Seminar with Dr David Hyatt, Senior Lecturer in the School of Education, University of Sheffield
Seminar with Dr David Hyatt, Senior Lecturer in the School of Education, University of Sheffield
Towards the critical inclusion of doctoral students – troubling hierarchies through decentering and decolonising pedagogies
This seminar aims to trouble and reconfigure the traditional relationship between a doctoral student and ‘supervisor’ in terms of its power differential, often characterised as an asymmetric, hierarchical expert/novice dyad, which can trap supervisory relationships in a ‘transmission’ or ‘training’ mode, with students receiving ‘instruction’ from ‘experts’.
How can we rethink, disrupt and disorient dominant conceptions of doctoral pedagogy, to build a more collaborative, collegial ‘decentred’ approach to supervisory work?
This work, drawing on interdisciplinary theoretical and conceptual resources from cultural sociology, anthropology, organisational studies and education, argues the liminal spaces students pass through offer opportunities for relational, productive and decentred pedagogies, where supervisors/advisors construct ways of valuing their students’ expertise, and facilitate a critical inclusion within the academic discourse community.
Doctoral pedagogies should aim to develop repertoires of successful members of the discourse community – mirroring professional ways of being, and doing research work.
A student’s doctoral repertoire will be indexical and biographical, grounded in the plethora of networks, communities and resources they learn through, and forming a distributed patchwork of competencies, dispositions and values.
The seminar discusses recommendations for doctoral pedagogic practices and the implications such decentring orientations have for decolonising doctoral pedagogies.
Dr David Hyatt is the Director of Learning and Teaching for the School of Education at the University of Sheffield, where he is also Deputy Director for Teaching Excellence at the Faculty of Social Sciences.
He mentors staff across the faculty on the development of their learning and teaching scholarship.
David is a highly experienced doctoral supervisor/advisor and examiner. He holds a Senate Award Fellowship (Sustained Excellence in Learning and Teaching) and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
David’s current scholarship in this work focuses on relational and decentred approaches to doctoral pedagogy, seeking to reconfigure the relationships between supervisors and doctoral candidates and their peer community of inquiry.
The approach to supervision championed by David advocates supervisory/advisory practices that support students in becoming members of an academic discourse community, via a process of critical inclusion, and through mirroring the authentic activities, repertoires and attributes of practicing academics.
David’s research has also engaged with the discursive analysis of educational policy. He has developed an innovative framework for conducting discursive analysis of educational policy.