are we heading for a DIY PhD?

patter

This is an op-ed piece I’ve recently written. It’s still in press but I thought I might give it a little pre-publication outing here. The DIY theme is one I’m doing more work on right now.

In the humanities and social sciences, the PhD is usually equated with a supervision relationship; thinking about this supervision relationship as a pedagogy is however relatively recent. One of the landmarks in the supervision-as pedagogy-thinking came in a 1995 issue of The Australian Universities Review (Vol. 38, no. 2), when editors Bill Green and the late Alison Lee brought together a range of ‘down-under’ scholars to discuss “postgraduate studies/postgraduate pedagogy”. The special issue addressed the emergence of a mass higher education system in which a normative ‘rational’ science model of research and supervision and discourses of ‘quality’, ‘experience’, ‘competency’ and ‘accountability’ were rapidly becoming dominant. In this context, the editors and authors collectively…

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