Developing generic support for doctoral students: practice and pedagogy

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.

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:

• How is generic support funded and situated within institutions?
• Should some sessions be compulsory for doctoral students?
• Where do the boundaries lie between what can be taught generically or left to supervisors as discipline-specific?
• To what extent is generic work pastoral?
• What are its main benefits? Its challenges? Its objectives?

Over the last two decades supervision has been investigated and theorised as a teaching practice, a discussion this book extends to generic doctoral support.

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.

Susan Carter coordinated a generic doctoral programme from 2004-2012 and now works with supervisors as an academic developer within the recently established Centre for Learning and Research in Higher Education at the University of Auckland, New Zealand 

Deborah Laurs is a senior learning advisor at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where she runs research skills seminars and thesis-writing workshops, as well as providing one-to-one support to students from all disciplines and at all stages of their doctoral journey.