DME seminars

Workshop arrangements and content:
The DME holds regular afternoon seminars. Each seminar usually includes two talks, by an internal speaker and an external speaker. Additionally, there is also a reading group in which everyone reads a previously circulated paper to read in advance and participates in a discussion about it. All DME staff and PhD students are expected to participate in seminars whenever they are not away for data collection or unavoidable meetings. They are also expected to contribute by suggesting speakers and taking part in discussions.

What you are supposed to get out of the seminars:
Because a variety of people give presentations (and suggest papers), much of what you hear and discuss in seminars will not be directly related to your own PhD research, and some of it you will not understand. This is a completely normal part of the experience for staff as well as for PhD students. But, as you are not expected to incorporate everything you hear into your thesis, you might wonder why we expect you to devote your time to taking part. Here is my answer.

First, the DME has a vibrant research culture. Visiting speakers are consistently impressed by the number of people in the room, the diversity of knowledge represented, and the high quality of the resulting discussion. This contributes to our reputation across the UK and beyond, which has numerous benefits in terms of attracting collaborators and opening up opportunities for staff and PhD students. But it is possible only because everyone commits to taking part. When we all value group coherence and reputation as well as individual knowledge, we all benefit.

Second, a PhD is supposed to leave you with more than a giant document called a thesis; it is supposed to enculturate you into the world of the professional academic researcher. Academic researchers design and conduct research studies, write papers about these studies, and give presentations about them at conferences. They also write grant applications, review papers, amend papers according to reviewer critiques, debate theoretical constructs and methodological approaches, discuss possible future collaborations, and keep themselves informed about developments in their own and related fields. The seminars provide experience relevant to all of these activities, and (importantly) do so in a friendly atmosphere in which people are supportive and want to help you do well. Below are some specifics.

• On research design. To design a study, it helps to have seen examples of other studies. It helps even more to be aware of the criticisms to which different study designs can be subjected. Seminars involve discussions about such issues so they should help you become better able to articulate why a particular method or design is or is not appropriate to your research questions. This should help you to be more confident in answering questions about your work at conferences or in your PhD viva. Study design is also an area in which listening to talks from beyond your immediate field can be useful: although the content of a particular talk might not relate directly to your work, it might provide a great idea for a method/design that could be adapted to do what you need.
• On writing. To write a good paper, thesis, or grant application, you need detailed knowledge of research in your own area. You also need to relate this knowledge to broader issues within and beyond your field in order to make a good argument for why your research is valuable. To do this well, it helps to see how others do it (or fail to do it), listening critically in order to judge what does and does not work well. Listening to criticisms and questions raised by others can help you to understand what experienced academics look for and what confuses non-experts.
• On giving presentations. To give a good talk, you need to present a coherent argument that people can follow, and to think on your feet to answer questions about it. Obviously, giving a presentation provides practice in these skills, but you can also learn a lot by watching presentations given by others. People adopt different styles and watching will help you to decide what style might work for you.
• On asking questions. Students are often nervous about asking questions in settings where there are many experts. But asking questions is central to research and is an important skill in academic life. If you feel nervous, here is what I suggest. First, listen and you will notice that the most expert people often ask the most basic questions – they expose their own lack of understanding as often as they ask about technical complexities. Second, take opportunities between and after talks to speak to other PhD students and staff in smaller groups – you will find that they do not think your questions strange and had often been thinking similarly themselves. Third, when you’ve done that, make a commitment to yourself to ask one question the next time. Once you have asked and nothing unpleasant has happened, your confidence will increase.
• On becoming well informed. Watching presentations can be an excellent way to get overviews of research in areas beyond your own; it is much easier to listen to someone describe the main results in a body of work than it is to trawl through hundreds of papers yourself. This can be useful for two reasons: first, you will eventually be expected to write and speak about how your research is related to education and/or psychology more broadly; second, you might learn about a body of work that is relevant to something you have been struggling with. As a bonus, you will have learned who has some expertise in that area and would therefore be a good person to ask for further information.
• On building a career. When you finish your PhD, you will probably want a job. Regardless of whether you apply for positions inside or outside academia, broad knowledge will serve you well. Recruiters will want to be confident that you understand contemporary issues in research and will be able to apply your knowledge and skills in areas relevant to them.

Of course, staff recognize that even with all of this in mind, it can be frustrating to sit in talks that seem less important than your ongoing work. My advice would be to plan to make the time count. Look up the schedule of talks in advance and, if they do not seem relevant to you, decide to make notes on something specific like the presenter’s style or how they justify their methods. Or decide to make a page of notes on what seem to be some key ideas and references in the presenter’s area – keep a file of such pages and you will have a useful resource when applying and interviewing for jobs.

A final word
Overall, the DME seminars give you an opportunity to become accustomed to taking part in academic discussions and debates. This might seem difficult at first, because people with more experience will naturally be more able to express their knowledge, so you might find that the conversation goes by rather fast. However, you should bear in mind that you do not have to say anything startlingly insightful in order to contribute – it is often just as useful for someone to summarise what they have understood or to say that they do not understand a particular concept/argument/ method. Such a contribution can push everyone towards clarification, and sometimes reveals ambiguities or miscommunications that no-one has noticed before.

What you must not expect is that attending the workshops will give you “answers” in the narrow and definitive sense, about either conceptual or methodological issues. Research is a process of knowledge creation, and there will always be disagreements about productive things to study and productive ways to study them. This might seem odd or discomfiting at first, especially if you have come from an undergraduate degree in which you were told what to think about and what to think about it. If you do find the experience unsettling, try thinking about it this way: your job is still to pay attention to your teachers, but what this means has changed in two ways. First, everyone is your teacher now, staff and other students alike. Second, your job is to learn not what they think, but how they think about it. Then you can apply your improved critical thinking skills to the research of others and, most importantly, to your own.

Best of luck, and please bear in mind that staff are always open to questions about the workshops or suggestions regarding how they operate.

Krzysztof Cipora