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This chapter discusses textography as a strategy for researching academic writing in higher education. Textography is an approach to the analysis of written texts which combines text analysis with ethnographic techniques, such as surveys, interviews and other data sources, in order to examine what texts are like, and why. It aims to provide a more contextualized basis for understanding students’ writing in the social, cultural and institutional settings in which it takes place than might be obtained by looking solely at students’ texts. Through discussion of the outcomes of a textography, which examined the written texts submitted by visual and performing arts doctoral students at a number of Australian universities, we reflect on what we learnt from the study that we could not have known by looking at the texts alone. If we had looked at the texts without the ethnographic data not only are there many things we would not have known, but many of the things we might have said would likely have been right off the mark. Equally, had we just had the ethnographic data without the text analysis, we would have missed the insights provided by the explicit text analysis. The textography enabled us to see the diversity of practices across fields of study and institutions as well as gain an understanding of why this might be the case, all of which is of benefit to student writers and their supervisors.

Evaluation of research is a core function of academic work, yet there has been very little theoretical development about what it means to ‘know’ in relation to judgements made in examination of doctoral research. This chapter addresses the issue by reflecting on findings from three projects aimed at enhancing understanding of doctoral examination. In order to progress understanding about knowledge judgements in the doctoral research context, the chapter draws on two key contributions in the field of knowledge and knowing, namely, Habermas’ cognitive interests and Chinn, Buckland and Samarapungavan’s notion of epistemic cognition. It examines the common ground between the two bodies of theory, drawing illustratively on empirical work in the field of doctoral examination. The comparison of the Habermasian theory of cognitive interests with Chinn et al.’s notion of epistemic cognition led to the conclusion that there were areas of overlap between the two conceptual schemas that could be utilised to advance research into doctoral examination in higher education. Habermas’ cognitive interests (which underpin his ways of knowing theory) offer a conceptual lens that facilitates analysis of the interaction of ontological and epistemic components of knowledge production. Chinn et al.’s notion of epistemic cognition allows for finer grained analysis of aspects of the cognitive work involved in knowledge rendition. This work is particularly pertinent in an era that sees the boundaries of the disciplines being challenged by the need for new perspectives and cross-disciplinary approaches to solving complex problems.

The aim of this study is to examine how reviewers for academic journals learn to carry out the task of peer review and the issues they face in doing this.

A total of 45 reviewers completed a questionnaire which asked about their experience in doing peer reviews, how they had learnt to do them, and the issues they faced in doing these reviews. Follow up emails were also sent to reviewers in order to seek further elaboration on the answers they had provided in the questionnaire.

Over half of the reviewers had learnt to do reviews by reading reviews of their own submissions to peer‐reviewed journals. Others had learnt to write reviews by just doing them; that is, by practice. The most challenging aspect for the reviewers was writing reviewers' reports that were critical but still constructive. There was no consensus on the most straightforward aspects of writing peer reviews.

The study has implications for reviewer development, proposing an experiential, “learning by doing” approach to the training of reviewers rather than a didactic, information transmission style one.

The study has implications for reviewer development, proposing an experiential, “learning by doing” approach to the training of reviewers rather than a didactic, information transmission style one.

The study provides insights into how reviewers learn to write peer reviews and the challenges they face in doing this. The paper also suggests strategies for improving reviewer development which can have benefits, especially for early career researchers.

In this chapter, we introduce readers to the volume, a collection of 13 inquiries that employ the methodology of self-study in teacher education practices (S-STEP) in culturally and linguistically diverse settings across the globe. After sharing the purpose and origins of the project, we provide an overview of the volume’s organization and brief summaries for each study. As a whole, the collection addresses two pressing yet interrelated challenges in teacher education research: understanding teacher educator development over the career span and how these scholar-practitioners prepare teachers for an increasingly diverse, mobile, and plurilingual world.