This Article Full Text Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Kamler, B. Articles by Thomson, P. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

The Failure of Dissertation Advice Books: Toward Alternative Pedagogies for Doctoral Writing

BARBARA KAMLER is emeritus professor of education at Deakin University, Faculty of Arts and Education, 221 Burwood Highway, Melbourne, Australia 3125; brk{at}deakin.edu.au. Her research focuses on writing and identity, writing as social action, and critical approaches to literacy, with her most recent work examining doctoral and early career writing and publishing.
PAT THOMSON is a professor of education and director of research in the School of Education at the University of Nottingham, Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Road, Nottingham, United Kingdom NG81BB: patricia.thomson{at}nottingham.ac.uk. Her research focuses on doctoral education, the work of school principals, and the practices of school reform, with her most recent work investigating the role of creativity and the arts in changing schools and communities.

Anxious doctoral researchers can now call on a proliferation of advice books telling them how to produce their dissertations. This article analyzes some characteristics of this self-help genre, including the ways it produces an expert–novice relationship with readers, reduces dissertation writing to a series of linear steps, reveals hidden rules, and asserts a mix of certainty and fear to position readers "correctly." The authors argue for a more complex view of doctoral writing both as text work/identity work and as a discursive social practice. They reject transmission pedagogies that normalize the power-saturated relations of protégé and master and point to alternate pedagogical approaches that position doctoral researchers as colleagues engaged in a shared, unequal, and changing practice.

Key Words: higher education • supervision • writing

Educational Researcher, Vol. 37, No. 8, 507-514 (2008)
DOI: 10.3102/0013189X08327390


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?