http://www.flickr.com/photos/barbourians/5365888653/
This post is by Pip Bruce Ferguson, Teaching Developer at The University of Waikato. Hamilton, New Zealand”
Two weeks back I facilitated a workshop that was advertised to a combination of PhD students plus staff at this University, where I work as a Teaching Developer. While my unit doesn’t work directly with PhD students nor supervise them, we do offer ‘Supervisory Conversations’ in conjunction with our Pro Vice Chancellor (Postgraduate), and have done for a couple of years now. These have been an effective way of supporting our supervisors, but have rarely included PhD students. We offer them in a beautiful location on campus, away from main teaching rooms, and provide a finger-food lunch.
Hospitality is important in New Zealand, and getting away from the hustle and bustle of ‘normal’ work and having time to discuss and reflect is very important to our supervisors, who can participate in cross-disciplinary discussion at these events.
Because of the pressure for staff to publish under our Performance-Based Research Fund (the New Zealand equivalent of the U.K.’s Research Assessment Exercise, but funded by rating individuals rather than units) we decided to offer a workshop on how to get published. This was also advertised to PhD students, and the workshop attracted a significant cohort of these, mainly international students. As with the conversations mentioned above, we offered morning tea, some resources such as hardbound notebooks and highlighters to help with the inevitable handouts (!) and an environment where people could ‘come apart’ from their normal workplace.
We drew on expertise from within the University, with input from a professor in Sports and Exercise Science, one from Arts and Language Education, and a librarian who was able to indicate what the library could do to help people searching for appropriate journals etc. I compiled a booklet which contained Charlotte Frost’s “Getting Published: what academics need to know” with her permission, and referring to the http://www.phd2published.com site.
Charlotte’s hints well reinforced the information that our own staff presented, and I’m very grateful to her for her swift and positive response to my request to reproduce the material.
Feedback on the workshop was extremely positive, although there were some suggestions that it would be good to replicate this type of event at discipline level. These suggestions will be passed on to our Pro VC (Postgraduate) as it is not our unit’s role to organise things at Faculty level.
I would like to sincerely thank Charlotte for her generosity in sharing her work, which was certainly appreciated by our workshop participants on the other side of the world!
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