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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.)

This article explores the role of publication in taking forward the work of the doctorate. Low publication rates from doctoral degrees have been noted as a problem in the quality of doctoral education for preparing students to participate in research cultures. At the same time there is ambivalence and some resistance among doctoral supervisors and candidates about the place of publication in doctoral work. This article argues that issues of writing and publication need to be systematically addressed within doctoral pedagogy. In a climate of increasing pressure to publish during and after candidature, pedagogies need to take up a more explicitly outward-looking stance, developing a stronger orientation to induction and participation in the world of peer-reviewed publication. These arguments are developed through two case studies that illustrate ways of supporting doctoral researchers to effectively recontextualise their dissertation writing for wider audiences. (Contains 4 figures and 1 note.)

This article explores the anxieties and political struggles around the professionalisation of academic development in contemporary universities. It seeks to go beyond the work of classification and categorisation of "roles and identities" of academic developers with its attendant oppositional or conciliatory metaphors, to re-describe the contemporary field of academic development in universities through an ironic lens. We work with Foucault's notion of "games of truth and error" and Rorty's scholarship of "re-description" in an attempt to tell the contradictions and tensions of the field more effectively. We discuss the implications that arise from these for academic development to engage productively in the ongoing reinvention of the academy. (Contains 1 table and 1 note.)

Many healthy human experiences and practices have become medicalized and professionalized within health during the past century. In the example used in this article, the legitimation of formal, "evidence-based" scientific knowledge about parenting within nursing and midwifery can have the effect of replacing and discrediting embodied, informal and culturally located ways of knowing and learning. At the same time, recent developments within health policy increasingly focus on the need for active engagement by members of the community in the production and maintenance of their own health. This is often promoted in terms of partnership between "consumers" of health services and "providers". The dominant metaphor of "knowledge transfer", however, produces a prescriptive text that assumes a unidirectional movement from expert professional knowledge providers towards the consumers of that knowledge. This article addresses this problematic by discussing a case study of one woman learning to breastfeed her first baby. It examines, through discursive analysis, the complex and contradictory dynamics of her knowing and learning, situated in relation to formal knowledge about breastfeeding, in order to explore and elaborate an argument for more complex "cultural and relational" understandings of knowing and learning than that offered by the "knowledge transfer" metaphor. (Contains 1 note.)

Writing remains significantly under-theorized within research degree programs in universities. Yet there is clearly more at stake than the application of generic structural rules or guidelines for writing research. Whatever the discipline, these mechanics are inadequate to account for the complexities of writing faced by doctoral students. This article takes up the challenge of research writing as a social, situated practice and calls for it to be embraced as such within research education. The article identifies problems of policy, theory and pedagogy in relation to research writing. It then examines recent initiatives, undertaken by the authors and others, in the formation of research writing groups, in an attempt to address some of these problems. Despite wide variation, these groups have in common a strong reliance on the pedagogical principles of identification and peer review, community, and writing as "normal business" in the doing of research. These are advanced as key principles for a broader conceptualization of the requirements for research writing. (Contains 1 note.)

Research education has been dominated in recent years by policy-driven preoccupations with doctoral completions, funding and contributions to the economy. This has led universities to focus on enhanced institutional support for research degrees, with an emphasis on supervision, in particular the training of supervisors, and provision of a richer environment for students. This article uses examples from interviews with research students to show how the provision of a rich environment is not in itself sufficient. A new discourse is needed so that students are able to take up opportunities that are available. The article questions the current emphasis and argues that a new focus on pedagogy is explicitly needed. It challenges the dominant focus on supervision and "provisionism" and suggests that a more appropriate pedagogic discourse should draw on the familiar notion of "peer" from the world of research. It argues that peer learning, appropriately theorized and situated within a notion of communities of research practice, might be a productive frame through which to view research education.

Examines the use of writing groups as a strategy for research development, asserting that writing is best considered a starting point of the research process and that fostering academic writing is a useful place to do research development work. The article describes the use of various writing groups over 3 years, exploring the responses of leaders and participants and identifying factors important to use of this strategy. (SM)

Explores ideas of autonomy and the independent scholar that underpin traditional practices of postgraduate pedagogy, particularly PhD programs in the humanities and social sciences. Finds practices underlain by the gendered nature of ideas of autonomy and the paradoxical nature of the processes intended to produce the autonomous scholar self. Offers ideas for addressing these problems in doctoral education. (Author/DB)

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)

The emergence of jawed vertebrates (gnathostomes) from jawless vertebrates was accompanied by major morphological and physiological innovations, such as hinged jaws, paired fins and immunoglobulin-based adaptive immunity. Gnathostomes subsequently diverged [...]