Potentials and Challenges in Redesigning Traditional Text Seminars in Doctoral Education in Sweden

Abstract

The text seminar has a long and strong tradition in academia, not least in postgraduate education. In these seminars, doctoral students are socialised into the research community to be able to act as researchers in an academic setting. However, research suggests that the traditional and strictly regulated form of doctoral seminars may hinder doctoral students’ learning. In response to this problem, this article presents and discusses an analysis of an attempt to redesign doctoral education seminars in Sweden by a design theoretic approach to learning. The result shows that while certain seminar forms functioned as somewhatlimiting for learning, other forms and multimodal resources were able to open for alternative meaning-making and ways of staging the identity of a researcher.