SCUTREA Proceedings 2003
Disciplinary divides: finding a common language to chart research journeys
Nod Miller and Allan Brimicombe, University of East London, UK
Paper presented at SCUTREA, 33rd annual conference, University of Wales, Bangor,
1-3 July, 2003
Starting points and backgrounds
Over the last two years we have been leading the development of cross-institutional research training for PhD students from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds. This initiative comes in part from the need to respond to the requirements of funding bodies and research councils for structured and formalised programmes of research training, but we are also motivated by our experiences of loneliness, isolation and confusion during our own doctoral studies, and the knowledge that such feelings are not uncommon. We also recognise that it is difficult for even the most conscientious of supervisors to satisfy all the needs of postgraduate research students for skills development through individual supervision.
Allan has a background in geo-information studies and surveying, and has a research orientation which is primarily quantitative and focused on the analysis of large data sets, while Nod comes from adult education and media studies and inclines towards qualitative analysis and the exploration of texts and subjectivities. In order for us to work together, we have had to question many of our own assumptions about what constitutes research and knowledge production and to search for a common language through which to explore our individual and shared experience. We have debated at length about the use of models, theories and metaphors in our individual disciplines, and argued about the extent to which these devices cross the borders between academic fields.
In this paper we explore some issues of language, epistemology and culture involved in working in an interdisciplinary context, and analyse our own attempts to find a common language for research planning and implementation. The aspect of adult education with which we are concerned is the training and support of doctoral students. In the process of designing research training programmes we have been provoked to reflect critically on our own research identities and cultural locations, so that we are also concerned with our own lifelong learning processes.
The policy and institutional context for research training
The DfES White Paper on The Future of Higher Education in England (2003) has given our work on research training added urgency and complexity, in view of the shifts (and contradictions) it suggests in the policy context. On the one hand the government’s aim is that the UK, through its human resources, transforms itself into a knowledge economy. This is an economy in which information is both raw material and product, where workers are engaged in knowledge production and commodification (Castells, 1989, 1996). For such knowledge workers, the necessary research skills to create new knowledge from existing data and information will be indispensable. On the other hand, research resources are to be further concentrated in a small number of elite institutions and the implication is that some universities will not be expected to engage in research and the generation of new knowledge. The White Paper suggests the restriction of PhD awarding powers and by implication the number of higher education institutions using the PhD as a vehicle for research training.
We work in an urban, post-1992 university situated in one of Britain’s most culturally diverse and economically and socially disadvantaged boroughs. The student population reflects the demographics of the region, and the university has been both recognised as at the forefront of widening participation initiatives and castigated for high ‘wastage’ rates. The university has high RAE scores in media and cultural studies, social sciences and art and design, but much of its innovative research activity does not fit neatly into the categories recognised in the RAE. There is considerable anxiety among our colleagues about the threats posed to the development of our research culture by the implications of the White Paper, and about the prospects of the higher degree opportunities for students from the communities the university serves (which include many who are poor, black, female, disabled or otherwise marginalised or disadvantaged). We have been concerned to contribute as far as we can to safeguard the university’s position by establishing research training programmes which meet the requirements of funding bodies and research councils as well as enhancing the student experience. HEFCE has recently issued a consultation document (Improving standards in postgraduate research degree programmes, 2003) in which it proposes a set of core standards which include the requirement that ‘appropriate arrangements be in place to develop research and other skills, as evidenced by the existence of a training programme’.
Developing a model for research training
Much of our time during the last two years has been taken up with the design and validation of a set of multidisciplinary programmes of research training leading to awards at postgraduate certificate, diploma and master’s level. We piloted a condensed version of the Master of Research programme in a series of workshops open to all PhD students across the university. Those who participated came from diverse disciplinary backgrounds including psychology, health and biosciences, cultural studies, science and technology policy, engineering and business. For the most part, the staff group for the programme has been made up of three academics (ourselves and a colleague from business studies, Dr Sandy Cripps), although a number of other colleagues made guest appearances in some sessions.
The series included skills-based workshops covering such areas as online information retrieval, IT skills for researchers, the use of Internet resources for research and the presentation of research findings to varied audiences. It encompassed debates about the nature of research and scientific method and evaluation and critique of contrasting methodologies and approaches to data analysis and interpretation. There were presentations on political, legal and ethical aspects of research, and a series of tales from the field from experienced researchers. Under the heading of ‘managing the research process’ we discussed practical and affective issues faced by researchers and heard about the problems experienced by research students in respect of time management; emotional challenges; and roles and relationships. Some participants wanted to share their uncertainties about defining a topic and about what was acceptable in a finished thesis.
