Approches to Graduate Student Learning Talk Sasha Kovacs, Ph.D. - - PDF document

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 19th 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,

• r 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
• ther 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

• ut 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

• ur 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

• wn, 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
• urselves

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

dissertation proposal, there then is a return, at the writing stage to a new model for education: the Apprentice Master Model. Yeatman, writing in 1995, has described this method as a “traditional model.” In this process, he says that “the established master inducts the new apprentice into the ‘mysteries’ of the craft” (in Burnett 46). Those “mysteries” are no longer shared with the cohort group. This shift from the collaborative (in course work) model where the instructor oversees all conversations of the students and where work is submitted to an ‘expert’ who then marks it (its either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but either way it’s pretty dead after that evaluation) to the traditional Apprentice model (in dissertation writing) where we are to emulate that expert, submit work not for grade (expert’s approval) but for the sake of the work’s development is shocking only as it signals a MAJOR shift in attitude towards the supervisor. How does one make the shift, as the cohort disappears, to recognize the committee as the new cohort you are to collaborate with? Is collaboration with the committee a goal, or a necessary evil? How can we develop strategies to prepare students for that shift? This becomes more complex, I think, for students like myself whose course work professors became their supervisor. How to ‘forget’ the model of seeking a ‘good grade’ on an assignment and turn to consider that professor a ‘colleague’ is difficult given the relationship that had been, and had to be, established prior.

• 3. Deadlines and Consequence

The third shift I have identified from the graduate student experience of course work to the graduate student experience of dissertation writing concerns deadlines: here I wish to consider the strategies of their enforcement and the quality of consequences incurred when not meeting those deadlines. During course work, deadlines are determined by the requirements of the course, but also the requirements of the university as a whole (extensions beyond a reasonable time must get departmental approval). If you don’t hand in the work, you don’t get a credit for the course, or else your grade badly suffers. When reaching the dissertation writing stage the direct and immediate consequences for not reaching those deadlines are no longer as apparent (in my experience, at least). Ultimately, a candidate behind on their first chapter submission isn’t going to get a bad

• grade. They might get a stern talking to. That’s a major shift from what many of us grew

acclimatize to as Canadian students (and I speak here from my own training history and perspective). Up to the time of dissertation writing, in the candidate’s progress, the grade has been a central consequence- it is the benchmark, the check-in that says how you are

• doing. It is the value that years of training have used to motivate the student: the fear of

not handing it in will lead to a C in the course. So of course, you just get it done. But in the move to the dissertation writing phase, and the apprentice model that goes with it, the idea of the grade disappears. It cannot exist in the model where I am my supervisor’s colleague, in the model where I must grow up and learn to work independently to structure my own deadlines. The thing is- a lot of us haven’t done that

before, and without the consequence of the grade (that we’ve come to know as the central value of worth through a Canadian education system) it seems like there aren’t any consequences altogether. Indeed, we all know there are consequences, and they are far graver than those experienced in course work, far more menacing that a bad grade. In the dissertation stage, the consequence of not meeting these deadlines is, quite plainly, financial peril (most

• ften resulting in non-completion). But between the supervisor and the candidate, is this

reality ever discussed? As the cost of living increases and student funding packages decrease (my own department’s funding package for my cohort was changed from 5 to 4.5 years), is there an obligation to work out long-term goals for the program in light of financial consequence? Should that consequence be discussed more openly as such? If money is the central consequence, perhaps it needs to be framed as such from the outset, and perhaps we need to find ways to talk more openly about it with our supervisors, not just an SGS administrator or financial counselor. I’d offer that discussing the plan of the work must go along with a discussion of a financial plan.

• 4. Time

And that discussion of consequence and deadlines leads me to the identification of the final and most significant change that I think happens from course work to dissertation writing: a change in the experience of time. For me, course work was a recognizable and comfortable format. The 12-week course resembled, for me, a lengthy rehearsal period for a full-scale production. Material was distributed, it had to be read, and by the end of the twelve weeks something had to be produced for an audience that would evaluate it. Taking twelve weeks to work through this process seemed appropriate. But 5 years (excuse me 4.5 years that will actually take 5 years but that averages 6)? No show on the planet has ever REHEARSED for 5 years! Time then becomes difficult when moving to the dissertation writing stage as long-term goal setting has not been practiced in and through the collaborative cohort model used in course work, and had not been a life skill I cultivated in the field of work I was used to. As well, specific skills necessary to the completion of dissertation writing take up a different kind of time and these skills are simply not honed through course work writing. My greatest surprise in the process of dissertation writing came when I began to understand that editing, real editing, took time: course work does not prepare graduate students for the time required to collaborate on a piece of writing (with a supervisor and a committee). In the course work model, submission happens and evaluation is provided. Things are done, completed, once that piece is off your desk. Conversely, in the dissertation writing apprentice system, supervisors (or at least GOOD supervisors) provide enough feedback to demand better follow-up submissions. The writing never seems to be over. This kind of conversation with the entire committee has been the most enriching part of my doctoral work thus far (has helped fend off that feeling of isolation), but it demands time that I had not accounted for. As I had never taken part in this kind of process before, how could I be expected to budget time for it appropriately? Is there a

way we can be transparent about this process, and the amount of time it requires, in advance? Less trial by error. More planning for a realistic future. And insofar as the dissertation takes more time, it also means that more changes occur within that time. Relationships, children: we see responsibilities shift during the writing phase especially, as greater independence means a flexibility to realize other life goals. Things are different than when we started. But how can we ensure throughout those maturations that the expectations for the writing remain of a high standard? (and these shifts occur for BOTH supervisor and candidate). I wish, when I began my PhD that it had all started like any job with a contract. I wish that it had started like course work: with the syllabi as a contract between student and instructor. The dissertation writing stage, in my experience, ceased to have this agreement that protected and outlined the time required from both parties to get through this, to get on with it. Conclusion: Speaking of getting on with it: I could go on, but for today, I’d like to end my

• bservations regarding the shift from course work to dissertation writing there. In

discussing these four categories, I hope I have outlined some of the shifts that I’ve experienced moving through the process. Overall, in developing this short talk, I’ve come to wonder how course work might include training for dissertation completion- how its structures could be used in the dissertation writing stage to the student’s and supervisor’s

• advantage. Perhaps the structures of course work need to be the thing we don’t just get

through, but turn back to, in order to get to the ABD we all strive for: ALL BEYOND the dissertation. Bibliography: Burnett, Paul C. "The Supervision of Doctoral Dissertations using a Collaborative Cohort Model." Counselor Education and Supervision 39.1 (1999): 46. ProQuest. Web. 27 Sep. 2013. Notes: Many thanks to Martin Revermann for the invitation to be involved in this discussion. Gratitude also goes out to the other workshop participants who so generously and openly responded to the dialogue of my experiences with warmth, graciousness and wisdom.