Our next collective initiative brings together stories of how doctoral researchers, supervisors, developers, and institutional leaders initiate and carry out organisational change in their universities, doctoral programmes, research teams, informal academic networks, and otherwise, through their learning from the Hidden Curriculum.
The series of blog posts will bring together examples and analyses of such learning experiences, from contributors across the globe. It will present a range of different perspectives on the role of the Hidden Curriculum in supporting researchers to initiate and enact organizational change for better doctoral education futures.
Some of the contributions will be based in researcher development practices, some in supervisory work, some will share the personal experiences of doctoral researchers, and some may offer opinions from an academic leadership vantage point.
As an open access resource for colleagues around the world, we are now inviting a range of short (under 1000 words) blog posts that present perspectives on the role of the Hidden Curriculum in supporting doctoral researchers, supervisors, developers, and leaders to initiate and enact organizational change for greater diversity, equity, and democracy in doctoral education and the university.
To contextualise your post, we thought it would be useful to remind you of our definition of the Hidden Curriculum in Doctoral education:
“The hidden curriculum in doctoral education comprises all unofficial mechanisms of learning that take place within and outwith academia. Learning via the hidden curriculum is recognised as genuine pedagogical spaces or sites of learning that can extend pedagogical practices by offering support provision for learners’ academic, personal, social and psychological needs. Whereas the starting point in the pursuit of the hidden curriculum tends to be driven by doctoral researchers’ ownership of this personal process, the entire doctoral ecology recognises that there are key ‘hidden curriculum agents’ who are able to support, empower and enable doctoral researchers in creating learning pathways that are strategically intended to harness a tailored hidden curriculum based on personal needs and professional aspirations.” (Elliot et al, 2020)
To summarise, we are interested in the informal spaces and sites of learning, the unexpected, the implicit, the hidden, the serendipitous, the incidental.
At the top level we are looking for posts that speak explicitly to both the idea of the hidden curriculum, and to the idea of initiating, embodying, and leading organizational change for greater diversity, equity, and institutional democracy – but we are happy for you to choose an angle for these ideas, that is meaningful to you in your own work. Our style guide is here and will give you a better understanding of the tone, audience and format required by the Hidden Curriculum blog.
For good examples of our most popular blog posts across a number of different perspectives, please take a look at the following posts on the Hidden Curriculum:
- The Hidden Curriculum: Post-PhD reflections
- Doctoral writing: Preparing for upgrade
- Decolonising doctoral education: Sociologies of emergence?
- It takes a village to raise a PhD
- Five ways culture change can be led by postgraduate researchers
You are very welcome to get in touch with us to discuss an idea for a blog post related to this call. We especially welcome perspectives from new contributors to our blog. Please share with us an informal proposal in the shape of a few sentences about what aspects of ‘organisational change’ your post might cover, and how it links to the Hidden Curriculum. On receipt of your informal proposal the team will discuss your idea and come back to you with our feedback within 3 weeks.
The timeline for production of the final 1000-word piece is flexible and we’ll make sure to suit the timeline to your schedules.
The hidden curriculum in doctoral education 