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As part of a two-semester advanced research methodology course, five PhD students completed three sketches--beginning, middle, and end of course--to represent how they were thinking and feeling about themselves as doctoral students as they progressed through their first year. They also wrote reflections to complement the sketches and shared their sketches in class. At the end of the course, the students co-led a study with their two instructors to examine their learnings and understandings gained from sketching. The students wrote individual narratives about their experiences and the instructors wrote narratives about how sketching was part of their pedagogical thinking. The analysis revealed seven student themes, including positive outcomes and challenges associated with sketching. One positive outcome was that students felt empowered as the sketches gave them the opportunity to reflect back on their progress, both cognitively and emotionally, over their first year of doctoral studies. Sketching itself was a challenge for some, but all felt that it was a powerful experience. Sketching provided the instructors with insights they might not have gotten through words alone, enhancing their sense of teaching and learning, and gave them valuable information to support the students.

Interprofessional education (IPE) occurs when students are provided the opportunity to learn with and from others of related professions to improve the potential for future collaboration. The aim of this study was to explore the perceptions of students about working with professionals from different disciplines before and after their engagement in an interprofessional learning activity and determine any changes in their willingness to work in interprofessional teams. Doctor of Pharmacy students from the University of Manitoba and Master's speech-language pathology students from McMaster University participated in an online inter-university and inter-provincial education module. Students were invited to complete the Interprofessional Socialization and Valuing Scale (ISVS-9B) and three open-ended questions to capture attitudes toward interprofessional teams before and after the IPE event. A mixed-method approach was used to assess changes in attitudes, values, and comfort with collaborating. A total of 20 students completed the pre-survey and 19 completed the post-survey; significant changes in total ISVS-9B scores were observed. Four questions of the ISVS-9B also showed significant positive changes after the IPE event. Qualitative themes were identified from responses to the open-ended questions: collaboration optimizes patient care, collaboration is fostered by clear communication, learning from peers increases knowledge and appreciation of professional roles, and IPE fosters the potential for future collaborations. This study suggests that a virtual IPE event tailored to pharmacy and speech-language pathology trainees may be effective in fostering future interdisciplinary collaboration through increasing knowledge and appreciation of other professional roles with a primary goal of optimizing patient care.

Background: Mentorship is critical to success in postgraduate science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine (STEMM) settings. As such, the purpose of this study is to comprehensively explore the state of mentorship interventions in postgraduate STEMM settings to identify novel practices and future research directions. The selection criteria for reviewed articles included: (1) published between 2002 and 2022, (2) peer-reviewed, (3) in English, (4) postgraduate mentees, (5) a program where mentorship is a significant, explicit focus, and (6) a description of mentee outcomes related to the mentorship intervention. Overall, 2583 articles were screened, and 109 articles were reviewed. Results: Most postgraduate STEMM mentorship intervention studies lack strong evidence to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention, with only 5.5% of articles designed as randomized controlled trials. Most mentorship interventions (45.6%) were created for faculty, and few (4%) were for postdoctoral researchers. Also, only 18.8% of interventions focused on underrepresented groups in STEMM. Most interventions (53.7%) prescribed a dyadic structure, and there was more mentorship training for mentors than mentees. Conclusion: Overall, these findings identify gaps in mentorship interventions and provide step-by-step guidance for future interventions, including a consideration for underrepresented groups and postdoctoral scholars, robust mentorship training, and more randomized controlled trials.

Educators, researchers, and institutions have long recognized experiential education's value for fostering ongoing learning and skill development. In recent years, experiential education has gained increased traction in higher education, based on recognized need for graduates to encounter and actively reflect on lived experiences in various disciplines. Yet, much of the research in graduate-level experiential education focuses on discipline-specific opportunities, often within the context of individual programs where students' career outcomes and program pathways are narrowly defined. In this paper, we examine experiential education as interdisciplinary practice. Through qualitative analysis of interviews, focus group, and data from a collaborative program evaluation, we respond to a gap in existing research to examine the perspectives of doctoral students from multiple faculties, programs, and degree types engaged in an interdisciplinary experiential education program. The study's findings contribute to a more robust understanding of the potential for experiential education as interdisciplinary practice, with direct examples of how doctoral students and higher education institutions are moving this work forward in this context. Research implications include examining similar interdisciplinarity in other contexts and reflection related to equity, diversity, inclusion, and Indigenization initiatives. Practice implications include aligning participant and program goals across disciplinary contexts.

Gaining ethical approval for qualitative health research and implementing all the planned research processes in a proposed study are not straightforward endeavours. The situation becomes more complex when qualitative research is conducted in a cross-national healthcare and academic context. Also, it is even exhausting when the study is student-based, as student researchers may be considered novices and inexperienced researchers, especially for field-based research. Our aim in this reflective paper is to present, reflect, and discuss the experiences of a doctoral researcher in dealing with two independent institutional review boards in Canada and Ghana during an interdisciplinary Ph.D. project and the ethical dilemmas encountered while collecting data in Ghana. Based on the researcher's experiences, it became apparent that consent and its documentation can have cultural implications in different settings; hence, institutional review boards must exercise reflexivity in their protocol review practice. Also, sharing research data with participants and institutional leaders while maintaining participant confidentiality and privacy in institutional ethnographic research requires sensitivity to bi-lateral ethical values. With the experiences shared in this paper, we advocate for a dialogic ethical review process in qualitative research where researchers and research ethics boards engage in ongoing dialogue rather than the usual prescriptive format research ethics reviews often assume.

