The ph d and beyond the apprenticeship model of learning

PhD & beyond:the apprenticeship model of learning

Professor Paul Maharg

http://www.slideshare.net/paulmahargpaulmaharg.com/slides

preview1. The apprenticeship model – what’s it good for

2. Occluded genres in academic study & beyond

3. Anxieties of influence

4. Questions, comments, war stories, parables, other narratives…

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Narrative ... is a form whose fundamental characteristic is to produce closure; argument is the form whose fundamental characteristic is to produce difference and hence openness.

Kress, G. 1989. ‘Texture and meaning.’ In Narrative and Argument, ed. R. Andrews, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 12.

John Dewey (1859-1952)‘A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjointcommunicated activity.’

Democracy and Education(1916)

‘Academic occluded genres are, in part, those which support the research publication process but are not themselves part of the research record.’

Swales (1996, 45)

academic occluded genres

In reverse order of seniority:

1.Request letters (for data, copies of papers, advice, etc)

2.Application letters (for jobs, scholarships, etc)

3.Submission letters (accompanying articles, books, etc)

4.Research proposals (for outside funding, etc)

5.Recommendation letters (for students, job seekers, etc)

6.Article reviews (as part of the review process)

7.Book or grant proposal reviews (as above)

8.Evaluation letters for tenure or promotion (for academic committees)

9.External evaluations (for academic institutions)

Swales (1996), 47

examples of occluded genres

Journal editor letters


Response to reviewer

letters


letters

EmailEmail

Published articles

Published articles

Conference presentatio

n


n

Grant proposals

Grant proposals

Conference abstracts


Response to reviewers


Reviewer evaluationsReviewer

evaluations

Submission letters

Submission letters

Journal article

Journal article

ManuscriptsManuscripts

Res

earc

h ar

ticle

publ

icat

ion

genr

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letters


letters

EmailEmail

Published articles

Published articles


n


n

Grant proposals

Grant proposals





Reviewer evaluationsReviewer

evaluations

Submission letters

Submission letters

Journal article

Journal article

ManuscriptsManuscripts

Res

earc

h ar

ticle

publ

icat

ion

genr

e cl

uste

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Feak (2009,18)

• Yes! And we never learned them at Edinburgh• Seek out opportunities to learn them through PhD &

early career and beyond• We all need to (re-)learn them, eg Maharg & PFHEA• Useful text: Swales & Feakin (2004).

are occluded genres part of PhD apprenticeship?

• Even more so!• The genres still exist but in

different & mediated forms –new contexts, processes, etc.

• New genres are emerging

do we need to learn them in our digital age?

• The academy can exclude, suborne, oppress private lives

• We are not just legal academics, and we can create our best work whenwe explore what we’ve done in our lives, who we are, our intellectual influencesand affective bonds.

• See text of Interview: PM & MM

our lives contain occluded genres

‘Now is your time to begin Practices and lay the Foundation of habits that may be of use to you in every Condition and in every Profession at least that is founded on a literary or a Liberal Education. Sapere and Fari quae sentiat are the great Objects of Literary Education and of Study. … mere knowledge however important is far from being the only or most important Attainment of Study.

The Habits of Justice, Candour, Benevolence, and a Courageous Spirit are the first Objects of Philosophy the Constituents of happiness and of personal honour, and the first Qualifications for human Society and for Active life.’

Adam Ferguson, Lectures, 1775-6, fols 540-1, MSS, Edinburgh University Library,quoted Maharg (2007, 109-11)

the academy occludes genres, too

Non tu corpus eras sine pectore; di tibi formam,di tibi diuitias dederunt artemque fruendi.Quid uoueat dulci nutricula maius alumno,qui sapere et fari possit quae sentiat, et cuigratia, fama, ualetudo contingat abunde,et mundus uictus non deficiente crumina?Inter spem curamque, timores inter et irasomnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum;grata superueniet quae non sperabitur hora.

Horace, Epistles, I, iv

You are not merely a body without any feelings.You have been given beauty, wealth and the means to appreciate things.What more would a nurse wish for her sweet little oneThan wisdom, the power to express what he feels,Much kindness, health and fame,An elegant way of life, and enough money?Amid the hope and worry, fear and anger,take every day that dawns as your last –the unlooked-for hour will be a welcome surprise.

