Expanding the doctoral development conversation

By Kay Guccione, Head of Research Culture and Researcher Development

This article is based on the book chapter: Guccione, K. (2025) A whole culture approach to doctoral education. In: Creaton, J., and Gower, O. (eds.) Prioritising the Mental Health and Wellbeing of Doctoral Researchers: Promoting Healthy Research Cultures. Routledge: Abingdon-on-Thames

A contextualised approach

It has been decades since those designing doctoral programmes have thought of a doctorate as an experience that is determined entirely by the intelligence and academic performance of the individual candidate. The value of a doctorate is understood as being more than it’s resulting academic credential; it, when seen as a process of development, is a personal opportunity for testing and learning about the self, and for acquiring a wide range of valuable personal and professional experiences and social contacts (Bryan and Guccione, 2018). Placing a ‘cultural lens’ on the doctorate, and paying attention to the structures, opportunities and people who enable researchers to thrive within their working environments, can support us to supervise in a way that that considers the broadest needs of doctoral learners, and creates confident, independent and engaged graduates.

Consideration of the social development of postgraduate researchers within their individual contexts is now firmly present within the doctoral education literature, and in the design of contemporary doctoral programmes, though it is not always evident in doctoral experiences at the micro-level i.e. within research groups, led by the actions of the individual supervisor.

What each PGR deems ‘of value’ will be unique. Doctoral researchers have diverse past and ongoing lives, different personal and professional motivations for embarking on their doctoral journey, and a range of aspirations for their careers during and post-doctorate. Consideration of the doctoral candidate as a whole person existing within a working culture and personal and societal context helps us to focus on the idea of creating a personalised study experience, rather than a uniform one. This can be achieved by placing the researcher at the centre of a curated web of supportive relationships and networks that create rich opportunities for developmental conversations, that help them to navigate and prioritise their work, and their career ahead.

To enable this rich culture of learning, the formal doctoral learning curriculum and traditional academic relationships can be supplemented with informal, often hidden, sources of learning and support, leveraging the doctorate’s hidden curriculum (Elliot et al, 2020).

Leveraging ‘hidden learning’ to create a culture of development

The doctoral learning ecology model (Elliot et al, 2020; p97) recognises the cultural context for learning in that it describes the diverse landscape of formal and informal or tacit (‘hidden’) academic and non-academic opportunities, regarded to be vital parts of doctoral learning, increasing candidates’ chances of achieving successful completion and career success.

The learning ecology model also presents a second notion of ‘culture’ – in that it recognises the processes through which a doctoral learner adapts to life within their discipline. It states that doctoral development requires communication of the tacit rules of the academic discipline. This is what Lee (2012) refers to as a process of ‘enculturation’ into the norms and the discipline.

Achieving the conditions for optimal personalised and contextualised academic, emotional, social, and psychological growth as promised by the hidden curriculum (Elliot et al, 2020; pp130-131) calls for the design of doctoral programmes in which we establish a variety of different pedagogies and supporting players (hidden curriculum agents), with each being relevant for the specific form of learning and support that individual doctoral researchers require. This broadening of support sources, whilst still acknowledging the central role of the supervisor(s) as a critical source of guidance and enculturation, supports us to also recognise the natural limitations of supervisory support and its relative ‘fit’ with the wide-ranging professional development and social support needs of individual doctoral learners (Cornér et al., 2018). If we consider how we can complement and supplement supervisory support by facilitating access to a multi-layered community of people (Wang et al, 2023), we not only provide a variety of fitting support types (Mantai & Dowling, 2015), but we open up ways to relieve the pressure on our already overloaded doctoral supervisors.

If we seek to be proactive in the development of the collegial cultures that facilitate rich doctoral learning we need to make the introductions! There are several access points into which we can design the time, spaces, and permissions that enable wider collegial dialogue. Below, I suggest three ways that supervisors can make small and gradual adjustments to achieve this.

Firstly, we can promote the growth of enabling cultures for doctoral learning by reimagining traditional sites of intellectual activity. This could involve, for example, rethinking and adjusting common features of academic life such as journal clubs, peer review, and research presentations. Supervisors can shift the primary focus of the above examples, from that of being a corrective or conclusive process designed to generate rigourous outcomes, to being one of enabling the exploration, ideas testing, and critical reflection that precedes rigourous outcomes.

For example, rather than a journal club in which a single group member presents their critique of a newly published article, doctoral participants can be encouraged to anonymously collate and then prioritise their questions for group discussion. A second example is a peer review process in which doctoral researchers and academic staff work together to discuss their impressions of the manuscript and to consolidate their feedback into a single set of recommendations for the author(s). A third, is the adaptation of doctoral presentation spaces to support doctoral audiences to work together to formulate effective seminar questions and feedback to the presenter.

Secondly, we can work to enhance the quality of learning dialogues by employing the tools and techniques developed within the coaching profession. Unlocking the most developmental benefits of collegial dialogue requires the application of purposefully designed conversations with specified rules of engagement (Guccione, 2023). Within effective coaching-style conversations, the role of the conversational is not only to proffer opinions and information, but to support the learner to process and make sense of their experiences and new information, and having evaluated their options, to turn this into future action. Delivering a coaching-informed conversation involves putting aside our tendency to advise, in favour of listening, and supporting enquiry, reflection and the raising of self-awareness, trusting doctoral learners to make their own choices (Guccione and Hutchinson, 2021).

Thirdly, we can help postgraduate researchers to understand the importance of informal dialogue with a range of colleagues, to their doctoral success. It is empowering for PGRs themselves to understand that reflective dialogue is worth their time and can support them in their quest towards a successful doctoral outcome. Having the knowledge that discussing and processing the new information they gain related to their research topics can actively help it to be embedded into learning and practice, is important way of helping them to prioritise participation in activities they may at first glance have dismissed as being peripheral to the ‘core’ tasks of the research degree – seminars, networks, training, workshops and meetings for example.

Increasing the visibility and value of developmental dialogue covers two important aspects – sites of delivery and sites of appraisal. Increasing visibility and value through the sites of delivery of learning conversations can be achieved though adding structure and formality to traditionally informal support modes such as buddying or peer-mentoring, reading/writing groups, supervision of undergraduate projects, or engagement in researcher communities. For example we can overtly note their value, what practices are developed, and what beneficial outcomes they bring. In parallel, increasing visibility and value through the sites of appraisal could be illustrated and celebrated for example through annual progress reviews, training and development planning and review, and career planning activities.

In looking at the difficult work carried out by postgraduate supervisors, as key gatekeepers and facilitators of access to collegial learning conversations, it is worth highlighting how learning to supervise and practicing good research supervision, also has its own hidden curriculum, and that an essential part of creating a holistic culture of development for doctoral students, is creating the same elements of support for their supervisors.