As PhD students and sessional lecturers, we undertook a collaborative narrative study to explore our pedagogical and curricular approaches to decolonizing a community development course offered in our College of Education. We gathered our conversations, reflective journals, and notes, then wove together the narratives thematically using a métissage research methodology. We discovered ways we come together in the spaces in-between our different experiences, backgrounds, and worldviews, as Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators, decolonizing our curriculum and our students' classroom experience. This paper shares one of the thematic braids we created, focused on the use of story for research, story as pedagogy and story for building relationships. We encourage educators to consider bridging their worldviews with other ways of seeing and knowing, to work toward decolonizing their teaching practices using story, and to form relationships across differences using story. [Articles in this journal were presented at the University of Calgary Conference on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching.]

International mobility programmes, both in-person and virtual, aim to build human capital. Though there is evidence of their impact on skill development, there is scant research on career and professional benefits. Moreover, because virtual mobility is a new concept, there has been little investigation into how this mode affects the perceived benefits. Using the lens of human capital theory, this study explores outcomes of in-person and virtual mobility in the Queen Elizabeth Scholars-Advanced Scholars programme, which includes doctoral, post-doctoral and early career scholars. Through interviews with 23 scholars, we explore the perceived impact of the programme, considering mode of delivery, on the career and professional development of scholars. Despite challenges with the unexpected shift to virtual mobility during COVID-19 lockdowns, both in-person and virtual mobility scholars reported benefits to their career and professional development. These results suggest that virtual mobility may be considered as a viable option to enhance the flexibility, inclusivity, and accessibility of such programmes.

Prior research has established the importance of the supervisor-doctoral candidate relationship and highlighted the importance of mentoring practices for the successful completion of doctoral theses/dissertations in the online environment. This article presents the findings of a survey with faculty members who work as supervisors in online and blended doctoral programs, and e-mentor students working on dissertations, or did so at a distance as a result of COVID-19. The survey was designed around the five sections of technology use in e-mentoring, strategies related to communications and expectations, strategies related to research processes, strategies related to emotional and social support for students, and institutional support, with a focus on which technologies and strategies faculty found most helpful. The results of the e-mentoring survey are presented and discussed in the context of prior literature and future research.

The purpose of this research project was to explore doctoral student learning and development as scholarly practitioners through one innovative method: a course-based self-study. This self-study empowered doctoral candidates in three key forms of data collection: 1) two project-based course assignments; 2) a survey on course-based student learning; and 3) a self-reflection on learning in the self-study. Results indicate positive impacts in addressing real-life problems and in connecting students to cohort members. The application of skills and knowledge in a course-embedded self-study connects to the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) principles of creating scholarly practitioners and also developing activist leaders who build coalitions and focus on researching real life social justice issues. This study can serve as an exemplar for similar EdD programs who are developing scholarly practitioners.

As a discipline, educational psychology is somewhat idiosyncratic in terms of content and methodologies. Such idiosyncrasies are likely rooted in the philosophical history of the discipline which involves both the empirical tradition of Thorndike and the contextualized pragmatics of James and Dewey. Despite this, there is little teaching about epistemological and ontological beliefs in most educational psychology doctoral programs. The purpose of this research was to (a) describe educational psychology doctoral students' epistemological and ontological beliefs and (b) determine the effectiveness of a four-part activity in supporting students' learning about epistemology and ontology. This study represents scholarship of teaching and learning. We analyzed 14 doctoral students' responses to a four-part activity to describe their epistemological and ontological beliefs. Second, we used a parallel convergent mixed method design to analyze quantitative and qualitative data describing students' learning from the activity. Students showed eclectic epistemological and ontological beliefs that were overall more epistemologically relativist than realist. For ontology, there was much more variability on the extent to which students believed truth exists and can be known in the discipline. All students, regardless of their epistemological and ontological beliefs, showed growth through the in-class activity. This is the first study to describe the epistemological and ontological beliefs of a sample of doctoral students in educational psychology. The results of this study and the pedagogical materials on which they are based can help the discipline itself and its students become more aware of its philosophical history and diversity.

This article presents the Holistic Empowering Methodological Approach (HEMA), which is philosophically informed by the concept of diversity by design; epistemologically and methodologically guided by hermeneutic phenomenology; and supported by the method of qualitative survey combined with the Single Question Aimed at Inducing Narrative (SQUIN) technique. This is a methodological conceptual article whereby the development and application of the HEMA is illustrated through the study that examined the learning and professional development experiences of disabled and neurodiverse PhD students in library and information science (LIS) programs amid the lingering COVID-19 pandemic and explored their academic lifeworlds. The article critically assesses the merits and shortcomings of the HEMA and provides other researchers with a roadmap for replicating the HEMA in every phase of research: from brainstorming to the selection of methods, to data collection, analysis, interpretation, and reporting. In so doing, the article also strives to reaffirm the vitality of rigorous qualitative methodology in studying underresearched, minoritized, and marginalized communities. From the scholarly worldview to specific methodological choices, this framework advocates for the type of research that puts participants in the "driver's seat," giving them agency and providing the opportunity for self-definition and self-determination. The nuanced presentation of a holistic methodological approach, with particular attention paid to the issues of methodological rigor and quality control, will be of benefit to both beginner and seasoned researchers and can serve as an educational aid in research methods courses and dissertation supervision.

