Inclusive doctoral recruitment and development: considering challenges and possibilities 

Dr Sherran Clarence, Senior Lecturer, Doctoral Education and Development, Nottingham Trent University

What does ‘inclusion’ mean to you, in a higher education context? Who needs to be included and who is responsible for including them? These questions need to be reflected on carefully and critically in doctoral candidate recruitment and researcher development. This is because this a significant entry point into academic knowledge-making work for new voices, ideas, bodies and perspectives. Academia needs these new bodies and voices, and the experiences, knowledge, perspectives and ideas researchers who offer them are building and sharing through their doctoral research and writing. But we cannot take their inclusion for granted.

Research in the US and here in the UK shows us that many researchers from racially minoritised backgrounds and those who identify as queer or transgender, as two examples, still find themselves on the outside of research communities and at the receiving end of discriminatory treatment from supervisors and colleagues. As a result, many struggle to feel like they are fully visible and belong within their research environments. This research into inclusion and representation in academia raises vital questions for those working in doctoral education and development, about our processes of recruitment, and the training, supervision and development work we do.  

The first set of questions relates to recruitment: how do we widen our recruitment process meaningfully, so that people who have previously felt that a PhD is not a valid choice for them can see themselves taking on and successfully completing a doctoral project? One of the ways in which we have addressed this at Nottingham Trent University (NTU) is through the development of a Competency-Based Admissions Framework (CBAF). This framework has been developed and piloted in consultation as part of the EDEPI project (Equity in Doctoral Education through partnership and Innovation). At its core, the Framework seeks to widen the kinds of skills, knowledge and capabilities we look for in prospective candidates, and in the process widen our definition of success at this level. Specifically, we want to look past purely academic or project-specific qualifications as a basis for success to consider more fully what prospective candidates offer the university, and the transferability of their existing skills, knowledge and capabilities.  

For example, can a prospective candidate provide evidence of a situation where things have not gone to plan, and how they have adapted and persevered through the challenge? This kind of resilience is vital to successful study at doctoral level, where researchers need to be and become independent over the course of their studies. How have they solved tricky problems in the past? Where and how have they shared their work in the past, and what have they learned from communicating with different users of the research or work they’ve done? How do they manage their time and cope with different demands and overwork? And so on. The Framework has a question bank organised around three core areas that have been identified as pertinent to success at this level: comprehension and evaluation, which include questions that delve into analytical and problem-solving ability, communication skills, and planning and organisation; socio-emotional competencies, which include questions about prospective candidates’ motivation, curiosity and resilience; and finally delivering results, where questions focus on relevant aspects of academic integrity, independence, and working with others.  

The Framework can – and ideally should – be used from the first stages of recruitment, where a project outline is written, and communication channels are chosen for advertising the project. What kind of ‘person spec’ are you writing, and what kind of candidate is likely to see themselves in that? Who are you likely recruiting if you only choose academic channels? In one of the projects where NTU has been exploring inclusive recruitment, Co(l)aboratory, project adverts are shared in academic and public channels, the latter including free local publications such as LeftLion and local radio stations. Each project brief also includes a clear person spec, and the application requires prospective candidates to reflect on their experience with problem-solving, adapting to change, dealing with challenges, and on their academic achievements and scholarly readiness for doctoral study.  We’ve found this enabled us to recruit candidates who had not really considered a PhD prior to finding this programme, and who are constructively challenging many of our ideas and assumptions around what success means at this level of study. 

The second set of questions relates to doctoral development and training: how do we engage doctoral candidates once we have recruited them, so that their experiences, perspectives and knowledge are genuinely seen, heard and taken into account in how researcher development is designed and enacted? This includes supervision practice. This is a challenging piece of work, as it starts with those who have already succeeded to some degree and are versed in the ways of knowing, being and doing valued within the university and our fields/disciplines. Diversity can be a rich resource for knowledge-making and research work, but to be such a resource different voices and perspectives need to be heard, space needs to be created and held open for ‘the way we do things here’ to be questioned and perhaps changed; we need to work to avoid what Catherine Manathunga has termed assimilationist pedagogies of supervision and development that assume a dominant path to success that is not inclusive or representative. But being challenged and having ways of working that are part of an academic’s identity critiqued or challenged can be very difficult and even painful, so supervisors and researcher developers need support and resources to help them think and work in new and different ways.  

There are challenges and risks associated with genuinely widening recruitment and participation in doctoral study – we may worry about supervision capacity, candidates’ readiness, completion rates and quality – and all these issues need to be carefully considered and discussed relative to each university context and the available resources. But our work at NTU so far, and the work of others at the University of Warwick on pre-admission communication, for example, has shown the possibilities we create when we widen access and support mechanisms to enable success – for knowledge development, for growth, for change, for learning, for connection – are worth the work.