After centuries of barely visible incremental development, postgraduate education has experienced twenty years of considerable turbulence as governments recognise its latent power, some responding more quickly than others and each in different ways. This anthology, drawing on research, deep reflection and praxis, illustrates the current situation in a range of geographical environments that result from such interventions, or lack of them, providing readers both with information about neglected contexts, challenges and concerns and with stimulating ideas about how they might be managed more effectively. Professor Emerita Pam Denicolo, University of Reading, UK

Supporting Student and Faculty Wellbeing in Graduate Education recognizes new pressures impacting graduate students and their supervisors, teachers, and mentors globally. The work provides a range of insights and strategies which reflect on wellbeing as an integral part of teaching, learning, policy, and student-mentor relationships. The authors offer a uniquely holistic approach to supporting the wellbeing of both students and academic staff in graduate education. The text showcases optimized approaches to self-care, self-regulation, and policy development, as well as trauma-informed, arts-based, and embodied pedagogies. Particular attention is given to the challenges faced by minority groups including Indigenous, international, refugee, and immigrant students and staff. Providing a timely analysis of the current issues surrounding student and faculty wellbeing, this volume will appeal to scholars and researchers working across the fields of higher education, sociology of education, educational psychology, and student affairs.

This book focuses on Indigenous participation in postgraduate education. The collaborating editors, from the contexts of Australian, Canadian and Nordic postgraduate education, have brought together voices of Indigenous postgraduate students and researchers about strategies to support postgraduate education for Indigenous students globally and to promote sustainable solution-focused and change-focused strategies to support Indigenous postgraduate students. The role of higher education institutions in meeting the needs of Indigenous students is considered by contributing scholars, including issues related to postgraduate education pedagogies, flexible learning and technologies. On a more fundamental level the book provides a valuable resource by giving voice to Indigenous postgraduate students themselves who share directly the stories of their experience, their inspirations and difficulties in undertaking postgraduate study. This component of the book gives precedence to the issues most relevant and important to students themselves for consideration by universities and researchers. Bringing the topic and the voices of Indigenous students clearly into the public domain provides a catalyst for discussion of the issues and potential strategies to assist future Indigenous postgraduate students. This book will assist higher education providers to develop understanding of how Indigenous postgraduate students and researchers negotiate research cultures and agendas that permeate higher education from the past to ensure the experience of postgraduate students is both rich in regard to data to be collected and culturally safe in approach; what connections, gaps and contradictions occur at the intersections between past models of postgraduate study and emerging theories around intercultural perspectives, including the impact of cultural and linguistic differences on Indigenous students' learning experiences; how Indigenous students’ and researchers’ personal and professional understandings, beliefs and experiences about what typifies knowledge and research or adds value to postgraduate studies are constructed, shared or challenged; and how higher education institutions manage the potential challenges and risks of developing pedagogies to ensure that they give voice and power to Indigenous postgraduate students.

Bringing together accounts of online community engagement from a range of perspectives, this book considers how the changing landscape of doctoral communities might be used to inform institutional level decisions about doctoral provision and support. Despite the increasing availability of online communities dedicated to doctoral supervisors, there has been little consideration of how they form and operate. This book surveys the landscape of these online communities and examines their impact on the production of the doctorate, and on the experience of doctoral researchers and supervisors. Bringing together accounts of online community engagement from a range of perspectives – doctoral students, supervisors, content curators, and research support practitioners, one of the overarching aims of this volume is to explore these communities in action. With the supporting doctoral research through online media catalysed as the ‘new normal’, this book allows stakeholders in doctoral education to better understand how students are using social media in their PhD studies, how online communities of practice impact upon researcher/supervisor relationships and support, and ways in which student experiences of various platforms might converge to create an augmented experience.

