Helping Doctoral Students Write: Pedagogies for Supervision

Helping Doctoral

Students Write

Pedagogies for supervision

Barbara Kamler and Pat Thomson

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Persuading an octopus

into a glass

Working with literatures

Working with the literatures is not, as some doctoral researchers in desperate

and cynical moments suggest, about showing their examiners that a lot of books

and articles have been read, summarized and bracketed. We believe that there are

deﬁ nite purposes in doctoral study for working with literatures.

We propose that the key tasks accomplished in literature work are to:

sketch out the nature of the ﬁ eld or ﬁ elds relevant to the inquiry, possibly

indicating something of their historical development and

identify major debates and deﬁ ne contentious terms, in order to

establish which studies, ideas and/or methods are most pertinent to the

study and

locate gaps in the ﬁ eld, in order to

create the warrant for the study in question, and

identify the contribution the study will make.

In stating the functions of literature work, we do not want to suggest that there

is universal agreement about the dimensions of any ﬁ eld and its themes, debates

and terms. There is no one correct way for the literatures to be interpreted. As

Golden-Biddle and Locke (1997: 29)

put it ‘… there is sufﬁ cient ﬂ uidity and

ambiguity in any topical literature to allow it to be authentically interpreted and

shaped in a number of different directions’. It is the doctoral researcher’s task to

canvass and interpret the ﬁ eld and to construct her version of its terrain. However,

there are often particular disagreements and developments about the boundaries

of ﬁ elds of knowledge, and it is possible to locate unresolved or contentious

topics. Supervisors, of course, make these issues clear in the preliminary readings

they suggest to students. And there are now increasing numbers of ‘Introductions

to …’, ‘Readers in …’ and ‘Handbooks of …’ which do ﬂ ag the key scholars,

themes, issues and debates.

In a recent review of dissertation literature reviews, Boote and Beile (2005)

deplore both the poor quality of student reviews and the lack of serious pedagogical

attention given to this act of scholarship in doctoral education. A thorough,

Chapter 3

Persuading an octopus into a glass 29

substantive literature review is, they argue, ‘a precondition for doing substantive,

thorough, sophisticated research’ (Boote and Beile, 2005: 3).

Our work with doctoral researchers in Australia and the UK suggests they

understand its pivotal importance, but are plagued by an excess of anxiety and

expectation about literature work. There are many reasons for this angst. There are

writing myths which complicate and make writing about the literatures a task to be

endured, rather than enjoyed. And there is a lack of recognition of the intensity of

identity work involved at this site of text production. We would go so far as to say

that literature reviews are the quintessential site of identity work, where the novice

researcher enters what we call occupied territory – with all the immanent danger

and quiet dread that this metaphor implies – including possible ambushes, barbed

wire fences, and unknown academics who patrol the boundaries of already occupied

territories.

Doctoral researchers have an emergent relation to the territory (the ﬁ elds

which inform their research) and its occupiers (the more senior, experienced

scholars of the academy). Yet they are expected to ﬁ nd the courage to assess the

work of the occupiers – some of whom, in time, may well examine and judge

their own theses. The novice researcher is not only an alien in foreign ﬁ elds,

but is unaware of the rules of engagement, and the histories of debates, feuds,

alliances and accommodations that precede her entry to the ﬁ eld. This is not

work for the faint/feint-hearted! There are so many decisions to make. Where

to start? Which ﬁ elds? Which landmines to avoid? How to be ‘critical’, who

to be critical of, and how to escape being tangled in the barbed wire? How to

negotiate the complexities of power relations in a strange land? Who to include

and exclude in the negotiations? Who to engage with, who to ignore and with

what effects?

While the metaphor of occupied territory may be dramatic, perhaps even

overstated, it stands in opposition to a taken-for-granted view of literature work as

a relatively straightforward, if time-consuming, task. It is also a metaphor which

we believe gets closer to the affective experience and intensity of identity work

many students experience when ‘reviewing’ the literatures.

This chapter focuses on the processes of naming and framing the literature

‘review’. We want to both unsettle a naturalized view of literature work and also

challenge advice that is too rational, too wise after the fact. But we begin by

looking at examples of students’ literature work that exemplify the difﬁ culties

they face and the issues that we as supervisors must address.

Literature reviews – what’s the problem?

What follows are brief excerpts from literature review drafts of two doctoral

researchers. It is difﬁ cult to select brief segments from such a long document, as

‘problems’ often range over paragraphs and pages. So our guiding principle has

been to select ‘pithy bits’ that represent typical problems we and our colleagues

encounter in relation to text and identity work.

30 Persuading an octopus into a glass

Vera is a doctoral researcher writing about deconstruction and its relationship to

both structuralism (using theorists such as Saussure, Lévi-Strauss and Lacan) and

poststructuralism (Barthes and Foucault). This excerpt occurs midway through

her review as she struggles with Lacan and Barthes.

