And, yeah, it’ll probably be half-baked – I guess I have the feeling that we are trending toward introducing these coursework elements, like them or not, so it’s worthwhile to figure out what there is to like, and what not to like, about the US system, so that maybe we can end up with something… 3/4 baked… ;-P Maybe just a little gushy in the middle… ;-P

I don’t know about what constitutes adequate intellectual grounding. Not me… At the moment first class honors, which is what I got in on, is the minimum. Now I’m not saying that should always be the case, but if I had to pay upfront for a masters or do a PhD without increasing my HECS debt or choose to recieve a scholarship for a masters or chose to recieve a scholarship for a PhD, the choice is not really much of a choice. The other thing that I wonder about is the HUGE difference between masters programs. Personally my honors at Monash Anthropology I feel was more rigorous than many masters by coursework presently are, which are less work than what I did.

So if you were to implement coursework into the PhD in Australia I reckon there is a whole lot of other things that really need to change before that could be successful.

One big thing is funding, government funding has dropped, and we don’t have philanthropy like in the US, there also is not the number of scholarships or other grants available…to quote a line out of Chopper ‘Here no cash – no cash here.’ I agree there is a big fat purple elephant to do with lack of institutional support, but people at BLEEP don’t want to deal with it, and there simply are not mechanisms to start to deal with it. The only support is the informal social networks between PhD students, which both of us seem to have developed regardless of other factors. Personally I’m glad I’ll get through before they implement a half-baked coursework throughout PhD candidature idea. And you know it will be half-baked…look me in the eye and tell me it won’t…

It varies from program to program, of course – some US PhD programs would be more structured than others… But you generally complete an MA, including both coursework and a research thesis, en route to the PhD, and then there are often other requirements after the completion of the MA, and prior to the thesis proposal (whether some kind of additional qualifying paper, exams, some additional coursework – the exact mix depends on the field and the school).

I think some of the US requirements are somewhat overkill (they were particularly annoying for me, as I haggled to do PhD seminars instead of my regular coursework as an undergrad, such that having to do even more as a postgrad was tiresome). I think it’s probably viable to streamline coursework and examinations, as (at least in my program) some of these requirements were essentially taking two bites at assessing the same skills… But overall, the approach does give you an extremely strong intellectual grounding, which isn’t currently replicated in the system here – particularly given that it’s possible here to leap straight from an honours thesis into a PhD without an intervening MA degree…

This doesn’t mean that students hide away in the academy and do no fieldwork, archival work, etc. Anthro students at my university, for example, would generally do a substantial period of pilot fieldwork in their area, before proposing their PhD project. And there was substantially greater opportunity for practice (and vetting) of students in field related skills before they committed to a particular thesis project.

I’m not clear whether the comparative stress level was higher or lower – among other things, a more structured program provides support of various sorts, and tends to create an intellectual cohort of sorts – so avoiding the sorts of atomised stress that is common here; but there are also more assessment milestones, which generate their own stress…

But the disciplinary issue is a pivotal one – I emphatically like the interdisciplinary character of the work being undertaken here – I think it leads to interesting projects, a more diverse student and faculty body. I’m just curious whether it might be possible to provide a level of deeper intellectual grounding, as what we have now relies heavily on individuals’ ability, with very little structure or support, to provide themselves with adequate intellectual grounding – and, in our case, in an extremely wide range of fields… It’s great when it comes off – but my guess is that the difficulty of actually pulling it off has something to do with stress and high dropout rates, as people get to a certain point, don’t know where to go next, and lack institutional support to get themselves out of the situation…

AND you can and do already do coursework in a masters program or honors program and then do a PhD by research thesis mode in Australia. Which returns me to my point; I do not see any real advantage of stressing out PhD by research students by dumping bucket-loads of coursework on top of their research projects. I just cannot for the life of me see any real advantage of putting more work on a PhD student’s back. And I am not convinced that whatever could be taught from within our university could be as great a value to me as what I have learnt from going outside of our university and working with Cambodian people. I thought that was part of the point of doing social research? Going outside and learning from people outside of university…

The time commitment would be the other factor, if you had even a year of coursework then I would say that your PhD candidature would have to be extended much further. As it stands I am going to be barely scraping through on the 4 1/2 year mark. If any life catastrophe happens to you during your candidature, then speaking from personal experience, it is very likely that you will end up taking more time to complete. You stack coursework on top of this and stress someone out more and you would see an even further reduced completion rate in my view. And the PhD completion rate as you may already know is abysmally low.