The study systematically assesses the determinants impacting Ph.D. success, amalgamating insights from 38 meticulously curated studies. Through the integration of PRISMA, TCCM, and an 8-step process, it delineates crucial findings and factors influencing successful Ph.D. completion. The PRISMA diagram intricately outlines the data retrieval process, while the TCCM framework systematically organizes discoveries, emphasizing elements crucial to Ph.D. achievement, including timely completion. Previous studies encompassed 17 theories (T), five essential characteristics (C) or factors, nine distinct countries or contexts (C), and diverse methodologies (M) encompassing qualitative, quantitative, and mixed approaches. Institutional factors emerge as the most prominent within the corpus of 38 studies at 65.79%, followed by demographic, financial, and psychological factors at varying degrees, with social factors contributing minimally at 7.89% to Ph.D. progression. The research meticulously follows an 8-step process throughout its developmental trajectory, underscoring critical determinants impacting Ph.D. candidates' satisfaction, advancement, and persistence. The study's limitation lies in including 38 studies based on specific criteria. By consolidating prior works, conducting critical analysis, and comparing findings, it offers insights into factors affecting successful Ph.D. attainment, guiding institutions, policymakers, funders, and Ph.D. students. Additionally, it pioneers the field by advancing methodologies through integrating PRISMA, TCCM framework, and 8-step approaches, paving the way for future research endeavors.

As online doctoral education continues to grow, faculty members are faced with mentoring an increasing number of students. To effectively support these students' research projects, faculty mentors need to develop strategies that take into account the unique challenges of online environments. This study, based on Crawford et al. (2014) theoretical framework for online graduate mentoring, aimed to identify the strategies used by faculty members who advise online students in Educational Technology doctoral programs during research experiences. The data was collected through a survey completed by 24 mentors, and five of them also participated in individual interviews. These mentors were faculty members in online educational technology programs in the USA and Canada. The study found that faculty mentors used strategies associated with both the academic and psychological domains of Crawford et al.'s framework. The practical implications of these findings are discussed in relation to enhancing the quality of mentoring in online doctoral education.

In this study, we explore how accounting doctoral students fared during the pandemic. We survey accounting doctoral students from Canada and the United States and perform quantitative and qualitative analyses of the responses. We situate our research within social cognitive theory, and our findings suggest that accounting doctoral students experienced some stress and burnout due to exhaustion. Most students coped using healthy strategies; however, we highlight correlations between stress and burnout for those who didn't. We also propose a series of possible interventions that can be adopted to support retention and future recruitment efforts. Some of these interventions reflect long-standing challenges faced by accounting doctoral students, such as increasing financial aid and having better-supported faculty to supervise students; however, many new challenges emerged because of shifts in doctoral studies during the pandemic and will require more innovative solutions.

This article continues the discussion of the experiences of disabled and neurodiverse Ph.D. students in Library and Information Science programs in American and Canadian universities, following up on the previous report that addressed their struggles during and in the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. This article directs attention to their experiences in Ph.D. programs irrespective of the pandemic and focuses on both existing barriers and support mechanisms. Based on the results of a qualitative, online, self-administered survey, guided by hermeneutic phenomenology, the study identifies barriers rooted in attitudes and perceptions; policies and procedures; information and communication; physical spaces; virtual spaces and technology; and access to support services and networks. At the same time, an only mitigating factor and an only sustainable and consistently mentioned support mechanism was the good will, compassion, and supportive actions of individual faculty members. The article places the analysis and interpretation of empirical data in the context of academic ableism, conceptualizing the situation of Ph.D. students as a lingering state that was not improved even through the lessons and experiences of the pandemic.

Amid the growing body of research on disability and neurodiversity, disabled and neurodiverse Ph.D. students are not often in the focus, despite the fact that Ph.D. students occupy a unique position of a learner-scholar-teacher in academia. A particular gap is felt in the field of Library & Information Science (LIS). This study stands to address this gap by focusing on the experiences of disabled and neurodiverse Ph.D. students in American and Canadian LIS Programs during the COVID-19 pandemic and in its immediate aftermath. Guided by the Holistic Empowering Methodological Approach (HEMA) that puts participants in the driver's seat and allows them to determine the nature and extent of participation, the study spotlights participants' experiences during the remote learning and returning to campus phases of the lingering public health crisis. The findings show that while there was a fair balance of positive and negative experiences during the earlier stage of the pandemic, the stage of returning to campus was associated with additional challenges and an overwhelming number of negative experiences. The article addresses personal, program-related, and environmental factors in both positive and negative experiences, using the findings as a basis for conclusions and recommendations to Ph.D. program administrators and faculty.

This corpus-based study explores the expression of gratitude in the acknowledgement section of doctoral dissertations in both English and Arabic. The objective is to analyse how gratitude in academic discourse is structured in these languages and to explore any differences related to gender. The study examines 80 dissertations (40 in English and 40 in Arabic), further divided by the authors' gender (20 male and 20 female for each language). Data collection involved searching for doctoral dissertations from various sources, verifying the authenticity of the native language through biographical checks, and categorising the acknowledgements based on the year and field of study. The analysis utilised a mixed-methods approach based on Hyland and Tse's (2004) framework, enabling quantitative and qualitative text analysis. The study revealed distinct differences in gratitude expression patterns between English and Arabic dissertations: English acknowledgements often used performative verbs and adjectives, while Arabic acknowledgements primarily employed nominalisation. Notably, Arabic texts showed no use of passive constructions or adjectives. Gender-related differences were also observed, such as the preference for nominalisation among male Arabic authors and the preference for bare mention among female English authors. These findings underscore the significant cultural and linguistic influences on the construction of gratitude in academic acknowledgements. The research contributes valuable insights into pedagogical approaches to teaching academic writing and highlights the interplay between language, culture, and gender in scholarly communications.

