Search results

Studies of inequality in higher education on both undergraduate and graduate levels have rarely examined experiences of Asians and Pacific Islanders (APIs). In this study, we focus on the experiences and outcomes of API students in doctoral education. More specifically, we examine socialization experiences and research productivity of three groups of students: domestic API, international API, and domestic white students. The results, based on a national cohort of PhD students in biology, reveal notable differences in experiences and outcomes of domestic and international API students. Although variation in socialization experiences explains differences in research productivity in the first year, that is not the case in the second year of doctoral study. In the second year, international API students have publication productivity comparable to their white peers, despite less favorable socialization experiences. Domestic API students, however, have lower research productivity than their white peers, even though they have comparable socialization experiences. Given the presumption of APIs’ success, especially in the STEM fields, findings for domestic API students are surprising and not aligned with the model minority stereotype. Contributions to research on API students, doctoral education, and socialization theory are discussed.

This chapter focuses on academic freedom in the experiences of Black/African American doctoral students and presents an examination of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students (https://www.aaup.org/report/joint-statement-rights-and-freedoms-students) based on research and practice on the marginalized doctoral student experience. Discussion addresses AAUP policy Statements: Section I (freedom of access to higher education), Section II (freedom of expression in the classroom), and Section III (freedom of inquiry and expression). The purpose of this work is to increase awareness of issues serving as barriers to student rights and freedoms related to self-expression, cultural bias, and student activism at the doctoral level. Strategies that disrupt, minimize, and/or eradicate barriers to actively maintain and pursue student rights and freedoms will be addressed to emphasize their importance to supporting and/or hindering academic success, doctoral degree completion, and creating/sustaining pathways of transition into the career pathways.

Although established for the purpose of educating Black Americans, recently, many HBCUs have been witness to a steady increase of White students (Shorette II & Arroyo, 2015). And, with projections that non-Black student enrollment will continue to increase at HBCUs (Palmer, Shorette II, & Gasman, 2015), strategies for supporting the changing demographics are needed. This chapter presents selected findings from a larger quantitative investigation examining the impact of faculty–student engagement on the experiences and perceived persistence, or belief that one will complete a doctoral program, of White doctoral students at HBCUs. Results indicated external engagement, i.e., social components for student success external to a student’s academic program and research practices, was a best predictor for optimal experiences and increased belief in self for program completion. Directions for future research and practice are offered.

In this paper, we take up an autoethnographic review of literature on doctoral programs in order to engage notions of doctoral subjects. While the paper basically proceeds by taking up and entwining these methods, it is neither/both an autoethnography nor/and a literature review. Rather, this work – like many spaces of a doctoral seminar – emerges as an uncontainable, unpredictable monster. We have also placed a kind of “I” at the center of this project, and yet use a posthuman reading of what this “I” might be. We search for a preconfigured “I” in the literature and create an “I/we” of doctoral experiences that never quite exists and yet moves and haunts us. We take up a tentative (post-)monstrous position that recognizes our cruel attachment to the “good” doctoral student, a subject that remains the inevitable (im)possibility of graduate school. Reviewing literature as an ethnographic practice and looking at ethnography as textual helps us smash these methods together. Yet, at any moment, we defy our methods – ignoring findings in the literature and possibly making up autoethnographic stories that never happened to us. Rather than sloppy academic work, this move intends to focus on thinkable and intelligible experiences as those belonging to doctoral students/studies/school instead of focusing on “authentic” experiences of well defined “researchers.” We hope our project provides space to question the very categories and credentials built into doctoral studies by decentering the “doctoral student” subject.