According to Belsey (2002: 57), Jacques Lacan reinterpreted Freud in the

light of Lévi-Strauss and Saussure – ‘to delineate a subject was itself the

location of a difference’. Belsey goes on to explain that, for Lacan, the human

being is ‘an organism in culture’. According to Lacan, speech was central to

psycho-analytic practice. He argued that during the ﬁ rst two months of life

a child’s emergent sense of self was formed in relation to subjects, capable

of signifying. Lacan calls this the ‘Otherness of language’. ‘The big other’,

states Belsey, ‘is there before we are, exists outside us and does not belong

to us’. The early writing of Barthes, says Norris (1982: 8), was aimed at a

full-scale science of the text, modelled on the linguistics of Saussure and the

structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss. In Elements of Semiology (1967),

Barthes takes the view of structuralism as a kind of ‘mastercode’ capable of

providing higher-level understanding. Culler (1976: 58) states that Barthes,

in Elements of Semiology, speculated upon the ways in which ‘langue and

parole’, ‘signiﬁ er and signiﬁ ed’, ‘syntagmatic and paradigmatic’ might

apply to various non-linguistic phenomena. Culler goes on to say that, for a

semiologist studying the food system of a culture, ‘parole’ is all the events

of eating, whereas ‘langue’ is the system of rules that underlies all these

events. These would deﬁ ne, for example, what is edible, which dishes would

be combined to create a meal and the conventions governing the syntactic

ordering of items.

We might characterize Vera’s text as ‘crowded’ by the literature (Becker, 1986:

146). She is traversing complex theoretical terrain, but seems to be ‘drowning’ in

the detail. She stands as an outsider, piling up layers of ‘who said what about what’

as a strategy for highlighting key theoretical ideas. ‘According to Belsey (2002:

57), Jaques Lacan reinterpreted Freud in the light of Levi-Strauss and Saussure

…. The early writing of Barthes, says Norris …. Culler states that Barthes …’ Vera

does not appear in this text at all. She has not added any evaluative comments and

her somewhat confused summary is dominant in this and the writing that precedes

and follows the extract. The reader has no idea how these ideas inform her study

nor whether any ideas are any more important than any others.

The phenomenon of the ‘invisible scholar’ can also be seen in the next example.

Geraldine is a doctoral researcher writing about the school effectiveness literature

and while she seems more on top of the ideas in the ﬁ eld she is entering, her

relationship to it remains hidden.

Mortimore (1998) also contributes to the school effectiveness research

agenda. He explains that school effectiveness researchers aim to ascertain

Persuading an octopus into a glass 31

whether differential resources, processes and organizational differences

affect student performance and if so, how. He is also of the view that school

effectiveness researchers seek reliable and appropriate ways to measure

school quality. Hopkins (2001) suggests that one of the earliest studies that

was done compared the effectiveness of some secondary schools on a range

of student outcome measures. Reynolds and Cuttance (1992) also point

out that the effective schools research entitled ‘Fifteen Thousand Hours’

characterised school efﬁ ciency factors as varied in the degree of academic

emphasis, teacher’s action in lessons, the availability of resources, rewards,

good conditions for pupils and the extent to which children were able to take

responsibility. It was emphasized that effective school researchers claim that

there are signiﬁ cant differences between schools on a number of different

student outcomes after full account has been taken of students’ previous

learning history and family background. Hargreaves and Hopkins (1991) also

endorse the view by stating that there is evidence to support the argument

that the characteristics of individual schools can make a difference to pupils’

progress since certain internal conditions are common in schools that achieve

higher levels of outcomes for their students.

We characterize Geraldine’s text as ‘he said, she said’. Every sentence begins by

naming the researcher, followed by a fairly neutral verb: ‘Mortimer also contributes

… Hopkins suggests … Reynolds and Cuttance also point out … Hargreaves and

Hopkins also endorse …’. Syntactically, the lack of connection between sentences

makes this more like a list, a summary of ideas. The writer piles up one study after

another, but there is no evaluative stance. When, a few paragraphs later, Geraldine

tries to insert some critique, she again relies on what others have said.

Scheerens et al. (2001) claim that many critics appear to misread the scope

and limitations of what school effectiveness is all about. Therefore, they point

out that school effectiveness research is about instrumental rationality, that is,

how to do things right and not so much about substantive rationality of how

to do the right things. The purpose of school effectiveness research raises

some concerns. While it is very important to know how to do things right, it

is of greater importance to know how to do the right thing because one bad

decision can ruin an organization and it would take an even greater effort to

set things back on the right track.