Stress is a common negative emotion in students. Given the stress associated with doctoral studies, it is crucial to examine the influence of stress on well-being, program satisfaction, and retention in doctoral programs. This study examined stress-related issues and their relationships with intention to quit in a sample of 2,486 students enrolled in doctoral programs representing 38 disciplines. Participants completed a web-based questionnaire including sociodemographic and self-report measures assessing perceived stress, emotional, social, and psychological well-being, as well as program satisfaction and intention to quit. We tested three hypotheses based on Lazarus and Folkman's transactional theory of stress and emotions and Núñez-Regueiro's stress process model of school dropout. The results of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) supported the hypotheses of the study and showed that perceived stress is negatively associated with emotional, social, and psychological well-being. The most significant finding from this study is that perceived stress, directly and indirectly contributes to lower program satisfaction in doctoral students and a stronger intention to quit. These study findings underscore the need for departments to actively support students in completing their dissertations by establishing explicit expectation norms.

During dissertation writing, PhD candidates face challenges engaging with academic writing, among other things, which leads to their participation in writing retreats with their peers. Developing a better understanding of PhD candidates' needs to optimize engagement with writing is important for improving the overall doctoral experience and reduce attrition. We then conducted a qualitative longitudinal experimental study with PhD candidates from Canadian universities: 15 respondents who participated in a writing retreat and 15 respondents who never participated in such event. Based on our findings, this article presents a complementary perspective to the theoretical model of engagement with writing by Murray (2015). Thereon, we expand on the intersectionality of components (cognitive, physical, social) to illustrate the influence of structured writing activities. These intersections highlight the benefits of writing retreats to answer the needs of PhD candidates to engage with writing: planning dedicated writing periods, implementing effective work methods in environments enabling concentration, and engaging with collective writing activities. By way of supplementing the most recent literature on the subject, we suggest that the participation in structured writing retreats serves as a pedagogical benchmark for graduate programs to offer students comparable conditions in support of their writing requirements to enhance academic success.

In this paper, we critically evaluate the use of a weekly "rapid responses (RR) to learning" process in the context of teaching a graduate course on research methods over a three-year period. The RR process involved use of a short set of open-ended questions about key moments in learning that students complete, in writing, during the last five minutes of each class. The questions asked students to identify salient take-away messages, note when they felt the most and least engaged, name actions taken by anyone that were affirming or confusing, and consider specific "aha" moments. Our specific aim was to assess the following questions: What was the pedagogic value of the RR process? How did it inform our teaching and to what extent were there direct benefits of the process for students as well as for us as teachers? We found that the systematic feedback we obtained in this way supported weekly monitoring of student learning, facilitated response to trouble spots, and assisted in assessment of student engagement and classroom climate. It also provided insight into the efficacy of pedagogic strategies, such as student engagement in metacognitive learning, and models a process of instructors receiving feedback and being flexible to change. For instructors, the process enhanced motivation and professional development; plus, we found benefits in documenting instructor leadership and development. Finally, it facilitated deeper appreciation of the need to better integrate student self-assessment and the development of metacognitive skills as core components of the course.

There is an increasing number of Chinese graduate students who study in Canada and have quite different educational backgrounds. Despite a large number of studies attending to the challenges and difficulties they encountered in life and study, not much research narratively explores Chinese international students' academic adjustment experiences in graduate programs in Canada. To fill the gap, this research makes a narrative inquiry into three Chinese international students' academic adjustment in the graduate and doctoral programs of two universities in Ontario, Canada. The three-dimensional framework (Clandinin, 2006) is employed to tell and retell their stories. Their narratives have revealed the importance of their native languages and how their past experiences before they came to Canada influenced their academic adjustment. The Eastern and Western cultures have had a lasting effect on their personal and professional development. In addition, they have played multiple roles as Chinese international students, novice researchers, and future educational practitioners.

The doctoral defense is an important step in the doctoral journey and an essential requirement for obtaining a doctoral degree. Past research on the doctoral defense has focused solely on national practices. In this work, I investigate the potential link between the doctoral defense format based on its major and minor elements and the perception of the defense by the student. For this purpose, I first reviewed the different defense formats used internationally to extract the different elements of the doctoral defense, and the literature on students' perceptions of the doctoral defense. Then, I carried out an international survey which received 297 responses, of which 204 were completed surveys which I used for the analysis in this article. I first analyzed the outcomes of the survey using qualitative and quantitative methods, and then cross-correlated the outcomes of defense format with the outcomes of student perception. From this analysis, I observed that the defense elements that positively impact the student's perception are: publication of the thesis before the defense, receiving committee feedback before the defense, knowing the recommendations of one or more committee member in advance, having the supervisor present in the audience or as part of the committee, using a dress code, and including a laudatio. The final conclusion of this work is threefold. The first conclusion is that the details of the defense format impact most the students' perception. The second conclusion is that doctoral students, on average, value the defense as a positive experience. The third conclusion is that the defense format cannot influence two important aspects of how a student perceives the defense: the student's inner life and experience during the defense, and the behavior of the committee members.