• Poets are anxious about powerful figures in the past, eg early Yeats is too strongly influenced by Shelley.

• They need to misread the texts of their strong precursors, revisioning the relationship, and at least in six ways or ‘tropes’, including tessera and clinamen.

• Misreading or misprision, like intertextuality, opens up latent, marginalised or hidden textual meaning, and it is possible to use it to explain and engage with the ideological complexities of powerful texts and ways of reading within hegemonic traditions. (Bloom 1980)

• All interpretation is misreading (Bloom 1974)

anxiety of influence (Harold Bloom)

• Santos takes Bloom seriously by misreading him: poems distort reality just as law does, and for similar reasons (Santos 1987, 281)

• Santos’ use of clinamen is typically Bloomian in his emphasis on the creativity of the move: ‘the clinamen does not refuse the past; on the contrary, it assumes and redeems the past by the way it swerves from it’ (Santos 2007, 86).

Bloom & de Sousa Santos, part 1

• Constitutional arrangements, which are particularly porous, are always open to misprision: examples are the endlessly creative debates around the First Amendment in the USA – in Scotland, post-Referendum, the discourse of ‘reserved matters’ is another.

• As legal texts, constitutional documents tend to be more open to arguments of public policy and rights-based arguments.

• As such, they become shaping texts that, quite apart from the legislative authority they bear, are heavily symbolic of the self-identity of a community.

misprision and constitutions

• But just as in Bloom’s critique authors cover influences, or perform creative swerves around dominant predecessors in a culture of belatedness, so too does a constitution.

• Every constitution has a relationship to predecessors; and in addition to granting rights, it creates a normative mode of discourse that closes down future debate, prevents the development of new discourse, establishes its own autonomy. Maharg (2012)

Bloom and constitutionality

• Bloom’s work exposes the rhetorical nature of constitutional discourse and normativity that has the force of law’s violence

• Santos uses this to argue, particularly in his recent work, for a replacement of the ‘canonic tradition of monocultures of knowledge, politics and law’ by an ‘ecology of knowledges’, central to which is ‘the distinction between conformist action and […] action-with-clinamen’ (Santos, 2007, 85).

Quoted Maharg (2012)

Bloom & de Sousa Santos, part 2

the anxiety of influence in doctoral studies

(Some of) our anxious questions:•How original is my work?•How will my evidence & argument be interpreted?•Am I fitting into a canon? Challenging that canon? Creating an ‘ecology of knowledges’? How will I do that?•Is conformism what I want here?•How do I move out of apprenticeship, find my voice, join the full community?

the constitution of doctoral studies

Bloom, H. (1974). The Anxiety of Influence. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Bloom, H. (1980). A Map of Misreading. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Feak, C. (2009). Negotiating publication: Author responses to peer review of medical research articles in thoracic surgery. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 59: 17–34. Available at: http://publica.webs.ull.es/upload/REV%20RECEI/59%20-%202009/02%20Feak.pdf.

Maharg, P. (2007). Transforming Legal Education: Learning and Teaching the Law in the Early Twenty-first Century. Ashgate Publishing, Farnham.

Maharg, P. (2012). The identity of Scots law: redeeming the past. In Scottish Life and Society. A Compendium of Scottish Ethnology. Law, ed. Mark Mulhern. Birlinn Press & The European Ethnological Research Centre, Edinburgh.

Santos, B. de Sousa (1987). Law: a map of misreading. Toward a postmodern conception of law, Journal of Law and Society, 14, 3, 279-302.

Santos, B. de Sousa (2007). Beyond abyssal thinking: from global lines to ecologies of knowledges, Review (Fernand Braudel Centre), 30 (2007) 45-90.

Swales, J. (1996). Occluded genres in the academy: the case of submission letters. In Academic Writing: Intercultural and Textual Issues, Eija Ventola, Anna Mauranen, eds, John Benjamins Publishing, New York, 46-58.

Swales, J., Feak C. (2004). Academic Writing for Graduate Students. Essential Tasks and Skills. Second edition, University of Michigan Press.

references

http://publica.webs.ull.es/upload/REV%20RECEI/59%20-%202009/02%20Feak.pdf

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Email:[email protected]: paulmaharg.comSlides: paulmaharg.com/slides