Clearly there is a debate in the ﬁ eld about school effectiveness as an instrumental

rationality, but Geraldine does not stake a claim here. She stands aside and

allows other researchers (Scheerens et al.) to introduce the idea of critique, but

her position in all this remains oblique. The distinction between ‘how to do

things right’ and ‘do the right thing’, a common phrase within the ﬁ eld, allows

the writer to take no position, while trying to give the impression she has been

critical.

32 Persuading an octopus into a glass

In both Geraldine and Vera’s texts, the literature is neither used to locate their

studies, nor to advance an argument about the state of the ﬁ eld in order to make

the case for their own work. This is characteristic of difﬁ dent scholars who lack

authority and who are literally overwhelmed by the work of others.

It is our argument throughout this chapter and the next that there are two sides

to reviewing literatures: knowing the genres, conventions and textual practices;

and assuming what we call a ‘hands on hips’ subject position. When the doctoral

researcher writes about literatures, she is constructing a representation of the

scholar and her scholarly practice. The struggle with writing occurs because of

the difﬁ culty of negotiating text work and identity work simultaneously. The

challenge is to learn to speak/write with authority, standing back with ‘hands on

hips’ in order to critically survey and categorize texts and the ﬁ eld itself.

To better understand why doctoral researchers ﬁ nd this work so difﬁ cult, we

asked them to describe how they felt about literature work.

Metaphors that students live and work by

We have run several workshops for graduate students in Australia, South Africa,

Norway, Canada and the UK on writing literature reviews and we ﬁ nd students

inevitably anxious about the task of positioning and justifying their own research

in relation to The Literature. We begin our workshops by putting identity issues

on the table as a starting point for the text work that will follow. One strategy we

have used is to ask: When you think about doing a literature review, what is it like

for you? What image or metaphor

comes to mind? These metaphors are written

on small cards, collected and discussed amidst the whole group. We approach

the task with humour and some irreverence, as we are keen to make visible the

feelings of inadequacy shared by many students and identify these as a genre

problem, rather than as simply an inadequacy of individual writers.

To give some structure to the discussion, we ask questions of the metaphors:

How is the literature represented?

What is the researcher doing?

How powerfully is the researcher represented?

We use the term representation to emphasize that metaphors are a particular

way of using language, not ‘the truth’ but a way of seeing and understanding

and therefore acting.

That there are many ways of seeing is evident from the

multiplicity of metaphors used across the group. These metaphors have power.

They inﬂ uence how doctoral researchers approach the task of literature work

and how they think of themselves as writers. They are therefore worth eliciting

and interrogating in order that supervisor and student can together confront and

change them.

For the purpose of our discussion here, we have pooled metaphors from three

workshops to highlight commonalities. These include a myriad of ways in which

•

Persuading an octopus into a glass 33

the doctoral researcher is represented as lost, drowning and confused while the

literature is pre-eminent, strong and needing, somehow, to be conquered.

Water images are particularly popular, where the literature itself is ﬁ gured as

dangerous territory and unmanageable:

a chaotic whirlpool

an ocean full of sharks

a stormy ocean

and the researcher as unprepared or impeded from taking action:

trying to swim with concrete blocks on my feet

setting off across the ocean in a canoe

ﬂ oating on the ocean without an anchor

diving into a pond of water weeds and trying to ﬁ nd my way out

tossed between currents in the sea, all pulling in different directions

trudging through a mangrove swamp.

The puzzle/maze metaphor also features widely as a representation of the literature,

nuanced by images of light and dark. Here the researcher is lost, stumbling, unable

to ﬁ nd their way:

walking into a tunnel

walking through a maze blindfolded

walking in the dark

going through a maze in search of hidden treasure

searching the night sky without a telescope for connections between

illuminated stars.

Students also use bodily pain and discomfort imagery to represent the process of

literature work, with popular clichés dominant, including:

pulling teeth

sweating blood

being hit by a truck

sinking in quicksand

getting caught in knots of other people’s writing.

While such images dominate the groups we’ve worked with, highlighting a lack

of agency and being overwhelmed, a small number of students have offered more

benign images of searching the literature, as:

gold mining: extracting the golden threads that provide the value

collecting seashells

•

34 Persuading an octopus into a glass

digging in the ground for precious metal

building a brick wall, laying down one brick at a time until this magniﬁ cent

wall has been created.

looking into a kaleidoscope, a mosaic which keeps shifting.

These images highlight the value of the search and the satisfaction of the process,

but possibly romanticize the labour involved. The rewards (gold threads, precious

metals, magniﬁ cent walls, lovely mosaics) have an Enlightenment ring which

suggests that for these students, some kind of ‘truth’ resides somewhere in the

texts with which they were working.

