ABSTRACT
On the fringe of the current debate over how best to educate doctoral students are concerns about how we prepare our future academics. At present we seem to do half the job because research education is still the principle vehicle for training teachers in higher education (Harris 1996). We all know this to be true but it is surprising how uncontentious the idea is. Just try it in another context and see how it works because doctors are trained in medicine, solicitors in law and so on. Learning one trade in order to practise in another does not make much sense except, apparently, in higher education where we have PhD students trained as researchers who then take up posts as university lecturers and become teachers. Because the modern university lecturer is simultaneously involved in the production and dissemination of knowledge, an education for doctoral students in both may be necessary for epistemological reasons as well as preventing later distortions of academic practice. Knowledge creation separated from the broader knowledge project changes the nature of the relationship and is likely to constrain intellectual development (see Beck and Young 2005), and a discrete education in research creates strong boundaries between research and teaching that may take many years to overcome. Yet the situation higher education finds itself in is complex because many postgraduate
students do teach when they are learning about research and consequently bring some experience to their lectureship. There has also been much effort over the past decade or so to support the professional development of new academics in their teaching role. Parts of these programmes have filtered down to the stage of postgraduate study although most initiatives tend to be limited in what they can provide. The recent additions and changes to the traditional three-year doctorate do not help
the case for teaching much as they are driven largely by economic and political rather than epistemological and professional development concerns (Barnacle 2005; Craswell 2007). Arguments for change and improvement tend to follow a similar pattern. First, more students wish to do a PhD and many will choose careers outside of research or academia. Second, the world is changing and uncertain and so educated people need to be flexible and innovative if they are to respond to this. These changes have required new forms of political control over the PhD to ensure that it fits within current neoliberal free market ideological aspirations and the focus is on highly trained ‘knowledge
workers’ for the ‘knowledge economy’. Governments and their representative agencies now manage many aspects of the PhD such as completion times, quality assurance and even which topics should receive funding. To meet this agenda universities have to be more flexible, make sure the PhD is fit for purpose and be prepared to respond to different stakeholders that include employers and the nation (Park 2007). Park (2007: 8) defines benefits for the nation as ‘enhanced creativity and innovation, and the development of a skilled workforce and of the intellectual capital and knowledge transfer, which drives the knowledge economy and are engines of the growth of cultural capital’. Of course, such ideas about what the ‘nation’ wants are reasonable yet they dominate
debate about doctoral study and because of this there is a danger that other voices are silenced. For example, there is relatively little interest in reforming postgraduate study in terms of teaching or recognising it as an authentic apprentice route into academia. Teaching gets an honourable mention in most commissioned reports on doctoral study and many universities now have tutor training programmes that recognise the postgraduate contribution to teaching (e.g. Hopwood and Stocks 2008). But little more is done. Even the more integrated Preparing Future Faculty schemes of North America (Richlin 1995) are limited and have not gained the wide support that might have been expected. The employability argument also needs re-examining because the major employer of
doctoral students is still academia, with nearly half of UK PhD students pursuing an academic career (UK GRAD 2004), and in the USA, more than half take up posts in universities and colleges (Boyer Commission 1998). So does doctoral study meet higher education’s own professional needs? It seems reasonable to expect that all new academics should have a level of competence in both teaching and research before they take up their first post, and in this chapter I will try to make a case for educating postgraduates in this way, provide some examples in which learning about research and learning about teaching benefit the doctoral student, and show that for those wishing to make a career in academia we can provide a full and authentic learning experience through an apprentice-academic pathway.
