Geof Hill – the Investigative Practitioner
One of the challenges in working with doctoral candidates is helping them to understand implicit quality criteria for various issues or practices they are investigating, while at the same time alerting them to the nature of quality in the whole investigation practice. Teasing out these innate or embedded rubrics of quality can create a start to helping them to understand issues of analysis and evaluation.
A case in point is the crepe dessert!
Recently my wife commented on crepes which we had ordered for dessert at a restaurant. ‘These are not as good as the crepes we had in Barcelona!’ she replied, inadvertently opening up a pandora’s box of comments about crepes and their varying quality.
At a first level in this conversation, we remembered that we had ordered crepes at several different places both in our (adopted) home city Birmingham U.K. and other cities which we visited over the previous months. There were the crepes purchased at Birmingham’s Canon Hill Garden’s markets that had delicious taste but were take-away crepes and a little difficult to eat. These crepes could be compared to crepes purchased at the Kew Garden (London) Christmas light show, that were also take away crepes but were not as well cooked as the Canon Hill markets crepes. As the conversation progressed, we began to draw distinctions between two similar products and make/construct comparative analysis based on the criteria of well-cookedness.
The mere thought of crepes brought to our minds the Barcelona Creperie where we enjoyed crepe dessert each night of our four night Barcelona stay. In this context of international crepe experiences we could compare the very positive Barcelona experience with those provided in a street café in Como (Italy) which were really pizza bread/pitta bread disguised to resemble a crepe, and added only to our conversation as an example of the worst.
Such a conversation about crepes also usually drew in reminiscences, such as the crepes at the Boulevard Hotel in Sydney (Australia) that still rated as a significant benchmark, bearing in mind that these older memories are sometimes biased with the reminiscence of positive and distant memories.
Such conversations bring into play that almost every issue will have a discourse that represents and discusses that issue. Part of the agenda for a doctoral candidate it to show through their writing their awareness of this discourse and how it contributes to notions or constructs of ‘goodness’. Often a doctoral dissertation is exploring some essence of what counts as good [or the absence of which counts as not good] for the issue at the heart of the investigation. With such literature, a doctoral candidate can then progress to explore elements of analysis and evaluation of the issue they are investigating.
In addition to the conversations of quality that exist for almost any topic, there is also a well-documented discourse surrounding quality of a dissertation or a thesis. Early examples of this writing are evident in books [for example Phillips and Pugh (1987)] and, because there is a vibrant conversation about the doctoral dissertation as an higher education genre of academic writing, there are also more recent examples [such as Pare, A., Starke-Meyerring, D and McAlpine, L (2009)] that not only speak to quality but illuminates the contested nature of what counts as a ‘good’ doctoral dissertation. This blog (Hill, 2011) is also a contributor to the discourse with what is perhaps its’ most accessed page written about making explicit assessment criteria from the perspective of being a doctoral dissertation examiner.
[supervisorsfriend.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/how-can-you-tell-when-there-has-been-a-contribution-to-knowledge-in-a-doctoral-research-study/]
At the outset of their doctoral candidature, a researcher may not be aware of what counts as a good dissertation, and as they progress their understanding of what it means to investigate an issue, their very language begins to identify not only what is ‘good’ around the issue they are investigating, but what might be ‘good’ in terms of a doctoral dissertation. Particularly as they explore the discourse pertinent to the issue they are investigating, they discover articles about what is ‘good’, or more often what is ‘not good’, and thus develop both the agendas associated with the discourse and awareness of contestation. As is the case wherever ‘goodness’ appears, the term is contested, and particularly in the context of the paradigm revolution there are many discussions about what counts as ‘good’ in a doctoral dissertation.
One classic example of ‘good’ research writing for me was Somekh’s (1995) paper on using first person writing in an action research doctoral inquiry.
By the time a reader of a dissertation is reaching the end of the document they need to see evidence in the inquirer’s writing about why they have adopted certain writing devices and how these devices align with the paradigm they hold about inquiry – how this reflects their beliefs about truth and knowledge. These forms of writing contribute to the transparency of their argument. While a reader may not agree with a particular selection, or jar at the use of a certain term, they can also see the awareness and choice that the writer/inquirer is making so that their dissertation reflects their many different positions related to inquiry.
It is often on the basis of these sometimes hidden criteria that a reader/examiner makes their conclusion that a dissertation is ‘good’ or ‘passable’.
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- Hill, G. (2011) How can you tell when there has been a contribution to knowledge in a doctoral dissertation? [supervisorsfriend.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/how-can-you-tell-when-there-has-been-a-contribution-to-knowledge-in-a-doctoral-research-study/]
- Phillips, E. and Pugh D. (1987). How To Get a Ph.D.: Managing the Peaks and Troughs of Research. Taylor and Francis: Bristol, U.K.
- Pare, A., Starke-Meyerring, D and McAlpine, L ( The dissertation as multi-genre: many readers, many readings. In Bazerman, C., Bonini, A. and Figueiredo, D. (Eds.). (2009). Genre in a Changing World. The WAC Clearinghouse; Parlor Press. https://doi.org/10.37514/PER-B.2009.2324. Pp 179-193.
- Somekh, B. (1995). The Contribution of Action Research to Development in Social Endeavours: A Position Paper on Action Research Methodology. British Educational Research Journal, 21 (3), 339-355
the (research) supervisor's friend
the (research) supervisor's friend 