The workshops were based on a model of experiential learning, with time given over each week to reflection groups, which provided opportunities for discussion of the frustrations and achievements encountered by participants in the course of their research activity. We strongly encouraged students to keep research journals and to draw on these in their weekly meetings. The reflection groups proved a particularly popular feature of the workshop series, as were the sessions where we began to compile a map of the PhD research journey, incorporating a 14-page document produced by the university’s graduate school to summarise regulations and procedures applying to research degrees as well as turning points, critical events and emotional shifts culled from the individual and collective experience of students.
Mapping the PhD process
Our map, which is still in development, is illustrated in Figure 1. It grew out of intense and sometimes uncomfortable attempts to find a common discourse to talk to each other and to the students about research activities which differed sharply in relation to theoretical orientation, methodological approach and assumptions about knowledge and truth (‘truth’?). We became anthropologists in other colleagues’ academic tribes and cultures, constantly interrogating each others’ rituals, language and dress codes and approaches to learning as well as research. Civil engineers, sculptors and feminist film historians eyed each other warily in the course of the PhD workshops, and one person’s cheery embrace of truth-free postmodernity was decoded by another as if it were expressed in incomprehensible cuneiform lettering. We found some of the literature on academic territories and the culture of disciplines (see, for example, Becher 1989 and Brew 2001) helpful in providing a framework for understanding the deep-rooted differences between colleagues from divergent subject areas that we were learning about experientially during our discussions and the linguistic confusions we stumbled into during workshops. The wide variety of nationalities and social and religious groups as well as disciplines represented in our meetings added further to the possibilities for cross-cultural learning as well as misunderstanding.
In our discussions of the PhD research process we reviewed a broad sample of texts on research, ranging from monographs on the philosophy of science via methodological manuals to the growing body of books giving practical advice on how to complete a PhD. Workshop groups tended to be at their most animated when talking about their hitherto private practices in and feelings about research; for example, a reading of a chapter from Becker’s (1986) text on writing for social scientists provoked a lively exchange about strategies for avoiding writing and some shameful confessions about personal rituals observed in relation to academic production. Becker’s language clearly spoke across disciplinary divisions in capturing humorously as well as wisely the embarrassment, insecurity and fear of exposure experienced by many graduate students.
Phillips and Pugh’s (1987) text on how to get a PhD was another which gave rise to spirited debate. Some students found the authors’ advice on how to manage supervisors instructive (particularly those who attributed superhuman status to their supervisors and in whom the notion of managing these beings involved a major paradigm shift). But there was consensus that the authors gave inadequate attention to the matter of how to handle emotional challenges and the stress induced by juggling too many identities and responsibilities, despite the promise in the subtitle of their book (‘managing the peaks and troughs of research’). Their diagram of a time-based programme of work, depicting the PhD process as ‘the progressive reduction of uncertainty’ (1987: 74) was seen by most students as bearing a very tangential relationship to their lived experience. A theme which ran through all the discussions about the research road map which we were constructing together was the importance of representing affective as well as cognitive experience and development. The concept of ‘the wilderness years’ spent wandering in confusion in the middle of a lengthy programme of doctoral research, named by a group of second- and third-year part-time PhD students, rapidly caught on as a code for referring to low points in the research experience and for invoking a self-reflexive reminder to avoid taking oneself too seriously.
Struggling with integrated codes
The three of us in the staff group mirrored the students in our struggles to reach shared understandings and to find models and metaphors which travelled well across disciplines. Our awareness grew of the way that formal institutional structures in universities can often act as barriers to interdisciplinarity.
