Martin Andrew

Supervising doctorates at a distance: three trans‐Tasman stories

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the challenges of post‐traditional, distance PhD supervision and suggest pedagogical interventions to bridge the distance. The paper investigates the skills and understandings necessary for mediating the supervisor‐supervisee dyad within faceless encounters.Design/methodology/approach – Grounded in a literature review and using interview‐based narratives, the paper describes a case study investigating the needs and experiences of three part‐time, trans‐Tasman PhD students, writing practitioner‐ or practice‐led research (PLR) higher degrees by research (HDR) by artefact and exegesis.Findings – Findings reveal the importance of proactivity, dialogue and mutual trust and the necessity of knowing which interactions, including e‐moderated supervisions and fast‐turnaround electronic communications, potentially help to bridge the gulf.Research limitations/implications – While this small‐scale study makes no major claims that results can be generalised, the resul...

Community and Individuality: Teaching and Learning Insights From a Postgraduate Online Writing Program

How should lecturers teaching postgraduate creative writing in an online master of arts build and maintain e-community to support and socialize learners? The study proposes that such programs need to attend to writers’ investments in developing identities while promoting socialization and sense of belonging. Grounded in literature on communities of practice, imagined community, and identity, the study draws on social constructivist and poststructuralist insights and contributes to the relatively unexplored area of pedagogy for teaching writing online. The study uses qualitative descriptive analysis to narrate themes from two datasets in the form of a métissage. Data from lecturer-e-moderators and students indicate that strategic e-moderation encourages collaboration and maximizes pedagogical potential in forums. Strategic e-moderation builds a sense of community by fostering critical friendships. The study emphasizes the need for e-moderators to develop participants’ investments in working in communities. The study reveals that although postgraduate writing students come to value learning via critical friendships and communities, they also demand particularized feedback from e-moderators and peers. Findings suggest that students need to develop writing identities and voices can be met by a pedagogical approach that harnesses the potential of community while offering response to individual development. The study concludes that pedagogies of community in teaching writing online need to benefit both collectively and individually. This works when writers apply discipline-specific literacies and professional skills in critiquing peer texts, while responding to feedback from their community of practice, facilitated by e-moderators.

USING INNOVATION AND ACTION RESEARCH TO BUILD TESOL TEACHER CAPACITY IN VIETNAM

Critical insights from educational innovation research inform TESOL educators in Vietnam that pedagogical interventions should be particular to their context and environment. This paper presents a qualitative descriptive analysis of four teachers who are students in a Master of Education (TESOL) program delivered in Vietnam by within a partnership between an Australian and a Vietnamese University. The study draws on the assessed work of students in the unit Innovation which aims to encourage its students, all of whom are experienced professional educators, to identify a research problem specific to their teaching and learning environment and design a research question built around a pedagogical or curricular intervention they can ethically implement and evaluate within their workplaces. This activity, serving as both curriculum and assessment, empowers students to apply a segment of an action research cycle to their classrooms. The study presents four narratives of teacher/researchers engaged in innovation research, identifying research problems, developing topics and lines of enquiry and ultimately evaluating their projects reflectively. This pedagogical approach articulates the idea that the best people to know what innovations are required in Vietnamese educational contexts are the teachers themselves. Additionally, the findings support the use of an action research-focused pedagogy as an appropriate approach for use in TESOL programs in such developing nations as Vietnam.