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With growing international interest in diversifying sites for pedagogical work within the doctorate, doctoral programmes of different kinds are being developed in different disciplinary, institutional and national settings. However, little is known about how the pedagogical work of these programmes is designed and enacted, and with what effects. In this paper, we present two cases of doctoral pedagogical work being undertaken within different disciplinary and institutional settings to describe how learning opportunities were designed and to theorise what it means to be engaged in doing doctoral pedagogy. Starting from the position that working from a design model supports systematic and rigorous documentation and development of pedagogy, we employ the twin concepts of design and action, drawing broadly on rhetorical and ethnomethodological understandings of pedagogy as social action. Of particular interest within the concept of design itself is the concept of enactment, the translation of designs into the practices of doctoral work. Together, the two cases become a resource for "slowing down" and making visible the practices of doctoral pedagogy that often go unrecognised because they appear so ordinary and everyday. This call for examining close-up existing doctoral education practices and relationships is attending to the "next challenge for doctoral education" (Green, 2009).

In this article, the author explores practices and economies of learning that make visible particular practices where educational work is embedded in places other than schools, colleges and universities, or at least in complex interaction with them. To do this, she draws on a body of work she has been involved with over the past ten years, sole-authored and co-produced with colleagues reflecting on the history and contemporary positioning of educational research and its relationships with research on learning in spheres outside formal education itself. Her particular focus is on recent collaborative research she has been involved in within health, where she exemplifies some directions and possibilities in relation to Sharrock's notions of "co-production of new understandings and solutions"--across boundaries and in interdisciplinary endeavour. Interrogating the boundaries and limits of what can count as educational research is always a risky endeavour, as it challenges the idea that there is a "centre" or one "parish" for education, conceptually, spatially and culturally. But the author's experiences of interdisciplinary research into health practice and professional learning allows the question of what is and is not education to be asked in ways that she hopes have some conceptual as well as pragmatic value. It takes as axiomatic that the boundaries of what counts as education, and hence the proper business of education research, are not fixed but shifting in time and space, and are more and more intensely contested, as the centre, as Kathleen Ferguson and Terri Seddon's socio-spatial framework suggests graphically, gives way and is remade through insertion into a set of dispersed learning networks. While this latter term has become commonplace, almost ubiquitous in recent times, there is a need for rigorous theoretical and empirical work attending to the scope and parameters of such conceptions.

This paper takes up the question of the way in which "the problem with educational research" is represented. It takes as its point of departure two recent views on "the problem"--one expressed by an educational journalist and one presented by the Australian Council of Deans of Education. It locates these within a larger frame of international debate about educational research and its problems and considers how these arise out of particular dispositions towards educational research and, by extension towards, education itself. The paper suggests that the different positions on the problem with educational research, and hence on the solution to the problem, fail to engage in the question of education itself as a problem of the present. It argues that this problem is produced through twin fantasies about education: a redemptive fantasy about the possibility and the imperative for education to solve problems of social disadvantage; and a disciplinary fantasy that faculties of education can do this by themselves. Through an examination of the "de-sciencing" of education in the past decade or so, and its recent "re-sciencing", the authors conclude that, with all the problems that might be identified that pertain to educational research and to faculties of education, the most significant might well be a failure of research imagination. Overcoming this problem demands engagement with provocative ideas coming from outside traditional educational expertise. (Contains 2 tables.)

This paper reports on a small exploratory study that investigates the place and role of reciprocal learning within a partnership-based home visiting program for mothers experiencing depression. The study is one important example of an increased focus on reciprocal learning within practice that has significant implications for the development of professional education and, more generally, for workplace learning and ongoing professional development. The study addresses two major gaps in the research literature: a lack of detailed accounts of how partnership based approaches are taken up and developed in Australian health care; and a lack of attention to learning as a focus and outcome of partnership-based practice. Using information from in-depth interviews with nurses and mothers we describe and analyse the experience of participants, their learning and knowledge development, the techniques used to facilitate learning, and the development of a relationship between mother and nurse, and mother and child. We identify a fundamental repositioning in practice that was being enacted and learned by all nurses, and a shift in practice strategy from expert assessment and knowledge provision, to practice as a process of shared inquiry and learning. We identify key relational strategies developed by the nurses and commented on by the mothers. We identify a shift in how the mothers experienced the locus of knowing and decision making in relation to their child/children and their parenting. Nurses enhanced their ability to formulate effective interventions for mothers, to build a deeper understanding of mothers' experience, and to challenge or reinforce their own existing beliefs and knowledge. We suggest much of what was described by both the nurses and mothers within this study can usefully be described in terms of reciprocal learning, or as pedagogy. Such findings, we argue, have significant implications for the conceptualisation of health professional practice, the identification of the capabilities required to deliver partnership forms of practice, and, critically, for the redesign of curriculum in the area of health professional education.