We have found some helpful insights which have aided our attempts to theorise about our experience of negotiating disciplinary boundaries and borders in Basil Bernstein’s work on educational codes and the ordering of curricula and pedagogic forms (Bernstein 1977; 1990; for applications of Bernstein’s framework to earlier examples of interdisciplinary projects see Miller, Leung and Kennedy 1997; Miller and West 1999). Bernstein sees the way in which educational knowledge is organised through the educational system as reflecting and reproducing patterns of power and control in the society in which that system exists. He outlines a typology of educational knowledge codes in which any organisation of knowledge which involves strong classification gives rise to what he calls a collection code; any organisation of educational knowledge which involves a marked attempt to reduce the strength of classification is defined as an integrated code. Our work may be understood in terms of an attempt to understand research in the context of an integrated code, as we attempt to pull together knowledge drawn from a variety of disciplines and subject areas, and to blur the boundaries between, for example, the ‘expert’ knowledge drawn from academically sanctioned texts and the everyday understanding generated by students as they reflect upon their personal experience. As Bernstein indicates, a shift from collection to integrated code may be perceived as a threat to the existing order:
It involves a change in what counts as having knowledge, in what counts as a valid transmission of knowledge, in what counts as a valid realization of knowledge, and a change in the organizational context. At the cultural level, it involves a shift from the keeping of categories pure to the mixing of categories; whilst at the level of socialization the outcomes of integrated codes could be less predictable than the outcomes of collection codes. This change of code involves fundamental changes in the classification and framing of knowledge and so changes in the structure and distribution of power and in principles of control. It is no wonder that deep-felt resistances are called out by the issue of change in educational codes. (1977: 105-6)
The perspectives offered by Bernstein go some way towards helping us to understand some of the tensions we have experienced in the course of our work.
Conceptualising the research process as a journey
In the original sense a journey is the act of moving from one place to another. The journey of life also includes both the passage of time and phase changes in our being as we age, learn and develop. A journey is therefore an apt metaphor for the research process. In our work with research students we have found it helpful to conceptualise the PhD process as a journey, and to use metaphors of travel to examine researchers’ experiences. The PhD journey, like foreign travel, involves the exploration of unknown territory and encounters with unfamiliar cultures. The experience is as much emotional as cognitive, and aspects of the journey may be exhilarating, frightening, puzzling, stimulating, exhausting or tedious. For many PhD travellers, the journey is aided, and sometimes hampered, by fellow-travellers and people met along the way. As well as offering practical training in skills which could aid travellers, we are developing tools which we hope will enable them to navigate bureaucratic barriers, interpersonal relationships (with, for example, supervisors and peers) and the occasional emotional swamp. We see an important element of our task as being to provide maps and travel guides, including (to revert to the metaphor of this conference) phrase books and language primers.
It has been important both for the students and for ourselves to try and transcend the discipline-specific context of our research and to focus on the research process. One might not expect a student researching murals in Los Angeles to have much common ground with a student researching the stress of primary school children in learning mathematics. As we strip away context we find that they can relate to one another in discussing their experiences of the research process.
Language is also an issue in this process. The word mapping, for example, is used in a number of disciplines. To a geographer or surveyor, a mapping would be the creation of a cartographic representation of some place. A computer scientist in mapping different databases establishes those fields having common semantics and data types. Despite appearing very dissimilar, both cases have a commonality: they are establishing equivalence between two entities and the transformation process of going from one to the other.
Learning journeys of professors of very different things
Allan: What has this latest journey meant for me? I have migrated across disciplines before. As a geography graduate, my first job was for consulting engineers. I had to learn engineering, not so much as to become one, but to understand how I could work with them and how I could evolve my skills, methodologies and products so as to become a valued member of the team. In academic life, however, my teaching was very much an individual thing – just me and my class. Where modules were syndicated, it would be one staff member at a time. In the area of research, most of the contact would be with peers largely from within the same discipline. So to undertake inter-disciplinary teaching jointly with staff from diametrically opposing research areas was to wander out of the ‘comfort zone’ I had so long enjoyed. I needed to think carefully about my assumptions on what constituted research and how it should be approached. I needed to think carefully about the language I used so as not to assume discipline-specific meanings. This was a challenge, but in the end it has been rewarding as I feel I have now grown beyond my previous confines.
My research focus is on space and the attributes and meanings of place. People have tended to be represented by aggregate statistics and the intangibles of place, such as its aesthetics, largely irrelevant if they cannot be reliably quantified. Along this new journey, I have had to take note again that places as well as people are individuals each with their own individual autobiographical story and individual journey. Previously my analyses were almost exclusively of quantitative data. As a result of this latest journey I have begun to see value in qualitative data, and I have purchased a qualitative data analysis package. I consider myself only a novice in this area but I have certainly broadened my definition of data that are relevant to my area of research.