Cheryl Amundsen

Identity and Agency: Pleasures and Collegiality among the Challenges of the Doctoral Journey.

How do doctoral students develop their identities as academics? In this analysis, we explore identity from the perspective of agency – humans as active agents. The analysis was based on the collective data from three earlier studies in different contexts. Embedded in the data were expressions of agency linked to affect – both positive and negative – in which doctoral students were acting to shape and not just be shaped by their experiences. Key findings were evidence of collective student identity as well as supervisors modeling and affirming student agency. Both these findings are pertinent in rethinking doctoral pedagogies: the latter provides a model for supervisors to explicitly model student agency, and the former suggests the value of creating opportunities for collective identity in which students act as positive agents in improving their own doctoral experiences.

STUDENT MOTIVATION TO LEARN VIA COMPUTER CONFERENCING

This study investigates why some university students appear motivated to learn via computer conferencing (CC) whereas others do not, exploring the correlations of three key aspects of student motivation—reasons for engaging in academic learning (goal orientation), beliefs that they can acquire the ability to use CC (self-efficacy), and beliefs that learning to use CC will help them learn the course material (outcome expectations)—with satisfaction and with the frequency of CC contributions. Participants (n = 79) came from 4 graduate-level face-to-face courses and 1 undergraduate DE course. The results suggest that students who believe that CC will help them learn the course material are more likely to express satisfaction and to be active online, that students who believe that they are capable of learning how to use CC are more likely to be active online, and that students who are concerned about their relative performance compared to others tend to send fewer messages to conferences where online activity is not graded. Practical implications for instructors and suggestions for future research are described.

‘Learning supervision’: trial by fire

This paper explores the experiences of new graduate supervisors, individuals who have just moved as it were from one side of ‘the table’ to the other. We describe how their learning to ‘do supervision’ relates to their understanding of academic work and how they make sense of the transition from doctoral student, someone supervised, to someone supervising, how they connect the past to the present (and future). The particular contribution is the examination of new academics’ experience of supervision within the broader context of undertaking to establish oneself as an academic. This study is part of a broad research programme in Canada that investigates the experiences of doctoral students and the academic staff who support them and then works collaboratively with those in the units in which we are collecting data to ensure the findings can inform and support doctoral policies and pedagogies.

Challenging the taken-for-granted: how research analysis might inform pedagogical practices and institutional policies related to doctoral education

Taken-for-granted pedagogical practices and institutional policies are often built without evidence of effectiveness, or can result from external calls for accountability that are often accepted given the lack of evidence to challenge them. We argue the need for evidence-based perspectives to support the rethinking of such practices and policies related to doctoral education and potentially to challenge external drivers that are placing increasing demands on academics. We have been particularly attentive to using our research findings for this purpose, and in this article we describe two examples of how we have drawn evidence from our research that challenges the taken-for-granted. We hope that describing our approach may stimulate other researchers to emphasize the specific implications of their research findings as regards influencing change towards more research-informed institutional practices and policies.

Concept mapping to support university academics’ analysis of course content

The authors’ goal in working with university academics is to support an intellectual process of close examination of instructional decisions, making explicit the rationale and intentionality underlying those decisions. Subject matter understanding is the primary point of reference in this process. The focus of the research described here is the use of an unstructured form of concept mapping to support academics in the analysis of course content as the first step in a course design process. While some academics with whom the authors have worked have been initially skeptical about concept mapping, the large majority of them, in the end, report that they value the process and what they gained from it. The findings show that the concept mapping process provided an alternate means to rethink course content, one that highlighted relationships among concepts, encouraged a view of the course as an integrated whole, and frequently provided the occasion to make explicit the types of thinking required in the course.

Making Meaning of Diverse Experiences: Constructing an Identity Through Time

This chapter looks across all of the chapters in the book to identify the common threads that demonstrate the ways in which the early career experience can be characterized as similar, despite different roles and academic fields. This is the basis used to describe the notion of identity-trajectory; a notion that emphasizes the integration of past-present-future in the individual experience of academic work and the individual’s desire to enact intentions and hopes through time. Central to the notion of identity-trajectory is the interweaving of three distinct but interrelated strands: intellectual, networking, and institutional. The intellectual strand represents past and continuing contributions to one’s disciplinary specialty. The networking strand represents the web of local, national, and international relationships one has been and is connected with. The institutional strand represents relationships and responsibilities where an individual is physically located. We argue that the notion of identity-trajectory can provide a reflective framework for taking personal action.

Postdoctoral positions as preparation for desired careers: a narrative approach to understanding postdoctoral experience

Doing a ‘postdoc’ following a doctorate is becoming more and more common worldwide as the pre-tenure job market continues shrinking in relation to the number of PhD graduates. Yet, behind statistics and descriptions of collective experience, how individuals experience the postdoctoral period is largely unknown, especially how they use this phase as preparation for future employment. Drawing on longitudinal data, this paper provides a close look at how seven postdoctoral scholars in life sciences from two Canadian universities intentionally prepared for their desired careers through day-to-day activities. The participants’ daily activities were situated in three ways: intellectual, networking and institutional. It was found that they were all agentive in preparing for the future; yet, agency was exercised differently due to different institutional and personal contexts. The personal was found to be a significant factor that influenced their career preparations and decisions. This study addresses the gap in the literature regarding postdoctoral experiences and enriches our understanding about postdoctoral experience and training.

Rethinking our underlying assumptions about what we do and why we do it: academic development as a case

In this paper, academic developers from universities in three countries explore underlying assumptions about what we as developers do and why we do it in relation to evaluating development programs. Through addressing three questions, key ideas emerge that highlight what is often overlooked in day-to-day practice: the fact that academic development has a ‘signature pedagogy’ defined by the ‘learning paradigm’; the potential role of different stakeholders in setting criteria for evaluation; and the inclusion of non-traditional academic development literatures (e.g., adult education, educational change, organizational development) to avoid perpetuating established practices. Our intent is to intellectually challenge ourselves and others to move beyond sharing program and evaluation activities to explore ideas and literature not often considered in our day-to-day work. While the context is academic development, we believe the questions and the answers that emerged are of value to all involved in staff and professional development.

Early career researcher challenges: substantive and methods-based insights

Navigating academic work as well as career possibilities during and post-Ph.D. is challenging. To better understand these challenges, since 2010, we have investigated the experiences of early career scientists longitudinally using a range of qualitative data collection formats. For this study, we examined the experiences of four students and four postdocs to address two questions. The first, a substantive one, asked about the challenges early career researchers experienced and their efforts to be agentive in response. The second methods-based question examined whether different data collection formats, weekly activity logs completed monthly and annual interviews, might contribute different insights into challenges and responses to them. In fact, the subtle differences that emerged from each of the data sources enabled us to substantively characterize different kinds of challenges and different patterns of response. Individuals were generally successful in managing day-to-day and short-term research-related challenges (largely reported in the logs) and developing coping strategies for existential challenges (reported in the logs and interviews). But structural issues (largely reported in the interview) were less tractable. The findings suggest that combining distinct data collection methods may better capture variation in experience – in this case, challenges and responses – than single formats alone.

Chapter 8: Electing an Alternate Future: Professionals, Research Professionals, and Academic Professionals Chapter 8

Wherever one looks internationally, the figures remain much the same—around 50% of PhD graduates are taking up nonacademic employment. Nonetheless, little has been reported about the alternate careers they find. In this chapter, we explore in some detail where they go, what they actually do, the perceived value of the PhD to their careers, as well as where they see themselves going in the future. Our goal is to demonstrate through examples the immense variability in the types of jobs available.