Supporting Academic Writing and Publication Practice: PhD Students in Engineering and their Supervisors

Supporting Academic Writing and Publication Practice: PhD Students in Engineering and their Supervisors This poster documents the bottom-up efforts leading to the establishment of an academic writing support program for doctoral students at an engineering university in the Czech Republic (CR). To defend their dissertation, by law Czech doctoral students have to have published their research. Moreover, many faculties require their doctoral students to publish in prestigious English-medium journals, which is a challenge even for the students’ supervisors. Although publication requirements prior to dissertation defence are becoming common in many countries (Kamler and Thompson, 2014; Kelly, 2017), Czech students often face a challenge of writing in the absence of any prior writing support, where insufficient knowledge of English only adds an extra hurdle to the already difficult task of argumentation absent in Czech schooling. CR has a comparatively high number of doctoral students, but also alarmingly high drop-out rates with more than 50% students not finishing their studies (Beneš et al., 2017). In part, this is due to the students’ difficulties to publish (National Training Fund, 2019). This challenge could be addressed with systematic writing development, but Czech educators and dissertation supervisors are not commonly aware of composition being teachable as we learned from our preliminary study on writing support in doctoral programs in several Czech universities (Rosolová & Kasparkova, in press). While supervisors and university leaders tended to see writing development as a responsibility of the students, the doctoral students were calling for systematic support.  We strive to bring attention to the complexity of writing development and introduce a discourse on academic writing that conceives of academic writing as a bundle of analytical and critical thinking skills coupled with knowledge of rhetorical structures and different academic genres. We show how these skills can be taught through a course drawing on the results from a needs analysis survey among engineering doctoral students, the target population for this course (for more information on the survey, see Kasparkova & Rosolová, 2020). In the survey, students expressed a strong interest in a blended-learning format of the course, which we base on a model of a unique academic writing course developed for researchers at the Czech Academy of Sciences, but not common in Czech universities. Our course is work in progress and combines writing development with library modules that frame the whole writing process as a publication journey ranging from library searches, to a selection of a target journal and communication with reviewers. Because we are well aware that a course alone will not trigger a discourse on writing development in Czech higher education, we also plan on involving a broader academic community through workshops for supervisors and a handbook on teaching academic writing and publishing skills for future course instructors. Colleagues at EATAW 2019 conference commented on the poster sharing their difficulties from the engineering context and for instance suggested a computer game to engage engineers. This resonated with our plan to invite our engineers into the course through a geo-caching game – for more, see Kasparkova & Rosolová (2020). References Beneš, J., Kohoutek, J., & Šmídová, M. (2017). Doktorské studium v ČR [Doctoral studies in the CR].  Centre for Higher Education Studies. https://www.csvs.cz/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Doktorandi_final_2018.pdf Rosolová, K. E., & Kasparkova, A. (in press). How do I cook an Impact Factor article if you do not show me what the ingredients are? Educare. https://ojs.mau.se/index.php/educare Kamler, B., & Thomson, P. (2014). Helping Doctoral Students Write (2nd edition). Routledge. Kasparkova, A., & Rosolová, K. (2020). A geo-caching game ‘Meet your Editor’ as a teaser for writing courses. 2020 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm), Kennesaw, GA, USA, 2020, pp. 87-91. https://doi.org/10.1109/ProComm48883.2020.00019 Kelly, F. J. (2017). The idea of the PhD: The doctorate in the twenty-first-century imagination. Routledge. National Training Fund. (2019). Complex study of doctoral studies at Charles University and recommendations to improve the conditions and results. Report for the Charles University Management. Prague

How Do I Cook an Impact Factor Article If You Do Not Show Me What the Ingredients Are?

