Building a supportive culture for researchers 

By Dr Dely Lazarte Elliot, Senior Lecturer in the School of Education

Many will concur that building a supportive culture among researchers is a challenging, but admirable endeavour. However, responding to this task requires clarifying several points.  

First, what do we mean by culture? 

Within the context of doctoral education, culture may refer to –  

• an ‘academic culture’ (i.e. emphasis on the specific genre of the PhD),  
• a ‘disciplinary culture’ that considers norms and expectations specific to a particular discipline,  
• a ‘societal culture’ for those who opted to do their doctoral studies in another country apart from their country of origin. 

However, it is likely to be about ‘research culture’, which is defined by the Royal Society as ‘encompass[ing] the behaviours, values, expectations, attitudes and norms of our research communities. It influences researchers’ career paths and determines the way that research is conducted and communicated.’ 

The definition from the Royal Society conveys the huge scope of what this term encompasses and how potentially complex the term ‘research culture’ can be. Possibly, the term can be viewed and defined from various angles and by different stakeholders, too. After all, the Research Culture: Changing Expectations Conference report suggests that ‘Research culture is about everyone within the research system’. This implies that an endeavour to change the interlinked ‘behaviours, values, expectations, attitudes and norms of our research communities’ is a tall order requiring substantial and concerted effort over a long period to realise. 

Second, what does a supportive research culture look like?  

As supervisors, whenever we hear colleagues talking about changing the research culture, have we asked ourselves the following questions –  

1. What do we need to change in the research culture?  
2. Why do we need to change it? 
3. How are we going to change it?
4. Where do we start to change the research culture? How do we prioritise changing it? 

Moreover, several secondary questions also need to be raised. 

5. Which aspects of the research culture are within our control?  
6. What is the component of the research culture that we can manage effectively? 
7. Who are the other stakeholders or the key players whom we can involve as we attempt to improve it? 

It is to be expected that there are multiple answers to these questions – often informed by our combined focus and remit. What I would like to share in this blog post is based on my experience as a doctoral supervisor closely working with another doctoral supervisor (Dr Kara Makara) and our group of doctoral scholars.  

I selected this topic since typically, supervisors neither have the time nor the space to exchange ideas with other supervisors and share what they do, endeavour to do and their experience of trying out new approaches or implementing certain ideas. This blog post can serve as an opportunity to reach out to other PhD supervisors with the sole purpose of sharing our practice and possibly, prompting them to reflect on their own role(s) and putting their ideas into action in connection with changing the research culture. 

You may say that this is only one of numerous pathways for building a supportive research culture. While ours has been running effectively since 2016, we do acknowledge that initiatives such as this are context specific, affecting its overall success. Nevertheless, sharing our experience could be a good starting point for other supervisors’ consideration. It may even inspire fellow supervisors to undertake a similar or another initiative, with a shared goal of fostering a supportive culture for doctoral scholars.  

The ideas here are drawn from a chapter called ‘ “It Is a Nice Way to End the Week”: Journal Club as an Authentic and Safe Learning Space’, which is featured in our most recent book called ‘Developing Researcher Independence Through the Hidden Curriculum’. At its core, it fosters doctoral collaboration and challenges the orthodoxy of competition by endeavouring to build a strong sense of community and peer support instead.  

So, what did we do?  

Being led by two supervisors and our multidisciplinary group of doctoral scholars, with whom we have the privilege to work closely, we have been promoting the importance of interdependence among our doctoral scholars through engagement in a Journal Club. What does taking part in the Journal Club entail, I hear you say? 

‘JCs involve a group of scholars who meet to read and critically discuss articles from the academic literature. JCs offer flexible paths for students to take turns being the leader (i.e. the designated person who facilitates the session) while other participants contribute to the discussion (Swift, 2004). It is a form of interdependent learning whereby peers rely on and mutually benefit from their exchanges with one another.’ (Makara et al., 2023) 

Our discussions are then guided by the following questions: 

In Makara et al.’s (2023) book chapter, Journal Club participants conducted an autoethnographic study of their experience of actively engaging in the Journal Club. Collectively, they reported its primary benefits in three domains – personal learning, academic learning and positive group dynamics, among others. Participants also reported that this regular collective time together provided a ‘safe space’ to discuss and ask questions. 

As their supervisors, this is our personal response to the challenge of thinking differently and contributing to a gradual change in the deeply entrenched and prevalent competitive spirit as a norm among doctoral scholars and as a means of successfully completing their PhD. Through collaborative scholarly activities, they can see for themselves first-hand how mutual support effectively enhances their research and research experience. 

Equally, we (supervisors) view Journal Club activities as an authentic way of enhancing doctoral learning via critical engagement with the literature. Likewise, we use the Journal Club to support academic writing while strengthening doctoral scholars’ understanding of publication standards, with a view to increasing their chances of publishing their research. What’s more, building a collaborative group enables spaces for reciprocal academic as well as psychological support, which is critical given doctoral scholars’ experience of long isolated working conditions, at times leading to doctoral well-being concerns.  

Through Journal Club, we strongly convey how crucial being an active and supportive member of a community is – not only during their doctoral years, but beyond – as they pursue a career in academia, industry or elsewhere. You may say that this is our way of nurturing these Early Career Researchers (ECRs) during their PhD years. 

What about you? In your context, what possibilities of building a supportive culture for doctoral scholars do you see? 
 

(*I would like to acknowledge all the members – past and present – of our Journal Club. Currently, our members include Dr Kara Makara, Dayana Balgabekova, Karen Gordon, Melissa Meng, Zhihan Wu, Jin Yu and me.)