In the mid-1990s with the birth of internet-based web technologies, ePortfolios emerged as a powerful tool in the institution of education. They are positioned within the online activities of courses and programs of universities, which are a subset of internet learning spaces. These interactions are located virtually on the internet and foster the development of various subcultures as demonstrated by graduate students completing their ePortfolio projects as a manifestation of internet culture. This paper reports on an ethnographic study conducted in three iterations of a capstone ePortfolio project course in a fully online post-secondary institution in western Canada. It also presents the interconnectedness of ePortfolios with the four constructs that underpinned my four years of online observation as a doctoral student in my role as a participant-observer of master's students in the final course of their program of studies. The findings based on the rich data collected on the perceived experiences of master's students offer stimulating discussion on the implications for future scholarship and research on ePortfolios as disruptive pedagogy for blended and online learning spaces.

There is little research on the socialization of doctoral students in Canada. Using survey data collected from 64 Canadian universities for the 2018 Academic Professions in the Knowledge Society project, this paper explores the reported doctoral experience of full-time academic faculty in Canadian universities who were "successfully" socialized to the role of scholar, to find potential factors affecting doctoral experience and career progression. This paper suggests that financial and faculty support are key to doctoral success. With disciplinary nuance alive and thriving, many contemporary doctoral students may be subject to unfair disadvantages, potentially one of the underlying reasons for high attrition from doctoral programs. Results indicate that teaching continues to be an overlooked aspect of doctoral training in favour of research; the associated faculty support which often accompanies research, along with the potential for funding for the research-related activity, may be significant factors affecting socialization in Canadian doctoral programs.

In this reflective writing, the author shares some experiences of learning to teach in higher education, the pathway she has taken on this online adventure, and how her online teaching has been influenced by the pandemic context.

Starting a career in academia is often fraught with uncertainty, turbulence, and isolation, as aspiring professors manage multiple, often contract-based roles in order to advance their curriculum vitae and secure a livelihood. In this research study, we use narrative inquiry to illuminate the role our critical friendship has played in our academic experience. Turning to the ethic of care (Noddings, 2006) as a theoretical and conceptual framework, we reveal to ourselves, and to the academic landscape, the common themes that contextualize academia for emerging scholars, including seeking employment, managing our roles as graduate students, dealing with tensions in the workplace, and managing the logistics of personal life events as they pertain to the workplace. The ethic of care was steeped into the continued development of each cyclical phase of our critical friendship (Wideman-Johnston & Brewer, 2014). Furthermore, our critical friendship provided empowerment, an overarching theme in our data, as we engaged with the joys and pains of being emerging academics through continued unguarded conversations (Baskerville & Goldblatt, 2009; Wideman-Johnston & Brewer, 2014). As our critical friendship grew more trusting and empowering, the fulfillment of "natural care" (Noddings, 2006) was realized. We share our findings to offer a new way forward, whereby authentic critical friendships provide the care necessary to empowering emerging academics.

The study aims to explore which factors influence international students' decision to pursue doctoral studies in Canada. Drawing on the push-pull model and the mechanism of educational decision making, this study uses semi-structured interviews to gather data and explores themes such as political and economic forces, institutional factors, social background and experience, and individual motivation in students' decision making. Our study identifies multiple factors at the individual, institutional, and country levels that influence students' decision making, including students' past experiences, funding, faculty members, and immigration policies. Moreover, it finds that the factors vary by students' regions of origin and disciplines of study. Our findings, focused on international doctoral students in Canada, add to the ongoing conversation about student mobility and add nuances on international students' decision-making process in times of shifting landscape of higher education internationalization.

In Canada, women are earning an increasing number of doctoral degrees; yet, they are less likely to secure a tenure-track position. A feminist thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 20 academic mothers from two Canadian universities reveals the range of challenges that mothers encounter in relation to care on the tenure-track. First, the theme of "fear of post-partum academic erasure" captured faculty mothers' experiences of feeling compelled to assert their physical and intellectual presence in post-partum during peak periods of infant care. The second theme, "the mommy tenure track and care choices," encapsulated academic mothers' experiences of feeling unsupported by the university in their pursuit of promotion and tenure given care responsibilities associated with motherhood. The final theme, "research while caring," captured the tensions academic mothers experience between the research process and caring. The findings of this research are particularly relevant in a pandemic and post-pandemic environment, where academic mothers have seen their care work swell to unprecedented proportions.

Living in transition while studying teacher education leads to multiple challenges for doctoral students as they situate themselves in the intersections with new sociocultural environments. The navigation process affects their personal and professional self-formation in constructing and reconstructing their multiple identities-making. In this paper, we, two Vietnamese female teachers, examine our life experience transitioning from Vietnamese to Canadian culture while pursuing our doctoral studies. The collaborative autobiography allows us to reflect, retell and relive our stories since we arrived in Canada. Through deconstructing our stories, we were amazed at the resonances of our tensions in new life-making experiences and perspective transformation in learning and conducting research. We hope our experiences are promising to shorten the gap in understanding experiences of those doctoral students composing life in similar education landscapes, which helps ease their difficulties and cultivate their academic and professional achievements. We also contribute more personal, social, cultural, and familial narratives to the dominant institutional narratives of Canadian teacher education.

"Accent work" is a term used to describe the preparatory work that professional actors undergo to attain a speech accent for a role. However, this article presents international teaching assistants (ITAs) as another set of workers who engage in their own type of accent work. Since the accents of ITAs are constructed as "liabilities" for communication-based tasks in English-medium universities in the Global North, their accent work entails ensuring that their speech is not a professional interference. Drawing on a narrative study done with 14 ITAs working in Ontario, Canada, the article details how the accent work of these ITAs consisted of working on or around their accents, which meant modifying accents to various degrees or engaging in tasks that did not require accent modification, respectively. These two practices of accent work were influenced by factors such as academic discipline, social locations, and audience. To conclude, the article offers preliminary recommendations on how accent work can particularly inform ITA training.