Doctoral studies in the Czech Republic are highly individualized with little coursework outside the supervisor/supervisee dyad, and the PhD students are mandated to publish prior to the dissertation defense. This mandate is troublesome because writing development has been on the fringes of the Czech education culture. In addition, the publications often must be in English, and many doctoral students struggle with English. In this exploratory study, we examined how this mandate translates into practice, how doctoral students learn to meet the requirements and how university administrators/supervisors perceive doctoral writing development. To answer our questions, we interviewed 7 university administrators/dissertation supervisors and 7 doctoral students from various backgrounds and universities, looking for diverse views on the issue. Our analysis confirmed the formal status of supervisors as the key doctoral writing literacy brokers. While the supervisors acknowledged their role, they also tended to view doctoral writing as a matter of self-study and funding, thus indirectly emphasising the publication outcomes. In contrast, doctoral students called for structured support of their writing processes. We propose a systemic approach to introduce writing pedagogies into the Czech discourse. With this study we hope to contribute to research on doctoral writing for publication of EAL (English as an Additional Language) students in Central Europe.

EATAW 2021

Two years have gone by, and it is time for us to meet again. Because the EATAW conference alternates with the conference of the European Writing Centers Association (EWCA), our plan had been to build on EWCA’s theme of “empowerment” in writing centers planned for the meeting in Graz in 2020. However, the covid-19 pandemic hit and EWCA could not take place. A year later, it was far from clear whether EATAW could take place, or in which form. We debated this a great deal, asked you all in a survey and then decided to go online, crossing our fingers that enough people would register. And here we are, ready to see you virtually on July 7 and 8, 2021 and still connect to EWCA intentions with our theme “The residence of writing and writing support.” If you are wondering about the connection of this theme to empowerment, we were thinking that the various forms and approaches in writing support and writing centers depend on where the support comes from and who provides it. Even though EWCA caters to writing center practitioners and EATAW to teachers, we all deserve to pause and revisit the foundations. More specifically, we should ask seemingly simple questions, some of which have been here for decades but may still be unanswered in certain contexts and/or in contexts that keep changing, such as the following: Who are we? • Who are we as teachers of academic writing? • What do we need to know directly to support academic writers at any level? • What else do we need to know to teach academic writers so that they can prosper? Where do we work? • Where DOES, SHOULD, and COULD writing support reside? • What are the different models universities have to support writing? • How is writing support defined? What is our field? • (How) has academic writing become a field? • How do we know? • How has teaching of writing made a difference in your contexts? How do technologies help us? • How digital are we? • How are we affected by the impact of technologies? • What has the pandemic taught us about the technologies? Who are other stakeholders in academic writing support? • How do libraries approach/support academic writing? • What is the role of journal editors, publishers, and reviewers? • Who have we lost, and what new partnerships have we made? Moreover, our theme explores the essence of our work and professional identity in an unprecedented time of the covid-19 outbreak that has put more things in motion than we could have ever imagined. Therefore, we added the question of: What has changed recently? • How has the residence of writing support changed as we have shifted to working remotely? • What have the quarantines taught us about the particular nature of proximity? • What have we lost/gained? We very much appreciate the wide interest of the EATAW community in the topics. We invite you to view this time as an opportunity for self-reflection and exploration of new things, and we are excited to see so many fascinating responses to the theme. Welcome to EATAW Conference 2021 and enjoy.Ostrav

Potřebujeme na univerzitách vyučovat Akademické psaní? Příklad dobré praxe z ÚJČ AV ČR a VŠB-TUO

V tomto Příkladu dobré praxe představujeme výsledky společného projektu dvou českých pracovišť v oblasti podpory vědecké komunikace, akademického psaní a publikační praxe v angličtině. V textu stručně popisuje10 kurzů Publikační praxe, včetně principů, na kterých kurzy stojí.  Kurzy se staly páteří PhD Akademie na VŠB-TUO a zapojila se do nich i Ústřední knihovna této univerzity. Ke kurzům jsme dále připravili v našem kontextu ojedinělé školení pro budoucí lektory kurzů, manuál pro lektory jako podporu během jejich lektorských začátků a také seminář pro školitele. Argumentujeme ve prospěch systematické strukturované výuky odborného psaní na všech úrovních vysokoškolského studia