title: Understanding the contributions of UKRI-funded cohort-based doctoral training models to the doctoral journey from the perspective of the individual student experience
Creators: name: Kneafsey, Mary Beth
Publisher: name: University of Glasgow
Year: 2024

description: This dissertation interrogates the value, from the student perspective, of the contributions that the ScoMsh Graduate Schools (SGSs) make to the doctoral journey. These are national (ScoMsh) graduate schools and thus support large numbers of students (approximately 500 at any one time, concentrated in larger universities) across multiple institutions (19 in total) where local institutional organisational structures and disciplinary environments already exist.

Nine students registered at the University of Glasgow who had completed at least two years of study (full or part-time) funded by a national graduate school were interviewed. They were asked about their motivations for doctoral study and their networks of support, to describe what helped or hindered them most as doctoral students, what sort of training and development they participated in, and what roles the SGSs played in their experience. This was designed to elicit discussion of broad factors and/or actors that contributed to their doctoral experience to get a sense of how the SGSs fit into the bigger picture rather than solely discussing the role of the SGSs.

A thematic analysis of the interview data illuminated themes of community, connection, complexity, and bureaucracy in the student experience. Both challenges and opportunities were evident: (1) doctoral journeys remain highly individual, while institutional structures are designed to deliver for the perceived needs of as many students as possible; (2) actors in the landscape responsible for the ‘delivery’ of doctoral education or support o\en act independently of one another, leading to duplication of effort; (3) the variety of opportunity in the landscape provides many developmental opportunities yet that same variety can also be overwhelming and/or frustrating to manage. Interviewees valued the development opportunities but what they said was most important to them and helped the most on their doctoral journeys was the day-to-day interaction and support from peers, colleagues, and supervisors.

The evidence supported the idea that learning is social activity through which meaning and identity are negotiated, and that PGRs exist in what is described here as a landscape of practice. This landscape is made up of intersecting, overlapping and diverse communities of practice and can be described through Wenger’s (1998) description of learning as experience, doing, belonging and becoming. The data supports an observation that the SGSs were added to an already complex landscape and that their value has been assumed. There is strong evidence of their value in terms of the funding and opportunities for training and development but also of the ways that they may create unhelpful complexity. The key recommendation is that we as a sector should be taking a wider view to assess what we do and why we do it in order to minimise duplication, remove unnecessary bureaucracy, and focus on the student experience rather than on the outcomes of that experience.