The doctoral defence is the oral examination of the doctoral thesis. While it is a major milestone for doctoral candidates, this event is often shrouded in mystery. In this article, I explore the doctoral defence from an international perspective. I have studied the format of the defence based on written testimonies as well as the literature on this topic. From this analysis, I distinguish four main elements of the defence format: (1) timing of the defence with respect to thesis publication, (2) number of steps in the defence, (3) public or private defence, and (4) the timeline of the defence itself. I then use these building blocks of the doctoral defence format to discuss differences and similarities between the formats, and finally to categorize defence formats used internationally by analysing the format of 26 countries, 24 of which use an oral defence format. The result is a deeper understanding of the defence format, which is valuable for candidates, committee members, supervisors, and administrators, and which can also serve the current discussions within the European Union on a standard format for the doctoral defence. Ultimately, understanding the defence format removes the mystery surrounding the defence.

This study examines the extent to which career competencies (knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to manage one's own work and learning experiences to achieve the desired career progression) are prevalent amongst early career researchers (ECRs). We adapted the Career Competencies Questionnaire [Akkermans, J., Brenninkmeijer, V., Huibers, H., & Blonk, R. W. (2013). Competencies for the contemporary career: Development and preliminary validation of the career competencies questionnaire. "Journal of Career Development," 40(3), 245-267] to ECRs' training and career specificities, considering the two career tracks facing them: within and outside academia. This questionnaire was sent to PhD students and junior PhD holders in 16 countries (n = 727). Our results show that career competencies for within and outside academia are clearly contrasted. Furthermore, compared with their female counterparts, male participants generally reported stronger career competencies in preparation for careers both within and outside academia, while PhD students perceived having more career competencies in preparation for careers outside academia than PhD holders did. We also found a positive link between ECRs' career competencies and their perceived employability, and those who perceived themselves as having strong career competencies were more likely to consider their current work meaningful. While most PhD holders pursue careers beyond academia, the concept of career competencies offers an innovative theoretical contribution to the field of ECRs' development, by highlighting how this population perceives their preparedness for diverse professional paths.

This paper examines the PhD by publication in the humanities and social sciences in US, UK, Canadian and Australian universities. A set of PhDs by publication from each of these countries were collected for the study. The theses were analysed to see to what extent they fitted, or not, with discussions of thesis types described in previous research into the PhD by publication. Interviews with students and supervisors were carried out to investigate the choices that students made in their writing. University rules for the submission of PhDs by publication and related policy documents are also examined. The study found that there seems to be a preference for different types of PhD by publication in each of the countries. In the US they were all prospective PhDs with the work being especially written for the thesis. In the UK, by contrast, retrospective PhDs, the PhD by published work, largely dominate. Canada was similar to the US, at least in the area of study where the data were collected for the paper, Education. In Australia, both prospective and retrospective PhDs were found, although it was the former, the prospective PhD, which dominated.

This qualitative research involved the development of 12 weeks of twice-weekly virtual maker professional learning (PL) sessions for K-12 and post-secondary educators at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The sessions were developed by four researchers from a maker lab in Ontario, Canada that moved entirely online in March 2020. The research question driving the study was: what are best practices related to virtual maker professional learning? Findings and implications related to this question include: a) technical issues should be anticipated and addressed in advance of each session; b) simple, hands-on activities are most effective for online maker professional learning; c) collaboration are pivotal to a rich online maker professional learning experience; d) using free, virtual tools is imperative for equitable access and learning; and e) adaptability is key when working with a diversity of learners/teachers from varied subjects and divisions.

Many doctoral students do not finish their studies. Social support has been shown to lower the likelihood of student withdrawal. I propose peer-mentoring as one of the practices that makes a significant difference in doctoral student attrition. In this longitudinal study, I investigated the influence of peer-mentoring on students' motivation and retention. Data were collected four times from 35 participants (a total of 140 surveys) in a Canadian university, where senior doctoral candidates mentored first year doctoral students. Data analysis indicates that students who received high levels of peer-mentoring experienced both steady and high autonomous motivation for their studies and low intention to leave. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Graduate programs typically expect students to publish their scholarly work; however, few researchers have investigated their experiences in publishing. What literature does exist suggests that mentorship through co-authorship is helpful in supporting the development of emerging scholars. Importantly, there were no studies exploring the perspectives of education graduate students regarding their publication experience. The researchers of this article were all affiliated with an education journal run by and for graduate students who encountered student-authors who were not well prepared to engage in the publication process. In order to understand these student-authors' needs, the researchers conducted a needs assessment through the framework of Experiential Learning Theory (Kolb, 2014). Specifically, this needs assessment provided voice to thirty education graduate students regarding their career aspirations, previous publishing experience, helpful influences, barriers, and needed supports to engage in the publication process. The findings suggested that the students in this needs assessment lacked formal instruction on how to navigate the publication process, and they perceived mentorship from supervisors, when it existed, as helpful. Implications for graduate training based on the findings are also discussed.

In response to a growing need for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to strengthen their teaching and learning skills, our university recently established innovative certificate programs that purposively incorporate experiential learning opportunities for deeper growth and development. Drawing on prior research and local needs assessments, we developed programs aimed to meet the identified needs of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. In this paper we describe how we planned, developed, and implemented these new certificate programs to engage graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from across our institution. Further, we discuss how these programs provide experiential learning opportunities for all participants. [Articles in this journal were presented at the University of Calgary Conference on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching.]