In our rapidly globalising world, “the global scholar” is a key concept for reimagining the roles of academics at the nexus of the global and the local. This book critically explores the implications of the concept for understanding postgraduate studies and supervision. It uses three conceptual lenses – “horizon”, “currency” and “trajectory” – to organise the thirteen chapters, concluding with a reflection on the implications of Covid-19 for postgraduate studies and supervision. Authors bring their perspectives on the global scholar from a variety of contexts, including South Africa, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Chile, Germany, Cyprus, Kenya and Israel. They explore issues around policy, research and practice, sharing a concern with the relation between the local and the global, and a passion for advancing postgraduate studies and supervision.

Since the first literature about the Threshold Concepts Framework was published in 2003, a considerable body of educational research into this topic has grown internationally across a wide range of disciplines and professional fields. Successful negotiation of a threshold concept can be seen as crossing boundaries into new conceptual space, or as a portal opening up new and previously inaccessible ways of thinking about something. In this unfamiliar conceptual terrain, fresh insights and perceptions come into view, and access is gained to new discourses. This frequently entails encounters with ‘troublesome knowledge’, knowledge which provokes a liminal phase of transition in which new understandings must be integrated and, importantly, prior conceptions relinquished. There is often double trouble, in that letting go of a prevailing familiar view frequently involves a discomfiting change in the subjectivity of the learner. We become what we know. It is a space in which the learner might become ‘stuck’. Threshold Concepts on the Edge, the fifth volume in a series on this subject, discusses the new directions of this research. Its six sections address issues that arise in relation to theoretical development, liminal space, ontological transformations, curriculum, interdisciplinarity and aspects of writing across learning thresholds.

This book considers how the main doctoral awarding countries from across the globe examine doctoral degrees. It compares and contrasts their approaches, comments on their robustness, and identifies examples of good practice. The doctorate is the highest award made by universities, but the examination process involved varies considerably in form and structure across the globe. This book studies the similarities and differences systematically on a cross-national basis, providing insights into the ways in which countries have sought to ensure that the awarded degree is comparable in standards. This book presents case studies of examination policies and practices covering 20 countries, which collectively are responsible for nearly 75% of global doctoral awards. Each chapter includes a summary of the key points, and a concluding chapter analyses the case studies from a comparative perspective. This book is written by a distinguished international team of authors who are researchers in doctoral education, and will be of interest to all those engaged in the field particularly policy-makers, graduate deans and programme leaders, supervisors, administrators, examiners, and scholars in the field.

This book examines the learning and development process of students’ scientific thinking skills. Universities should prepare students to be able to make judgements in their working lives based on scientific evidence. However, an understanding of how these thinking skills can be developed is limited. This book introduces a new broad theory of scientific thinking for higher education; in doing so, redefining higher-order thinking abilities as scientific thinking skills. This includes critical thinking and understanding the basics of science, epistemic maturity, research and evidence-based reasoning skills and contextual understanding. The editors and contributors discuss how this concept can be redefined, as well as the challenges educators and students may face when attempting to teach and learn these skills. This edited collection will be of interest to students and scholars of student scientific skills and higher-order thinking abilities.

ÿThe 24 chapters contained in this volume provide diverse but also congruent perspectives on future foci for research into postgraduate education and supervision in the knowledge society. The chapters move from deliberations on challenges for postgraduate supervision at macro level (such as the pressure to increase postgraduate output and the implications of increasingly managerialist institutions) to meso level matters (the form and function of postgraduate education in specific countries) to the micro (rich case studies of individual institutions, programmes and supervisors).

After centuries of barely visible incremental development, postgraduate education has experienced twenty years of considerable turbulence as governments recognise its latent power, some responding more quickly than others and each in different ways. This anthology, drawing on research, deep reflection and praxis, illustrates the current situation in a range of geographical environments that result from such interventions, or lack of them, providing readers both with information about neglected contexts, challenges and concerns and with stimulating ideas about how they might be managed more effectively. Professor Emerita Pam Denicolo University of Reading, UK