As educational institutions continue to call for greater accountability and learning outcomes take center stage, faculty, administrators, and institutions alike must assume a broader, more holistic approach to teaching and learning. As outlined in this chapter, technology and virtual spaces, when utilized well, can radically shift how graduate faculty can help doctoral students become critical and reflective thinkers, to develop or refine a professional identity, and help them to transform their assumptions about their knowledge and about themselves, a process that Kegan (1994) and Baxter Magolda (1999) call self-authorship. Using digital narratives as part of a technology-mediated classroom that is built around learning partnerships and principles of self-authorship is one way to accomplish this. Such an approach can lead to innovative practices in the classroom, deeper, more reflective learning for students, and greater overall success for our institutions. By combining multimedia tools and technology with an adult learning-centered pedagogy built around self-authoring practices of student development, faculty can more effectively organize doctoral education to engage and involve students in the process and to truly cultivate a new generation of doctoral students as scholars, researchers, and practitioners.

Drawing on data from 399 Swedish doctoral theses, this chapter explores the epistemological foundations of higher education research. Using an analytical framework whose elements are the institutional organization of researchers and knowledge, the object of study, and the object of knowledge, we found that higher education research is mainly a concern for the older universities and for research subjects within the educational sciences and, secondarily, the social sciences. The prime objects of study are topics related to teaching, followed by issues of system policy, institutional management, and knowledge work. Studies of academic work and quality are almost non-existent, and comparative studies and international perspectives are rare. Regarding the object of knowledge, doctoral students’ choices of research approaches, theories, and methods point to a diversified analytical toolbox, although dominated by text-based analyses and qualitative methods, especially interviews and documentary studies, and a range of learning and institutional theories.

We are long overdue for a conversation about ethical treatment of student researchers. Ethical treatment of research participants has been carefully defined through decades of public conversation, and ethical practices have been institutionalized through mechanisms like mandatory ethics trainings and Institutional Review Boards. Student researchers deserve the same level of consideration. While there are many types of ethical violations of student labor in research projects, there are two that are of particular concern to social movements researchers: use of volunteer labor without clear academic or professional benefits, and failure to ensure the safety of student researchers. The first of these ethical violations is especially common in social movements research because of the emergent nature of protests: new rounds of protests begin and researchers seek to rapidly collect data on a tight timeframe, making grant funding to pay student researchers challenging. The second situation emerges when faculty researchers do not consider the ways students' race, gender identity, or other characteristics, or the nature of the protests themselves might create potential risks for students.

In this paper, I propose using the Belmont Report principles to create guidelines for ethical treatment of student researchers. While these principles were developed for the purposes of protecting research participants, the principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice help us to clarify the risks and benefits for student researchers, to find ways to maximize the benefits of student research participation, and to understand and address the inequalities that plague graduate student training.

In this chapter, we review the ways in which scholars have conceptualized and relied on the notion of identity to understand the academic career. We explore the use of identity as a theoretical construct in research about the experience of being an academic. We discuss the individual and organizational factors that scholars have focused on when seeking to understand the role of professional and personal identity in academic careers, as well as recent and emerging shifts in the use of identity within this line of scholarship. Research suggests that if we are to understand the future of the academic career, we must understand the identities of its current and prospective members and, more importantly, how those identities shape goals, behaviors, and outcomes. We close with recommendations for future research and theory development.

“Academic values” is one of the most popular terms used in the higher education literature. But how do we study academic values? Besides autonomy, freedom, and collegiality, the “values” in “academic values” often remains implicit, leaving a conceptual gap in the literature. Moreover, autonomy, freedom, and collegiality may reflect the shared normative expectations as part of the value system of a profession, rather than the value orientation at the individual level. To examine the latter, this chapter proposes a conceptual framework adapted from the studies of work values in applied psychology. As a heuristic device, the academic work value framework consists of six ideal-typical value orientations belonging to three dimensions: work autonomy, social orientation, and value of knowledge. The framework's relevance and usefulness are evaluated by revisiting relevant literature on academic orientations. The result shows a spectrum of value positions in academic work, from the “old school” values to the “entrepreneurial” ones to the hybrid orientations. Overall, this framework provides a potential approach to operationalize the concept of academic values for empirical research. At the same time, as a heuristic device, it is open for reflection, critique, and further development.