This paper explores Ontario's international education policy landscape through illuminating the discursive struggles to define international student funding policies, in particular the international doctoral students' Trillium Scholarship. Adopting Hajer's (1993, 2006) Discourse Coalition Framework, the study engages with three research questions: What paved the way to this funding policy? Who were the actors engaged in this policy landscape? How has the argumentation over this policy influenced the international education policy context in Ontario? Argumentative discourse analysis was used to analyze three data sources: news articles, policy documents, and interviews. Two storylines were identified: international student funding is desirable and beneficial to Ontario versus Ontario first. Whereas the first storyline achieved hegemony, the second succeeded in bringing discourses of protectionism to the forefront influencing the government's future engagement with international student funding. The paper ends with three observations on Ontario's international education policy landscape. This study contributes to our understanding of how international student funding can be highly political and influenced by non-education policy spaces and discourses.

There is widespread discussion about the need to develop and enhance the career prospects of PhD graduates, and many Canadian universities are seeking to provide professional development programs and mentorship specifically for doctoral students. This paper considers doctoral career preparation from the department level through an in-depth examination of how Canadian political science departments approach the issue, drawing on a survey of department chairs. We find that departments are supportive of professional development; while departments are not in the position to provide extensive programs and struggle to integrate efforts systematically, they are well-positioned to participate in collaborative approaches and welcome improved communication and coordination. We argue that graduate faculties should consult with departments and engage them in professional development program design, perhaps tailoring to specific disciplines as needed, and that departments should look for opportunities to work with graduate faculties before initiating their own programs.

The article deals with the research of special features of foreigners' integration and language learning in Canada as an integral part of adult education. The paper outlines a complex of basic scientific approaches such as system, structural and functional, andragogical, axiological, intercultural, and competency-based approaches. The study analyses a number of programmes for immigrants' integration in Canada, as well as language learning by adults. Critical overview allowed assuming that "Language Instructions for Newcomers to Canada" is the most popular programme among immigrants in this country. Taking into account the lack of similar programmes for foreign students in Ukraine and positive experience of Canada in this sphere, Lviv Polytechnic National University developed an elective course for international PhD students aimed at their adaptation in Ukraine. The article focuses on the features of the course which is based on the "Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada" programme. Its content component is based on the demands, individual needs and involves the acquisition of language skills and acquaintance with the culture of the country. At the end of the course, the PhD students took part in a survey. The results of the survey showed that in spite of some difficulties, it appeared to be quite effective and informative.

The growing number of international students studying at Canadian universities has exacerbated the need to address identity, cultural aspects of teaching, and the commonalities of different cultures through a transcultural lens. To explore these concepts, researchers conducted a qualitative study using a workshop format at a large university in western Canada with graduate students, postdoctoral students, and faculty members from multiethnic backgrounds (N = 9). Two questions were posed to precipitate the research: (1) What does being transcultural mean to you? (2) Have you experienced cultural dissonance as part of your professional life? In a series of three activities, participants explored how to use identity texts (written, spoken, visual, musical, or multimodal sociocultural artefacts produced by participants) as an intervention to foster transculturalism and reduce tension and dissonance in a cross-cultural educational setting. Results indicated that using identity texts increased self-awareness, built trust, enhanced belonging, and revealed common humanity, thus creating opportunities to develop a successful professional identity in a multiethnic milieu.

The doctorate and doctoral writing remain popular areas of inquiry and discussion, and yet very little research has empirically investigated the trends in dissertation types and how these trends might indicate broader changes in dissertation writing practices. This article builds on our recent work that investigated the macrostructures and research designs of 1,373 education-based PhD dissertations from five major Canadian research universities. In this current article, we more deeply explore the emergence in popularity of two 'alternative' or non-traditional dissertation macrostructures in education fields: the "manuscript-style" dissertation and the "topic-based" PhD dissertation. We highlight the popularity of these two dissertation types as evidence of shifting notions of what doctoral research and dissertations can (and do) look like in contemporary PhD programs. We focus specifically on these two dissertation macrostructures that were prevalent in our analysis, yet which are scarcely addressed in education-based dissertation resources. We provide a deeper reflection on the popularity of these dissertation models from our large-scale study, the ways these types of dissertations are organized at the global (macrostructural) level, and the chosen research designs, number of chapters, word counts, and authorship status (as either single-authored, partially co-authored, or mostly co-authored texts).

Peer and cohort interaction are essential elements in building a sense of community for doctoral students, yet the restrictions placed on universities in the rapidly evolving COVID-19 environment challenged the ways both doctoral students and faculty approached their teaching and learning. In many environments, public health measures forced doctoral programmes to reconsider traditional delivery methods of supervision and peer learning. This study explores the value of a virtual doctoral networking group created to foster academic connection and peer learning during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Uniquely, the membership draws students from both traditional and applied doctoral programs that use different delivery modalities (online and in person) and includes students at various stages of their doctoral studies. Through the use of personal reflections, we created narratives that we analysed thematically using the Braun and Clarke method. Our findings challenge and extend the previous understanding of the cohort model of learning. We demonstrate that the benefits of the cohort model of learning can occur across programs and independent of the stage of progression in the programmes, in a virtual context. These benefits open opportunities to new ways of supporting doctoral students in a post-pandemic environment.

