can cause tensions. Laurie Finke puts it neatly: “Every utterance is always inhabited by the voice of the ‘other,’ or of many others, because the interests of race, class, gender, ethnicity, age, and any number of other related ‘accents’ intersect each utterance” (Finke, 1992: 13).

Here, though, I focus not on social distinctions, but on difference in approach to practice. I’m drawing on material I have developed for supervisors teams who want support with managing the relationship…

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Two new papers to share

Hi everyone

Just a quick note to post these two papers.

Both of them will be published soon by Brill in an edited collection that I co-edited with Cally Guerin from the University of Adelaide.  I thoroughly enjoyed working with Cally and we were able to form a friendship through Skype and emails while working on this manuscript.

This process highlights what I enjoy most about academic work.  All the authors were collegial, helpful and committed to the book.  Everyone worked together really well.  The editorial review and production process also went smoothly and was conducted very professionally with both the editors and the publishers doing all they could to help us along.   (This is proof that academic writing and review work doesn’t have to be painful!)

Anyway – here are the two papers.  The first is the introduction to the book where we use memes as an entry point.The second is a paper from a project on graduate research writing that I’ve been working on with colleagues and it’s about using visual tools (mind-maps, sketching) as a way of thinking through research before writing.

Brill I.1_BadenhorstGuerin_completed

Brill V.1_Badenhorst_completed