Search results

This chapter discusses the process of initiating and developing an open and ongoing conversation about values within a doctoral community in an education research center located within a British university. To do this, the authors first articulate the local and institutional context of this specific doctoral community and the intersections of values declared by the host institution and the specific research center.

This chapter then moves on to describing the process of building an open conversation with postgraduate researchers (PGRs) and staff supporting them. This open conversation questions and explores the institutionally stated values, starting from collaboratively negotiated guiding questions and prompts. The discussion of responses to those prompts, obtained through an anonymous online platform, grounds then a discussion of how values can become relevant and rooted in everyday experience for PGRs. The authors, as a collective, use the concept of “boundaries,” emerged in the conversations themselves but also relevant in academic literature, as a linking concept for the discussion of the responses.

The discussion then concludes by articulating the broader impact of the engagement in these conversations about values within and beyond the boundaries of the host institution and argues for the importance of such ongoing conversations as fundamental elements of fostering value-based communities and cultures in higher education contexts.