Developing Generic Support for Doctoral Students

<p>This multidisciplinary, multi-voiced book looks at the practice and pedagogy of generic, across-campus support for doctoral students. With a global imperative for increased doctoral completions, universities around the world are providing more generic support. This book represents collegial cross-fertilisation focussed on generic pedagogy, provided by contributors who are practitioners working and researching at the pan-disciplinary level which complements supervision. </p><p>In the UK, funding for two weeks annual training in transferable skills for each doctoral scholarship recipient has caused an explosion of such teaching, which is now flourishing elsewhere too; for example, endorsed by the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate in the USA and developed extensively in Australia. Generic doctoral support is expanding, yet is a relatively new kind of teaching, practised extensively only in the last decade and with its own ethical, practical and pedagogical complexities. These raise a number of questions: </p><ul> <p> </p> <li>How is generic support funded and situated within institutions? </li> <p> </p> <li>Should some sessions be compulsory for doctoral students? </li> <p> </p> <li>Where do the boundaries lie between what can be taught generically or left to supervisors as discipline-specific? </li> <p> </p> <li>To what extent is generic work pastoral? </li> <p> </p> <li>What are its main benefits? Its challenges? Its objectives? </li> </ul><p>Over the last two decades supervision has been investigated and theorised as a teaching practice, a discussion this book extends to generic doctoral support. </p><p>This edited book has contributions from a wide range of authors and includes short inset narratives from academic authorities, accumulatively enabling discussion of practice and the establishment of a benchmark for this growing topic.</p> <p>Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction <strong>Part 1</strong> 1. Context 2. Putting Together a Doctoral Skills Programme <strong>Part 2</strong> 3. Responding to Cross-Campus Student Requirements 4. Acknowledging Values, Identity and Equity 5. Generic Support for English as an Additional Language (EAL) students 6. Writing: Intrinsic to Research 7. Writing: Process, Product and Identity Development <strong>Part 3</strong> 8 Part-Time and Digital Support 9. Preparation for Careers 10 Evaluation of Generic Doctoral Support Conclusion Index Works Cited</p>