For us, however, the richest metaphors are those that attribute the difﬁ culties in

writing to the nature of reviewing literatures. Two of the metaphors we ﬁ nd most

delightful use animal imagery:

eating a live elephant

persuading (selected arms of) an octopus into a glass.

These metaphors differ qualitatively from the others in that they highlight the

almost absurd difﬁ culty of the task, with humour. Feelings of inadequacy or

lack of preparedness are absent. Rather, the obstacle is huge and unruly (the live

elephant, those unmanageable octopus arms), and the researcher is active. She is

‘eating’ and ‘persuading’ – doing what she needs to do in the face of what seems

an impossible task.

Such metaphor work is powerful for tapping into student anxieties. It has the

potential to create a pedagogical conversation through which supervisors can

orient doctoral researchers to the importance of identity work in the project of

becoming a scholar and, more speciﬁ cally, doing the literature work. Our aim as

supervisors is to shift disabling metaphors so that students can begin to imagine

other subject positions where they might be in charge of this journey, however hard

it is. Beginning a conversation about literature work with a discussion of metaphor

is a way to start a different kind of conversation with doctoral researchers, one

which addresses their intellect and emotions, and which takes up the tangled

nature of text work/identity work.

We think at least part of the problem, however, lies in the term itself – the

literature review.

Literature review – what’s in a name?

Just as we were concerned in Chapter 1 to question the phrase ‘writing up’,

because of its negative and mythologizing effects on the process of thesis writing,

here we reﬂ ect on and reject the notion of the literature review.

A few things stand out about the phrase. First it is singular, preceded by the

article the or a, suggesting that it is a single object of importance which occurs in

one place in the thesis, conventionally the second chapter. Whether we are talking

•

Persuading an octopus into a glass 35

about the (as in one and only) or a (somewhat less deﬁ nitive but still singular)

literature review, it is linguistically marked as a uniﬁ ed piece of writing, rather

than being used throughout the dissertation.

Even more worrying is any implication that the writing of the review occurs

only once at the beginning of the doctoral research, with only minor editing and

tidying after the ﬁ eldwork has concluded. There is no doubt that at the outset of

doctoral candidature, an intensive immersion in literatures is essential. But most

commentators (e.g. Dunleavy, 2003; Hart, 1998, 2001) stress that literature work

is an evolving and ongoing task that must be updated and revised throughout the

process of writing the thesis. We rephrase this advice to suggest that reading and

writing are integral to all phases of doctoral study.

The term literature itself is also curious, as it seems to elevate research reports,

books, articles and monographs to the status of canon – the literature, with all

its evocation of high culture and importance. We don’t ask doctoral researchers

to do a review of research, but of literature, and usually of literature as singular,

literature not literatures.

Finally, the verb review, which has been transformed to a noun, implies a

collection, a showing and summarizing of what others have done. The doctoral

researcher is to create a review by ‘doing’ one (Hart, 1998) or ‘writing’ one (Murray,

2002). When the term review is used as a verb, as in to review the literature, the

researcher is positioned linguistically as onlooker. Our emphasis, by contrast, is

on positioning students as agents who use and evaluate the research of others, in

order to make a place for their own work.

As we progress our discussion in this chapter and the next, we return to some

of the issues raised here, including what it means to use the literature, rather than

be used by it and where/how literature work might be located in relation to the

overall structure of the thesis. As our aim is not to invent new terms unnecessarily,

we continue to use the term literature, but always in the plural and with a lower

case l – literatures. This is to signal that there is neither one monolithic research

canon, nor necessarily one place only in the thesis where it belongs. At times we

will also use the abbreviation LR to further defuse and undermine the potency of

the taken-for-granted terminology.

We now consider how literature reviews are discussed in the advice books in

order to clear the way for more productive metaphors and strategies.

Literature reviews and the advice books

Advice books on how to write the LR are rife with intimidating expressions and

exhortations to be rigorous, systematic, respectful (but critical), and comprehensive

(but not all inclusive). Burton and Steane (2004) are a prime example of how not

to help. Writing from the ﬁ eld of management, they construct what we would call

an excess of expectation about the signiﬁ cance of the LR. Calling it alternately ‘a

critical part of the thesis’ and ‘the foundation of the research project’ (2004: 124),

and crediting it with doing an enormous amount of work, they say:

36 Persuading an octopus into a glass

All parts of the thesis are strengthened by the comprehensiveness and rigour

of your review of relevant theories. Understanding the literature sharpens the

focus of your argument and will help to clarify your proposition or research

question … deﬁ ne the arena of your study, and can suggest hypotheses that

you need to test, methodologies appropriate for your study and perhaps even

a sample size.

(Burton and Steane, 2004: 125)

This is high stakes LR. This is a make-or-break activity. While we agree that

getting a grip on literatures is important, this kind of heightened do-or-die focus

hardly helps to make the LR project seem doable.