This article presents an assessment tool for doctoral students preparing their comprehensive portfolio. This tool was created from my firsthand experience in the Joint PhD program in Educational Studies--a collaboration between three universities in Ontario, Canada: Lakehead University, Brock University, and the University of Windsor. Following the three criteria for evaluation of the comprehensive portfolio in the program handbook, I developed nine sub-criteria (three for each criterion). This assessment tool can be used for educational purposes, as doctoral students begin to organize and narrate their doctoral journey. Students can map their experiences to the sub-criteria developed, allowing them to be explicit about how their presented scholarly tasks have helped in preparing them for candidacy. While this tool has an obvious application for students within the Joint PhD program, students in other programs with similar requirements may also find it useful due to its theoretical grounding in literature on the process of scholarship.

Reentry women, or women who have reentered higher education after a gap in studying, are a population of graduate students who have a unique set of challenges compared to their traditional counterparts. In addition, professional psychology programs place additional demands on students that can add to the unique challenges of reentry women. This study sought to examine how reentry women persist in navigating and succeeding in the challenges of clinical or counseling psychology doctoral programs. A theoretical purposive sample of 21 women from the United States and Canada participated. Data collection methods included a semi-structured interview with each participant, and data were analyzed using the constant comparative method of grounded theory. As a result of data analysis, four factors emerged that aided women in their pathways to persistence. Each of the factors had multiple categories that contributed to reentry women's persistence, including: (a) intrinsic factors: maturational competence and goal grit; (b) extrinsic factors: support village and a climate of belonging; (c) identity factors: academic emersion, navigating liminal space, and professional identity claiming, and finally, (d) reinforcing factors: mastering milestones, maneuvering through barriers by meaning-making, and lucky events. Definitions of the factors, the emergent theoretical model, and the research implications are presented.

In this case study research, we examine online supervision and engagements in a blended education doctorate (EdD) programme through a lens of relational trust. Interviews with supervisors and EdD graduates enabled us to examine practices and strategies used to cultivate relationships and learning alliances that supported doctoral candidates in conducting research and dissertation writing. We explored opportunities and challenges in fostering effective supervisory relationships online. Five enabling factors for cultivating effective online supervisory relationships address programme design, supervisors' roles and responsibilities, and doctoral students' experiences. Establishing relational trust and learning alliances in early and ongoing engagements in programme through to culminating milestones was vital for effective student-supervisor relationships.

Existing scholarship exploring the notion of mentorship in academic environments typically reflects support for negotiating tenure. This form of mentorship supports an established scholar to aid in the professional development of a junior scholar. The unilateral nature of this form of mentorship is critiqued for reifying power dynamics. Absent from this literature, and more specifically from tourism research, are discussions and analyses of reciprocated mentorship. As such, the aim of this paper is to examine the development of an intergenerational partnership between a pre-tenured scholar and a graduate student during the co-construction and delivery of an Integrated Curriculum Design (ICD). Specifically, we employed collective-memory work (cf) and Creative Analytic Practice (CAP) to critically reflect on our intergenerational partnership and how our various experiences influenced the trajectory of our ICD project to its current form. Research data was co-constructed to broaden audience and impact. Findings contribute to the limited scholarship on ICD in tourism, address the absence of scholarship on reciprocal mentorship in Recreation, Sport, Tourism and Hospitality, and propose an intergenerational partnership as a more appropriate mentorship model in contemporary academic landscapes.

This study examined the role of written feedback in the academic discourse socialization of second language doctoral students at a Canadian research university. Using a second language socialization framework, and foregrounding the sociocultural and interactional contexts of language learning and use, this article considers written feedback to be a form of social practice that socializes students and discursively positions them into a range of identity categories, academic discourse practices, and communities. Data sources include interviews, student-produced narratives, and written feedback artifacts. The analysis focuses on the students' interpretations of, responses to, and stated preferences and dispreference towards the feedback they received. Findings reveal that feedback played a formative role in their broader socialization and contributed to the co-construction of academic identities and (in)access to preferred discourse practices in their departments and disciplines.

To understand recent changes in the social work academic job market, we gathered information on both open social work tenure-track positions and doctoral candidates' experiences on the academic job market to provide an approximation of the overall 2017-2018 academic market in social work. About two-thirds of both PhD and DSW candidates on the job market sought tenure track faculty positions. We found that, unlike in the past when there were fewer doctoral candidates on the market than positions available, there was an oversupply of doctoral graduates, with many PhD and DSW candidates who wanted tenure track faculty positions in 2017-2018 not obtaining one. In addition, about one-seventh of both PhD and DSW candidates had taken clinical or macro practice positions.

Purpose: This paper aims to examine graduate student learning experiences and perceptions of quality and the extent to which these learners were living the intended experiences that academic programs are seeking to foster. Design/methodology/approach: Using a multiple case-study design, a three-stage interview protocol used with six PhD candidates across three faculties as well as 25 institutional, provincial and national documents served as principal sources of data. A within-case analysis was performed for each case and compared via a cross-case analysis. Findings: The four principal factors that characterized the PhD candidate learning experience emerged as the significance of intentional individualized guidance; the importance of social interactions and community; becoming an independent scholar; and the transformative nature of learning. Gaps were identified between institutional intent and the learner experience. Recommendations are made regarding the adoption of indicators of quality that focus on student learning and notions of transformation. Originality/value: This investigation attempts to tell distinct and shared stories of the highly contextualized and complex phenomenon of quality in PhD student learning. With limited information regarding how programmatic development is lived by students, this study's comparison of institutional characterizations and student perceptions of quality sheds light on existing strengths to leverage, and gaps to invest in, at the institutional and program levels.