Look I don’t know about disciplinary narrowing in Australia either. Its very different I suspect to the US. I have ended up working across disciplines of psychology, social work, sociology, anthropology and history here. But I have none of the specialized strengths of one of those disciplines, ending up a sort of jack-of-all-trades, but master of none. I would say having a specific theory unit on Marxism or a specific method unit on life history would not necessarily narrow into a discipline focus in itself.

But, of course, the process does significantly increase the time commitment required for completing a PhD. And, as well, this kind of training (in the US, at least) does tend to be organised strictly in terms of disciplinary socialisation, which tends to channel research in specific ways – I personally think this kind of socialisation exacts a high cost, which is why I’m interested in how one could think through how to provide a thorough intellectual grounding – theoretically and methodologically – without dictating this kind of disciplinary narrowing…

But you do know that I think coursework at this stage is not that useful. I hope you also remember that I said if I was forced to do more coursework, which I see as just a distraction, I would not have started a PhD in the first place. As it stands the research methods course run at BLEEP university taught me nothing new and was unfortunately a waste of time. Mixing honors, masters and PhD students together in that research strategies course was not a good idea either. The honors students might get some benefit, but PhD students do not. I think that it is fine to do coursework in a masters or honors. But during PhD, I think no absolutely not.

But I think that doing coursework for me would just be an additional stress and not allow me to focus on my thesis. I’m not saying that coursework would not be useful for some post-grads, but I’d had enough of essays for courses.

Plus I do not see how a post-grad course could be made relevant for every PhD student. Unless it is relevant for them writing and researching for their PhD it would be a waste of time.

The only way that I see would be useful for PhD students would be to run highly specialized elective courses on ONE particular method, say ethnography or life history in my case, and that is all you would do in that course for a semester. Or ONE particular theorist or theoretical perspective, say phenomenology or Marxism or post-structuralism for a semester.

I do not see the use in me learning quantitative statistical regression analysis if I intend to do life histories, for example.

The other thing also depends on what your supervision is like. If many PhD students actually got effective supervision then perhaps any supposed need for coursework would then be much less.

When I teach, though, I’m happy to cover a wide range of understandings of theory and how it might relate to practice. My concern is that methods texts seem to suggest certain understandings very strongly, maybe without intending to.

[Note that I edited your post above slightly, to see whether an unclosed tag or quotation mark might have been causing some of the issues I'm seeing on the site - it didn't change any context, but I just wanted to explain the edit...]

Not sure whether I can follow you here. Perhaps this is because I’ve already entered my academic life advocating the position that theory follows practice and nothing I encountered in between really prooved me wrong, which says nothing though.

The challenge then becomes, though, how to introduce postgraduate coursework for research students without falling into the hyper-disciplinary focus that accompanies it, say, in the US. I like the porousness of disciplinary boundaries in the Australian system – so my question is whether you could structure more systematic theoretical and methodological training, without this inevitably channeling students into a narrow disciplinary focus…

I’ll go hide now while you criticise my endorsement of research coursework… ;-P

How much theory is needed in the undergraduate programs? It is a big question. And at the moment I feel what students are given theory-wise is too broad to be particularly useful (this is a peculiar problem localized to our institution), but on the plus side is a broad base to build upon. I really wish our school would run an elective theory course in first semester of second year that focuses on a smaller number of social theorists, before they get to qualitative methods and definitely before they do an honours thesis.

At the moment I’m not sure that most students, by the time they graduate, even get that there are dominant theoretical traditions in use in their field.