Burton and Steane also use a journey/water metaphor to represent the process of

reviewing, warning of the dangers of getting lost or trying to include everything.

The task of identifying the relevant literature can be likened to a journey of

discovery, like tracking a river to its source. If you are exploring the river,

there will be tributaries and creeks that invite exploration, but these are side

trips and diversions from the main task and from the general direction – some

of them fruitful and some of them not. If you explore every creek and stream

that ﬂ ows into a river, you will have a much greater understanding of the

whole river, but you also run the risk of becoming so distracted by the small

streams that you will never reach the source. So you need to decide what are

the important branches of the river that need to be explored, and to decide

what branches are less important and can be ignored.

(Burton and Steane, 2004: 126–7)

This river metaphor constructs a rational landscape, a considered set of choices.

The literature (singular) is represented as a river with branches and is subdivided

in a fairly orderly manner. Somewhere there is a source (or sources) out there

to be found. All the journeyperson need do is navigate, decide whether to move

this way or that, here or there, and decide how long to stay. While the position

of navigator has agency, navigating is presumably hard to do if, as our students

suggest, they are wearing concrete blocks on their feet or they are caught up in

the weeds and sludge of the river bottom, entangled and lost or on the verge of

drowning.

Burton and Steane send their student out on a journey with no map, into

uncharted waters, with little guidance about how to approach the plethora of

decisions to be made. On what basis does she decide which streams are worth

exploring? How does she avoid being stuck on a mud bank, or swept off course in

white water? This river metaphor, and others like it, construct an overly rational

version of what is possible after the fact. Once the writer knows the river and can

presumably see its tributaries and branches, she can navigate them.

It is little wonder, we suggest, that advice such as this does little to help students

and probably adds to their anxieties. It is crucial to move LR conversations with

Persuading an octopus into a glass 37

students in more positive and enabling directions. We think of this as re-naming

and re-framing. In the remainder of the chapter, we consider two metaphors for

rethinking the practice of working with literatures.

More helpful metaphors: tables and dinner

parties

Not all advice books are so unhelpful. Becker (1986) in a chapter aptly entitled

‘Terrorised by the literature’, suggests that students need to think of scholarship

as a cumulative enterprise. They are adding to something that already exists and

they re-use scholarship in order to advance their own study. Rather than sending

students out on a river in a Deliverance

style test of endurance, Becker uses the

metaphor of a table to get at what is new, and what is old or borrowed/used. He

says:

Imagine that you are … making a table. You have designed it and cut out

some of the parts. Fortunately, you don’t need to make all the parts yourself.

Some are standard sizes and shapes – lengths of two by four, for instance

– available at any lumber yard. Some have already been designed and made

by other people – drawer pulls and turned legs. All you have to do is ﬁ t them

into the places you left for them, knowing that they were available. That is the

best way to use the literature.

(Becker, 1986: 142)

Becker suggests that the LR is a particular kind of text, an argument. (This is a

genre we explore in more detail in Chapter 6.) Here we allow Becker to make the

initial point:

You want to make an argument, instead of a table. You have created some of

the argument yourself, perhaps on the basis of new data or information you

have collected. But you needn’t invent the whole thing. Other people have

worked on your problem or problems related to it and have made some of

the pieces you need. You just have to ﬁ t them in where they belong. Like the

woodworker, you leave space, when you make your portion of the argument,

for the other parts you know you can get. You do that, that is, if you know that

they are there to use. And that’s one good reason to know the literature: so

that you will know what pieces are available and not waste time doing what

has already been done.

(Becker, 1986: 142)

One positive feature of the table metaphor is that of familiarity. We have all used

tables and know what they are, whereas not many of us will have paddled a river

from top to bottom. A table is also of a manageable size because it has to ﬁ t into a

room: even the grandest table can be seen in entirety and walked around. The table

38 Persuading an octopus into a glass

metaphor thus makes the LR appear doable. And, making a table is a crafting

activity. It is pleasurable work with the hands, both mental and manual, aesthetic

and utilitarian. This resonates with the notion of writing that is honed and polished

through labour that is both aesthetic and functionally directed. Of course, there is

always the occasional hammered thumb to contend with, but that is a far cry from

being submerged or being stranded oarless up the proverbial creek.

In our own search for useful metaphors that might put some agency back

into the process yet foreground the crucial identity work involved, we have been

particularly taken by a metaphor developed by our Australian colleague John

Smyth. It is of literature work as a dinner party. We have elaborated this metaphor

in our workshops with students to counter the overwhelmingly swamped, lost and

drowning images they usually offer.

