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> <li>How is generic support funded and situated within institutions?</li> <li>Should some sessions be compulsory for doctoral students?</li> <li>Where do the boundaries lie between what can be taught generically or left to supervisors as discipline-specific?</li> <li>To what extent is generic work pastoral?</li> <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>