Canadian Doctoral Writing Study

Doreen Starke-Meyerring, McGill University Anthony Paré, McGill University

Heather Graves, University of Alberta Roger Graves, University of Alberta

... Research Context: Rationale

•  Decreased public funding for higher education Increasing pressures on research funding & publication record

•  Research writing more high-stakes than ever, but much anxiety, little conscious attention

•  High attrition rates; long times to completion

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... Research Context: Questions

•  What are the practices and demands of doctoral writing in the current higher education environment?

•  What challenges do these practices and demands present for doctoral researchers and supervisors?

•  What perceptions of and support for doctoral writing currently exist at Canadian research institutions?

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... Research Context: Theory

•  Writing as social practice (regularized, habitual—genred), learned through participation, as producing and (re)producing institutional activity, ideology, values, knowledge, subject positions/ identities, etc. (e.g., Artemeva & Freedman; Bazerman & Prior; Bazerman & Russell; Bhatia; Coe, Lingard, & Teslenko; Giltrow; Miller; Paré; Schryer; Smart; …) •  “a practice view of … [writing] does not ask how

novices acquire (or fail to acquire) the genres owned by some particular community …. Instead, it considers how generic activity is implicated in the on-going (re) production of … participants” (Bazerman & Prior, 2005).

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... Research Context: Methodology

•  Multiple layers •  Surveys of doctoral students, supervisors, and

administrators at English G13 universities •  Interviews •  Case studies in different disciplines

•  Policy analysis

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... Research Context: Methodology

•  Phase 1 •  Surveys sent for distribution to English G13

universities •  Doctoral students (n= 3,100+)

•  Supervisors (n= 600+)

•  Graduate program directors (n= 85)

•  Writing centre directors (n= 9)

•  Analysis of graduate school meta-genres (Giltrow, 2002) of dissertation writing, e.g., handbooks, policies, handouts, guidelines

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Survey of doctoral students Snapshots from the data

Doreen Starke-Meyerring, McGill University

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Snapshots: Student Perspectives

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Career Paths

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The need to publish ...

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Student Perception of Role of Writing

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Support Sought

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Support Received

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Under prepared for publishing

•  I don't lack confidence in my writing, but I do feel grievously underprepared to compete in the world of publishing.

•  I feel I do not have a lot of experience writing scientific manuscripts and worry I do not have enough publications to remain competitive for grants.

•  Most of all, I am worried I am not good enough to publish and I am not sure if what I do is even publishable, or what the right venue is for it.

•  The field is so competitive and so demanding in terms of being published, that the pressure I feel to publish is intense. It is the greatest source of anxiety in my PhD pursuit - it transcends the course work, comps, dissertation, etc... Getting published is the one thing that can keep me up at night. Well, that and funding.

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Supervisor as key, but under pressure

•  I sometimes wonder how well I would write without the guidance of my supervisor, but mostly I'm confident that she has given me a very good grounding and I'll be okay working with others.

•  I consider my supervisors help most helpful.

•  The budgets are continuously being slashed, we don't have enough tenured professors, we have TOO MANY contract professors, who can't help out graduate students and our department hasn't hired a new professor to replace the 8 we have lost over the past 5 years!!!!! So many of us would LOVE some help and guidance on research writing, because you definitely feel the pressure to perform and to PUBLISH, yet you're left completely on your own, to figure it all out.

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Survey of doctoral supervision Snapshots from the data

Anthony Paré, McGill University

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They can’t write like they used to

“The main problem is not specific to ‘doctoral’ writing, but rather to writing in general. Many students arrive at university with inadequate writing skills, which should have been learned in elementary and high school.”

“They cannot write, pure and simple. This is true for the majority of Canadian educated students and for nearly all foreign students.”

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International students

“All my students are non-native English speakers and so they face a double challenge of writing effectively, and doing so in a foreign language.”

“Students coming from abroad are often not very good at writing in English. Often, they have great ideas, but they have difficulties writing about them.”

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Time

“Good supervision requires time and attention. A supervisor might have all kinds of tools, but time is the most important.”

“. . . I spend a huge amount of time with each student and his/her writing and this is not really feasible if one has many students.”

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Disciplinary discourse

“I’m not sure we do enough to train doctoral students to think about the various genres of critical writing in the field, which leaves them ill prepared to make the transition from seminar papers to a book-length study.”

“Despite the volume of reading each student must consume, they seem incapable of similar technical writing . . .”

“The writing of articles for publication is difficult as the students are often unable to follow the example from the published literature.”

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Graduate Program Director Perspectives

Heather Graves, University of Alberta

Question:

•  Drawing on your experience and perception, if you can, please indicate how the demands on doctoral students regarding their writing (e.g., pressures for early conference presentation, publication, and research funding record) have change in your program over the last 5 – 10 years.