We like the domestic, familiar image of the dinner party and its emphasis

on conversation with a community of scholars. The party occurs in one’s own

home, in the familiar territory where one belongs (not the ocean or the swamp

or the river). The doctoral researcher invites to the table the scholars she would

like to join her for a conversation over the evening meal. The emphasis is on

the company and the conversation that happens at the table. The candidate has

selected the menu, bought the food, and cooked the dinner which she offers her

guests. As host to this party, she makes space for the guests to talk about their

work, but in relation to her own work. Her own thesis is never disconnected from

the conversation, for after all it lies on her table. It is part of the food the guests

eat, chew and digest.

And because it is her dinner party the doctoral researcher has a great deal of

agency. The dinner party metaphor makes it clear that she cannot invite everyone

because they will not all ﬁ t at her table. She is not just a bystander or ‘reviewer’

of the conversation, but a participant. While she may not always comprehend the

conversation or catch all its nuances and complexity, she is present. And she can

reﬂ ect on these conversations later, mulling them over as one might do at the end

of a good night out. But having made the contact and the connection (between their

work and her own), there is a starting point for other dinners, coffees, conversations

and the option of not inviting some guests back or including others.

We ﬁ nd students warm to this metaphor because it is such a stark contrast

to the more powerless images they offer. It does not seem out of reach. Its very

domesticity makes the LR seem doable. Most importantly it creates a very different

subject position for the writer. It is the doctoral writer who does the inviting, it is

she who initiates the conversation with her scholar guests and it is she who uses

what they have said, rather than just being grateful that they have come.

Of course, counter metaphors, as important as they are, are not enough

in supervision pedagogy and so we move on to strategies that help students

operationalize the dinner party organizer as subject position, that is, to ﬁ nd agency

through text work. But our argument throughout is that identity work is as central

as the text work and should not be underestimated. This is not just an added extra,

it is part of the work of writing the thesis.

Persuading an octopus into a glass 39

Adopting a critical stance

As we noted earlier, most advice books suggest that the LR needs to be critical.

On the surface, the term critical positions the doctoral researcher more powerfully

as judge and evaluator of the research that has preceded her. But we have found

this is where many students come undone. Critical is taken to mean critique, to

ﬁ nd what is wrong. Many students are intimidated and sometimes paralysed by

the prospect of being critical of (esteemed, elevated) scholars who are senior,

more powerful and acknowledged experts in their ﬁ elds.

The seemingly innocuous and commonplace phrase a critical review of the

literature carries with it a set of presuppositions that create a particular stance for

the doctoral writer, what we call a difﬁ cult subject position, which makes the task

of writing more onerous. Doctoral researchers often revert to writing summaries,

we believe, because they are nervous about taking on the subject position of

‘critic’. They are often cautioned (through advice books, supervisors, university

websites) that the LR is not a summary genre, that it involves making a case

for their work and ﬁ nding which research literatures are like/unlike/connected to

what they are doing. But such advice is often not sufﬁ cient.

The dinner party metaphor can help here. The doctoral researcher can make her

dinner party a dull affair where all the guests speak one after another, but engage

in little interaction, debate or challenge. Or her soirée can be one in which she

serially holds the ﬂ oor, ridicules all of the guests and prevents them from talking

back or to each other. Of course, all students know that in reality neither of these

events will be entertaining or informative. Getting the mix right is not easy.

We can capture this dilemma by considering a text where the doctoral researcher

has difﬁ culty achieving a critical stance. The text is written by Gina, a senior

school administrator who is researching what is ‘known’ about school reform.

Fullan (1993) proposes some paradoxes about change that would help one

to understand and deal with the complexities of change. He claims that you

can’t mandate what matters since the more complex the change, the less

you can force it. He also explains that change is a journey, not a blueprint

and that we will encounter problems. However, we should see problems as

our friends. Can one ever regard problems as good? This could be the most

feared thing and could become an obstacle for some, knowing the stress and

headaches that problems can cause. Nevertheless, the author is of the view

that because they are inevitable, we can’t learn without them. In this light,

I share the author’s view because the old adage goes ‘experiences are our

greatest teacher’.

Here Gina shows a grasp of the issues and debates about school change, but a

difﬁ culty in positioning herself in relation to the writer Fullan, a senior scholar in

the ﬁ eld of educational reform. In this passage she talks of herself as ‘one’ and ‘I’

and of an anonymous ‘you’ and ‘we’ as the audience the writer is addressing. She

40 Persuading an octopus into a glass

is critical of the proposition Fullan is making, but in order to make the critique

she resorts to rhetorical questions. Gina then absents herself from the text to make

another critical comment which is based on her own considerable professional

experience, but which she is reluctant to assert, saying ‘knowing the stress and

headaches that problems can cause’. She does not produce counters from other

literature at this point. She reasserts herself, as the ‘I’, only when in agreement

with the author.

