Mentoring doctoral students towards publication within scholarly communities of practice

In this chapter, we describe the experience of a professor/​doctoral advisor (Richard) mentoring his doctoral advisee (Amanda) on how to publish academic research. We demonstrate that preparing doctoral students to publish in top-tier journals involves more than simply providing them with advice on rhetorical strategies or genre conventions for writing research. Doctoral students often need mentoring that assumes that academic writing and publishing is, as Kamler and Thomson (2008: 508) note, ​‘text work/​identity work’, in that ​‘texts and identities are formed together, in, and through writing. The practices of doctoral writing simultaneously produce not only a dissertation but also a doctoral scholar’. This means that mentoring involves constructing:

A space in which both doctoral researchers and supervisors are learning selves in transition. This is a social and relational space in which performance (experience, dialogue, writing) allows the dynamic ​‘smudge’ of learning, the movement from one knowing-being to another. In text work and identity work, writing is performance.

Thein, A. and Beach, R. (2010)

Mentoring doctoral students towards publication within scholarly communities of practice.
In C. Aitchison, B. Kamler and A. Lee (eds.) Publishing Pedagogies for the Doctorate and Beyond. London, Routledge: 117–136