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Increased demands on PhD students

33.3

30.8

35.9

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

Slightly Greatly increased No change

Program Director Opinions

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Sources of change

•  Pressure to publish and give conference presentations

•  Not formal program requirements but cv and professional development

•  Increased demand is faculty- and student-generated, to be competitive for funding/grants, post-docs, jobs

•  Emphasis on “development of industrial products funding grant” precludes “skills necessary to be good researcher”

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Question: Writing Groups

•  Do you or does your department or program organize doctoral students into “writing groups” to review each other’s work outside of course work?

No: 91.7 %

Yes: 8.3 %

“No ... this must be a very 'arts' based view of the world... I can understand this from the perspective of a PhD in philosophy but in computer science?!”

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Question:

•  Do you or does your faculty, department or program organize a research seminar series where faculty and graduate students present their work (either completed or in progress) outside of course work?

Yes: 89.5%

No: 10.5 %

“Yes, the students hold a J club in which they take turns presenting their work in an oral format with ppt.”

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Question: Reading Groups

•  Do you or does your department organize “reading groups” to discuss new publications in your field outside of course work?

Yes: 47.4%

No: 52.6%

“This is not done by the department, but is often done informally within labs, or groups of grad students & faculty with shared interests. The most common format is a 'journal club' in which recent publications are discussed; occasionally a reading club focuses on a single book for an entire semester.”

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Program Director Comments

“Again, another quaint concept from the arts... really where do you find the time for this? Aside from giving three courses per year, supervising 3 PhD, 2 MCS, 1 post doc, co-ordinating the graduate program and dealing with the mountain of admin that we face, where do you find any time to actually read a paper for a reading group? The best you can hope for is that you manage to incorporate some of these activities in your graduate class...”

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Writing Centre Perspectives

Roger Graves, University of Alberta

Who provides instruction?

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45

Part-time instructors

Full-time instructors

Undergradaute tutors

Graduate tutors

Tenure (track) faculty in your dept.

Tenure (track) faculty in another dept.

How old is your WC?

0 5 10 15 20 25 30

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

In years 

WC Activities

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

Research into writing WAC/WID initiatives

Work with instructional librarians Website development

Tutorials Workshops

Elective credit courses Required credit courses

Elective non-credit courses Required non-credit courses

Faculty development workshops (for publication or grant writing)

Faculty development workshops for teaching writing

Faculty development workshops on supervising graduate students

Other (please specify)

Support for Doctoral Writers

Phase 2: Open-ended questions

•  In the rest of this presentation, I’ll describe how writing centre directors responded in the open-ended questions on the survey

•  Text on the next slides are either direct quotations or paraphrases of comments made in the survey

PhD Students as writers •  Sometimes resistant to sharing writing

•  Time-conscious: no time to read writing of peers

•  Working with support that is untheorized: what Kamler and Thomson refer to as “tricks and tips” from the self-help genre of thesis writing

•  Writing in a second language

•  working through cultural and disciplinary differences

•  Sorting through poor advice from supervis

Kamler, B. and P. Thomson. Helping Doctoral Students Write: Pedagogies for Supervision. New York: Routledge, 2006.

5 Challenges

1.  Supervisors

2.  Project management

3.  L2 concerns

4.  Time pressures

5.  Publishing pressures

Supervisors

•  Supervisors play an enormous role in the success of their graduate students’ writing

•  Supervisors may be un-prepared: they sometimes offer dubious writing advice and sometimes re-write student texts

•  Supervisors suffer themselves from time pressures and so offer less one-to-one guidance

Project management

•  “A significant number of doctoral students underestimate the thesis-writing task”

•  Managing a large writing project requires a skill set and planning background that many of these students do not have

L2/3/4 Concerns

•  Supervisors check out—they cannot invest the kind of time needed to work with the severity of the L2 language problems of their students

•  Many supervisors are themselves L2 writers and do not feel they have sufficient knowledge to provide help

•  L2 students need direct instruction in linear argument

Time is of the essence

•  Time demands results in failure to attend writing groups

•  Science faculty micromanage their students and demand that students spend their time in the lab

Publishing pressures

•  Students must apply for federal and provincial grant funding programs

•  “push-to-publish” results in “spiralling panic . . .[in] a fight for declining resources”

•  Doctoral students are expected to publish more now than in the past

What to do?

•  Demand is up: “enormous”

•  “Faculty trained in fields related to the teaching of writing are able to provide training of a type that many department faculty are, by their own admission, unable to provide”

Current WC strategies

•  Tutorials: 75% of WC offer them; more students are helped through them than be any other strategy

•  Elective non-credit courses/workshops: over 50% offer them

•  Workshops: 25% offer them

•  Writing groups: 25% offer these