It would be easy to respond to this text as a piece of ‘bad writing’, but a closer

reading shows that the problem is not primarily about style and expression.

The lack of intertextuality and some of the tongue-tied-ness derive from Gina’s

inability to ﬁ nd a comfortable ‘hands on hips’ stance. She is mute at her own

dinner party.

For Gina to move forward, an expanded notion of critical, beyond praise and

blame, is required, together with the adoption of a stance that we characterize as

appreciative.

Becoming critical

To be critical is not just about praising and demolishing the work of others. To

continue with our dinner party metaphor, the task is not to invite the guests in order

to poison, gag or humiliate them. Nor is it simply to contradict in the style of the

famous Monty Python argument sketch, where ‘Yes it is’, ‘No it isn’t’ constitutes

an argument. These are commonsense versions of critique and argument. The

scholarly meanings of these terms are different.

Being critical involves making a number of judgments and decisions about

which literatures to engage with, and which to ignore, which aspects of texts to

stress and which to omit or downplay. Adopting a critical stance to a text means

paying attention to: deﬁ nitions; underpinning assumptions; theoretical resources

mobilized; epistemology and methodology; method (who, what, where, how);

and ﬁ ndings. These perspectives can be brought together to establish points of

similarity and points of difference. It is through such focused interrogation and

intertextual work that students come to identify major debates in the ﬁ eld.

But to be critical is also to be respectful of what others have done, to look

at what they have contributed, rather than going on the attack. A key question

to ask is: What does this work contribute? Rather than, what does it fail to do?

This creates an evaluative frame which does not privilege ‘criticism’ as negative

or destructive behaviour. The following example, written by doctoral researcher

Sean, illustrates what an appreciative stance might look like.

The Stages Heuristic is widely acknowledged to have been the ﬁ rst formal

policy theory established in the ‘new’ ﬁ eld of policy science (Deleon, 1999;

Sabatier, 1999; McCool, 1995). Although it is no longer in active use, I

mention it here as an historical antecedent to later policy theories. Originally

conceptualized by Lasswell (1951), the stages approach was reﬁ ned by Brewer

Persuading an octopus into a glass 41

(1974) and identiﬁ ed six key stages: (1) policy initiation, (2) estimation, (3)

selection, (4) implementation, (5) evaluation, and (6) termination. The Stages

Heuristic represents a delineated, sequential policy process framework

where some overlap between stages is possible, but where each stage has

distinctive characteristics. While much of the policy research since the 1970s

has been shaped by this framework, its critics now characterize the approach

as disjointed, episodic and linear (Deleon, 1999; Sabatier, 1999).

For all practical purposes this theory has become outdated and irrelevant

in that it is no longer studied by scholars. But the stages approach represents

a point of departure for other theories and more stringent and holistic models.

It also served to open policy studies to a range of academic disciplines and

provided space for later ideas based on social norms and personal values

(Deleon, 1999).

Here Sean demonstrates a grasp of a body of literature which was important to

policy scholarship. While noting the critiques of scholars who built their work in

dialogue with and against this body of work, he is able to insert his own evaluation

of its importance. Without resorting to ‘I agree (or disagree)’, or ‘Deleon says’, Sean

puts forward his assessment of the body of scholarship, namely that the work was

important as a kicking-off place for others and as the beginning of a new ﬁ eld.

This is a graceful recognition of the work of other scholars. It is neither

deferential nor obsequious nor harsh. But it does, nevertheless, point out that the

actual theory in question has largely been superseded.

Some students arrive at a generous and generative criticality by themselves.

Others beneﬁ t from a more direct pedagogical strategy. The work of Jon Wagner

(1993) is particularly useful in establishing an analytic framework for criticality that

moves beyond liking or disliking, agreeing or disagreeing. Wagner distinguishes

between what he calls the ‘blind spots’ and ‘blank spots’ in others’ research. What

we ‘know enough to question but not answer’ are our blank spots; what we ‘don’t

know well enough to even ask about or care about’ are our blind spots, ‘areas in

which existing theories, methods, and perceptions actually keep us from seeing

phenomena as clearly as we might’ (1993: 16).

So, for example, surveys typically give a broad snapshot of a phenomenon

using respondents’ perceptions. What they cannot do is provide in-depth reasons

about why those particular answers are the way they are. This requires a different

kind of investigation. The lack of in-depth reasons are a blind spot of this type of

research (and indeed, are typically why mixed methods are seen as preferable to

single surveys). To identify the blind spots in others’ research, students need to

focus on the things a particular methodology or method does not do, that is, areas

that have been overlooked for theoretical or methodological reasons.