In the context of intensifying accountability for academic work internationally, there are increasing pressures on individual supervisors, departments and universities to evaluate the quality of doctoral supervision. Existing evaluation tools are focused at departmental rather than individual level and are mostly quantitative. Evaluation for supervisors is usually limited to reflective self-assessment and peer critique. It has been difficult to elicit sustained feedback from doctoral students regarding their experiences of working with an individual supervisor, or even a supervisory panel, for ethical and practical reasons. This article discusses one attempt to address this problem: an online survey instrument that draws on previous research and qualitative methods to elicit sustained reflective commentary from doctoral students, in an anonymous format, about their experiences of supervision. The article describes the design and development of the survey, named the Research Student Feedback Survey (RSFS), and raises a number of critical conceptual and methodological issues for further exploration and debate. (Contains 1 note.)

Academic development has had an approximately forty-year history within Australian higher education, paralleling the major expansions and changes in the sector, both nationally and internationally. Its principal concerns have been the improvement of teaching and the professional development of the academics who teach. The history of academic development has gone largely undocumented and unexamined at a national level, in Australia and elsewhere. However, as university teaching has increasingly become important in relation to quality in higher education, academic development has become a central player in the work of universities. It becomes of particular importance at this time to garner a more thorough understanding of the continuities as well as the discontinuities in the meanings and practices of university teaching and in the work of those whose role has been to support its development. This article presents a discussion of two key themes identified from a set of oral history interviews conducted with early leaders in academic development in Australia. These themes offer different insights into issues and understandings of academic development in today's university. The first concerns a perennial issue in academic development--the struggle to define academic development's emerging ethos in relation to research and service to the broader university's endeavour. The second theme represents an issue that has been forgotten or marginalised in the official accounts of academic development but which lives on in the "lore" of the field--the role of activism in the shaping of university teaching and academic development. (Contains 1 note.)

Portents of the demise of the Professional Doctorate have emerged in some recent policy and institutional circles in Australia, raising questions about the meaning and relevance of the Professional Doctorate in an era of "league tables" and research assessment in Australia. This article argues that such portents, based largely on narrow market-driven arguments, are premature, reactive and unhelpful, in that they foreclose on a set of critical questions concerning the future purpose, scope and practice of doctoral education. The article argues that the simple re-assertion of the PhD as the default award represents a restoration of the logics and imperatives of disciplinarity and of older notions of so-called "real" research. Further, questions of the changing economies of knowledge and practice within, between and beyond the reach of the university, are subordinated and disavowed. The article presents a re-reading of the emergence of Professional Doctorates, from the perspective of a decade-and-a-half of development and change. It suggests the need to revisit that history critically in the light of the current developments in doctoral education, in knowledge production and in developing different relations around knowledge between universities and different social and professional domains. Such revisitings can bring out emerging issues for doctoral education at a time when anxieties may inhibit taking up opportunities for innovation and linking with new kinds of knowledge production that go beyond Euro-centric and university-centric traditions. (Contains 1 note.)

More than 40 years after its beginnings, academic development stands uncertainly on the threshold of becoming a profession or discipline in its own right. While it remains marginal to the dominant stories of the university, it has become central to the institution's contemporary business. This Research Note describes an enquiry that uses a multiple histories approach to explore the emergence of academic development in three national sites. Our intention is to provoke a more critical engagement with academic development's current forms and future possibilities.

The use of writing groups to support students undertaking post-graduate research within universities has begun to receive attention from academic supervisors and doctoral researchers. Very little has been written by doctoral students themselves on the benefits of working within such writing groups. In this article, the experiences of working within a doctoral writing group at an Australian University are presented, primarily from the perspective of students. The authors identify two main benefits they have experienced through participating in a writing group using a "multi-voiced" approach. First, they discuss the kind of learning that they achieved through working in a writing group. They do this with reference to key principles of peer learning and of peer review. Second, they focus on the ways the group worked as a community of discursive social practice. An overarching message for them in participating in the group and now writing this article is the shift in their thinking and experience of writing from seeing writing as an essentially private and implicit process to writing becoming a matter of public and shared work. These two notions are bound by the concept of identity building, drawing from the literature on communities of practice. (Contains 1 figure.)

Discusses outcomes of a research project analyzing the relationship between academic literacy specialists and a subject specialist from a nursing faculty engaged in a collaborative curriculum development project at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. Focuses on how participants in this partnership negotiated a working relationship to develop a literacy-focused curriculum and pedagogy for undergraduate nursing students. (Adjunct ERIC Clearinghouse for ESL Literacy Education) (Author/VWL)