Barbara Kamler

Rethinking Doctoral Publication Practices: Writing from and beyond the Thesis.

This article addresses the importance of giving greater pedagogical attention to writing for publication in higher education. It recognizes that, while doctoral research is a major source of new knowledge production in universities, most doctoral students do not receive adequate mentoring or structural support to publish from their research, with poor results. Data from a case study of graduates in science and education are examined to show how the different disciplinary and pedagogic practices of each discourse community impact on student publication. It is argued that co‐authorship with supervisors is a significant pedagogic practice that can enhance the robustness and know‐how of emergent scholars as well as their publication output. There is a need, however, to rethink co‐authorship more explicitly as a pedagogic practice, and create more deliberate structures in subject disciplines to scaffold doctoral publication – as it is these structures that influence whether graduates publish as informed professionals in their chosen fields of practice.

Getting Out of Deficit: Pedagogies of reconnection

The fact that children growing up in poverty are likely to be in the lower ranges of achievement on standardised literacy tests is not a new phenomenon. Internationally there are a myriad of intervention and remedial programmes designed to address this problem with a range of effects. Frequently, sustainable reforms are curtailed by deficit views of families and children growing up in poverty. This article describes an ongoing research study entitled “Teachers Investigate Unequal Literacy Outcomes: Cross‐Generational Perspectives”, which made teacher researchers central in examining this long‐standing dilemma. It outlines the research design and rationale, and analyses how two early career teachers worked their ways out of deficit analyses of two children they were most worried about. It argues that disrupting deficit discourses and re‐designing new pedagogical repertoires to reconnect with childrens lifeworlds is a long‐term project that can best be achieved in reciprocal research relationships with teachers.

Bringing pedagogy to doctoral publishing

This article explores the role of publication in taking forward the work of the doctorate. Low publication rates from doctoral degrees have been noted as a problem in the quality of doctoral education for preparing students to participate in research cultures. At the same time there is ambivalence and some resistance among doctoral supervisors and candidates about the place of publication in doctoral work. This article argues that issues of writing and publication need to be systematically addressed within doctoral pedagogy. In a climate of increasing pressure to publish during and after candidature, pedagogies need to take up a more explicitly outward-looking stance, developing a stronger orientation to induction and participation in the world of peer-reviewed publication. These arguments are developed through two case studies that illustrate ways of supporting doctoral researchers to effectively recontextualise their dissertation writing for wider audiences.

The Failure of Dissertation Advice Books: Toward Alternative Pedagogies for Doctoral Writing:

Anxious doctoral researchers can now call on a proliferation of advice books telling them how to produce their dissertations. This article analyzes some characteristics of this self-help genre, including the ways it produces an expert–novice relationship with readers, reduces dissertation writing to a series of linear steps, reveals hidden rules, and asserts a mix of certainty and fear to position readers “correctly.” The authors argue for a more complex view of doctoral writing both as text work/identity work and as a discursive social practice. They reject transmission pedagogies that normalize the power-saturated relations of protégé and master and point to alternate pedagogical approaches that position doctoral researchers as colleagues engaged in a shared, unequal, and changing practice.

Driven to abstraction: doctoral supervision and writing pedagogies

The writing of academic abstracts is more than a tiresome necessity of scholarly life. It is a practice that goes beyond genre and technique to questions of writing and identity. In this article we deconstruct a series of abstracts from a variety of refereed journals to ‘read’ for the representation of data, argument, methodology and significance. We describe one strategy for writing abstracts, developed as part of a long‐term project on postgraduate writing pedagogies. We propose that the art of writing abstracts is neglected in the academy, is given scant attention by journal editors, and has produced a motley and often bland array of conventions and genres. We suggest that abstract art should be an important aspect of supervision if graduate students and novice researchers are to stake a claim in the academy.

“Do you see what I see?” Reading a different classroom scene

This paper examines the problem of representing a research site in poststructuralist terms, suggesting that “data” often taken for granted cannot be read to represent “reality” or “truth.” The representation of classroom life produced for analysis is both multifaceted and contradictory. The researchers positioning within the major discourses governing educational practice may have as much influence on what is seen in the classroom as does the researchers physical positioning within material reality. Rather than being seen as an impediment to ongoing educational research for change, the findings presented offer a challenge to researchers to make explicit their underlying interests and agendas.

Making difference count : A demographic study of overseas born teachers

This article reports on the findings of a demographic study which is part of an Australian Research Council funded case study. It seeks to better understand the experiences and challenges facing teachers who are overseas born and educated non-native speakers of English. The investigation has been carried out in Victorian government metropolitan, regional city and rural secondary schools. A statewide survey has provided data about this previously ‘invisible’ population of teachers, their demographic location, their qualifications, backgrounds and the nature of their teaching experiences. The findings raise a number of concerns in relation to overseas born teachers of ethnic difference in rural schools where cultural and professional isolation may be of particular concern. We explore some of the implications for teacher education in the light of increasing numbers of overseas born students entering teacher education courses.

Text as Body, Body as Text

... there are ways that the sexuality and corporeality of the subject leave their traces in the texts produced, just as ... the processes of textual production also leave their trace or residue on the body ... (Grosz, 1995, p. 21)

Translating Difference: questions of representation in cross-cultural research encounters

This paper addresses questions of cross-cultural communication and represen tation as they arose in a longitudinal research project which sought to learn about the lives and concerns of older women. It focuses on the translations and mistranslations that occurred in narrative workshops where Australian researchers, who did not speak Vietnamese, worked with Australian Vietnamese women aged 55–74 and a translator to produce video diaries of the older womens everyday life. A number of workshop interactions around storytelling are examined to document the complexities that can arise when communities meet and interact across cultures. The aim is to ‘come clean’ about the problems of trying to conduct research without a common language and to suggest just how difficult translations and representations of culture really are and how easily preconceptions and cultural positionings interfere with the process of communication that is actually occurring.

Gender and genre in early writing

Abstract This longitudinal case study explores issues of gender and genre by examining the writing development of 2 children, a girl and a boy, who learned to write in “process writing” classrooms in Australia. Participant observation was used to follow the children during “writing time” in their Kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2 classrooms. Data consisted of written texts, observational notes, audio tape and videotape recordings of the childrens talk during writing, and interviews with parents and teachers. Analyses of the childrens written texts utilized the systemic-functional grammar as developed by Halliday (1985) and models of genre and register as proposed by Martin (1984,1986). Findings revealed that despite “free topic choice,” (a) the majority of texts were of one genre, the Observation genre, in which the writer reconstructs and evaluates personal experience with family and friends; and (b) a significant pattern of gender differences occurred within this genre whereby experience was reconstructed by the boy in terms of being an active participant in the world, and by the girl in terms of being a more passive observer of experience. A number of implications for classroom practice are considered, including a critical reassessment of free topic choice in process writing classrooms as it may tacitly support the current gender order. This study suggests that choices made in language are not free but are constrained by social and cultural contexts, including the ideology of gender in the culture.