Identifying blank spots, by contrast, involves asking what this research could

have seen or done that it does not. That is, what are the shortcomings of the

research? So, if a survey omitted questions or failed to take up opportunities for

informative cross-tabulations, then these are arguably blank spots.

42 Persuading an octopus into a glass

This distinction assists students to see the difference between research

that is poorly executed, and research that can only provide a limited data set.

Furthermore, when there is a limited data set by virtue of a blind spot, the student

is then able to check the blind spots against the claims made of the ﬁ ndings to

see if they stack up. Combining the notion of blind spots and blank spots with

an appreciative stance allows doctoral researchers to focus on what the research

contributes and how/where/why more might be required. The combination also

provides evaluative detail beyond summarizing content and themes.

In workshops we encourage doctoral researchers to assess the individual texts

of other scholars by asking such questions as:

what is the argument?

what kind/aspect of x is spoken about in this article?

from what position?

using what evidence?

what claims are made?

how adequate are these (blank spots and blind spots)?

Asking and answering such questions allows students to write about the

speciﬁ c contribution, and then to compare it with other texts that have been

written, possibly as a history of the ﬁ eld, or as a synthesis of the current state of

understanding. Working with blank and blind spots across many texts provides

important understandings about the gaps and spaces in the ﬁ eld, one of which the

doctoral researcher will occupy.

Modellin g good litera t u re work

It is helpful for supervisors to collect examples of student writing, including

texts that don’t work, as well as texts that do (and negotiate permission to use

these). Supervisors can thus make concrete how identity issues surface in text.

Doctoral researchers and their supervisors can look together at this writing as a

set of strategies, asking: What does this text accomplish and what does it fail to

do? Such writing becomes part of the resources of a writing-centred supervision.

It makes writing-in-progress more public and less a source of embarrassment. It

creates an opportunity to get speciﬁ c, rather than provide only general feedback

to students.

Here is an example of student writing which demonstrates what a sound LR

looks like. Anne, a senior public servant, is focusing on traditional and critical

perspectives on the role of bureaucracy. In this excerpt she demonstrates that she

can handle with facility and generosity complex ideas and an important corpus

of scholarship.

The question of whether senior bureaucrats play an active role in policy

development or if their inﬂ uence is more limited, even an impediment to the

•

Persuading an octopus into a glass 43

will of elected ministers, is contested. There seems to be a pervasive view

that ministers set the policy agenda of government with the bureaucracy

represented as a ‘necessary evil’ for enacting policy. Meanwhile, there is

literature that positions the bureaucracy more favourably, even suggesting

a more authoritative role in policy development. But, there appears to be no

concurrence on the extent of involvement. While many scholars agree that

bureaucrats, either actively or tacitly, do play an important role in policy

development, it is safe to say that this does not represent the consensus view

(Levin, 2002; Stone, 2002; Birkland, 2001; Lynn, 1996; Majone, 1989;

Goodsell,1985).

The casting of politicians as policy leaders assumes that a public servant,

senior or otherwise, is a ‘servant’ to the public, but more to the point, a

servant to the minister. Some see senior public servants as instruments of

political processes but with a severely limited role in policy formulation

(Wilson, 1999). This theoretical orientation is consistent with new corporate

management ideologies that are believed to foster a stronger separation

between public administration and politics but, as I will argue, do more to

motivate bureaucrats to seek a more direct role in government policy. As Cohn

(1997) suggests, under such arrangements ministers rely on deputies and

other senior administrators to provide direction and advice on policy, but the

actual decisions are made at a political level. In framing policy development

in this way, there is some recognition of the role of the permanent public

service, to be sure, but it is one of implementation, stopping short of policy

formulation.

We could characterize Anne’s text as ‘in charge of the literatures’. Anne frames

her discussion from the outset as a debate, a set of ideas in competition with

one another. This allows her to make ideas central, rather than other researchers,

and to take the lead in guiding the reader through the different positions in the

ﬁ eld. She uses evaluative language to sort and clarify positions: ‘There seems

to be a pervasive view; there is literature that positions the bureaucracy more

favourably … there appears to be no concurrence …’. She also makes links to

broader discourses, ‘This theoretical orientation is consistent with new corporate

management ideologies …’, and to her own argument, ‘… as I will argue, do more

to motivate bureaucrats to seek a more direct role in government policy’.

This is a dinner party where the host is orchestrating the conversation and

calling the shots in an elegant and respectful way. Such writing, together with

other examples, might serve as a model for students. It stands in contrast to the

work by Vera and Geraldine with which we began this chapter. It demonstrates that

the doctoral researcher is neither overcome by the literatures, nor in possession

of unrealistic expectations of their ﬁ nality and unity. It shows a healthy degree

of appreciation and criticality, and a clear sense of where the doctoral research

argument is to go.