Approches to Graduate Student Learning Talk Sasha Kovacs, Ph.D. Candidate, Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto Introduction Today, I’m going to be talking about one aspect of my experience as a graduate student: the move from course work, past completion of the comprehensive exams and into the dissertation writing stage. My discussion today responds to one of the lead questions posed by Martin, in advance of our meeting today: He asks: “Is the ‘black hole’ between course work and the ABD-stage of a Ph.D. a regrettable fact of life or avoidable? What are good strategies to pre-empt or manage it?” In preparing for my talk, I was reviewing some of my own course work files and I surprised myself with a find: an old email file, from Martin, that had attached a marked paper on Aristotle and feminism. I had forgotten that I ever wrote this. I laughed out loud at my former self when I began to read. How could I, the student whose research now focuses on the late 19 th century performances of Mohawk English poet/performer E. Pauline Johnson, so assuredly discuss and defend my ideas regarding the intersections between Aristotelian concepts and gender theory? I turned to the first page suspicious of my pre ABD self—ready to judge my own attempt at understanding something I was not, or at least could never now claim to be, an expert on. Then I read the paper. Excuse the lack of modesty here but it was actually quite good. And it was 25 pages! Written, if memory serves correct, over a weekend and at the same time that 4 other 20 page papers were due. It made me think: have I reached this kind of productivity level since I obtained ABD status? Could a complex combination of naiveté and courage to just DEFEND an idea no matter what I know- to just make a proposal and risk being wrong without too much worry- could that perspective that I had in my course work, that got me through writing about Aristotle, help me through my dissertation writing? Shouldn’t productivity (measured in pages submitted), given my passion and knowledge for for my thesis subject, lead to MORE confident writing, and just MORE writing generally? Why is the opposite true? The Black Hole of ABD Of course, we all know that there might be a whole lot of reasons that productivity changes in the move from course work to the dissertation-writing phase. Upon gaining my ABD status, I misguidedly interpreted the acronym. For me, ABD meant that now I could do ANYTHING BUT my Dissertation. At the time when Chronicle and Higher Ed. articles were coming out about the un-hirable PhD students, and my linked-in feed was a running signpost that decreed “YOU MUST PUBLISH/TEACH BEFORE YOU COMPLETE” I thought this title ABD meant “now that you only have to do your dissertation, you can take the time to teach, perform, PD PD PD!” APD?
But rather than focus on the extrinsic pressures that affect dissertation progress, what I’m keen to discuss today are the changes in learning format that I experienced and performed when I moved from course work to candidacy. My preparation for this talk began with a reflective question then: Why was it easier for me to produce 80 pages in a one-month span while doing course work? And it moved to thinking about apparent shifts in the methods of education at the dissertation stage: What about the structure of the dissertation-writing phase makes that kind of productivity less prevalent? Did I get lazy? Worse? Complacent? Or am I just, now, doing it differently? In approaching this question, I began identify four main categories that I think we could look to in order to identify changes from the course work to dissertation writing experience. These are: 1. Contact: Presence of Cohort & Competition Versus Isolation 2. Hierarchy and Rank: Education as Student Versus Expectations of Apprenticeship 3. Deadlines and Consequence: Grade Penalty Versus Financial Penalty 4. Time: Short Term Versus Long Term I’d like to briefly talk about these categories today to trace my own experience being “taught” in graduate school. I hope that these more personal reflections can precipitate a conversation that allows us to • Consider how the changes within these 4 categories intersect with levels of graduate student productivity (time to completion) • Assess the efficacy of those changes for both the graduate student experience and the supervisory experience • Brainstorm ways that graduate students could be trained (by the supervisor? By other means?) through course work to productively meet the new expectations of the dissertation writing stage 1. Contact So, I’ll begin with talking about the first identified shift from the course work to dissertation writing phase: contact. Specifically, I would like to identify how the move from course work to the dissertation writing phase, in my experience as a Graduate Student at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies pulls students from what Paul Burnett would call a Collaborative Cohort Model (characterized by much contact with fellow students) into an Apprentice Master Model (characterized by very little contact with fellow students, and almost an exclusive engagement with supervisor). Throughout course work, graduate students learn to develop their thinking and writing out of a process of healthy academic conversation. Even throughout the dissertation writing proposal stage at the Centre for Drana, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto my cohort would meet to discuss ideas under the supervision of our program director (who would eventually become my supervisor, Dr. Stephen Johnson). So, just to be clear, after course work was done, the dissertation proposal stage,
in my experience, was still structured as a course: a cohort that had been defined through years past was led by an instructor through a process of writing. An outcome (the proposal itself) was demanded in order to move on, to gain credit. I’m sure this process was adopted to ensure completion of the proposals. My own dissertation proposal greatly benefitted from the input of my fellow cohort peers that had witnessed the evolution of my interests from early in the program past a year of course work. What is cultivated between the cohort is this support, yes, but also a good degree of healthy competition. We pushed each other to get better. We knew when one of us was phoning it in, and we called each other on it. Soon after that though, we all went our separate ways to look for supervisors, and it is there that everything changed. In no time at all, our meetings stopped. We were on our own, and each student developed at a different pace, depending on the separate supervisor’s guidance and process. Different expectations from these leaders meant that each of us met expectations no longer together as a group, but individually- some gaining candidacy early, others in their fifth year or not at all. That actually made socializing difficult. Things were different now that we all were writing our own and fending for ourselves Overall, I’d suggest that this metaphor would serve to characterize my experience: imagine training an athlete for a number of years to play doubles tennis (a partner-based, collaborative sport) and then, for their first competitive match, enrolling them in an individual field singles against someone their old partner. The result should be expected: a lot of flailing at the start. The feeling of isolation was made more prominent as training, writing, and productivity has always happened, previous, in somewhat collaborative contexts and now was happening, without much preparation, in an isolated context with one on one contact only with a supervisor, and not peer. I ask, can we think about how that shift in the quality of contact affects graduate student progress? Are there better ways to prepare students, throughout course work, for the kinds of processes and strategies necessary to move through independent writing of the thesis? I acknowledge that the move to dissertation writing is meant to test a student’s ability to work independently, as they would be expected to in a professional research context, but is throwing us all in the water and seeing who manages to swim the most effective way to cultivate that independent spirit? You might say that this is the test, and that there is no way to prepare a student for it. I say that’s lazy pedagogy. 2. Hierarchies and Rank And with that, I am brought to a discussion of the second category: changes in contact. The sudden shift from collaborative to isolated work, seems, to me at least, to be predicated upon the larger shift that occurs between course work and dissertation writing: and that is the relationship to rank and hierarchy. In my own experience, the relationship to hierarchy in the academy shifts as a student moves towards candidacy. After students have been trained in the collaborative cohort model for years of the course work and
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