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

Working with hierarchies, levels, and positions

Our work involved experiments to unsettle the hierarchical form and increase doctoral students’ agency. Recurring positions in our sessions were those of seminar leaders, seminar participant, keynote speaker, panellist, doctoral student, researcher, and audience member. One way we experimented with these positions was to consciously assign and reassign roles. We chose to ask doctoral students, senior lecturers, and professors to sit together in a panel or to participate as audience. In seminar V, all participants, regardless of academic rank, got to perform a well-known theorist character on stage. An additional way in which we seminar leaders chose to regulate roles was to democratically distribute speaking opportunities. As described earlier, this was done by collecting questions on sticky notes, summarising them thematically and then directing them to the speaker and the panel. It was also done by giving the floor to doctoral students first and to senior researchers later. In retrospect, however, we see that our choice to assign a senior researcher to make a short introductory lecture beginning each seminar to some extent counteracted our intention of creating a space for equitable discussions. In the written doctoral student reflections, some suggested that they too be trusted to make such introductions and thus contribute to the framing of the seminar.

Another important aspect of orchestrating the seminars was to make use of the physical space as a resource for learning (Selander, 2008). Here, we paid particular attention to exploring the levels of the room and the shapes that bodies formed together through participants’ placement. We also considered social aspects of space with an ambition to enable more equitable and democratic conversations. We saw, for example, that the flat, non-hierarchical panel form offered doctoral students a more equal position when they were placed side by side with researchers on stage and everyone was orientated towards a shared interest. Based on the student performance and audience interaction we observed, this kind of social staging provided an opportunity for the doctoral student panellists to position themselves as researchers. It did not, however, provide a new resource for students who were not on the panel. Correspondingly, the circle form, staged during the evaluation at the end of seminars I and II, offered a communicative situation where eyes were directed towards each other so that everyone could be seen and heard. Even so, the circle form did not automatically result in a more equitable conversation. A doctoral student expressed this in the following way:

The democratic format in the second part of the seminar, that is to say that the audience sat in a circle, made no major difference to the discussion climate. To a large extent, a positioning was still taking place where some strong voices dominated and this almost became even more evident now that we could all look at each other, as opposed to when everyone is sitting in rows in a more traditional form of discussion after a panel presentation.

While we here sought to frame the physical space as a democratic setting through placement of chairs, the doctoral student’s reflection above shows that the circle form did not offer sufficient support for all participants to position themselves in the seminar. On the contrary, the circular shape became counterproductive as it enabled gazes reinforcing existing hierarchies. Sitting in a circle thus functioned as a panoptic (Foucault, 1977), hence disciplining, arrangement. Based on Levine’s (2015) argument that different forms can conflict with each other, we conclude that in the context of our doctoral seminar, the circular form—which we the researchers associated with educational equity as practiced in for example study circles—clashed with the triangular form of academic hierarchy. As seen in previous research, doctoral students might opt out of speaking as they do not find themselves in a sufficiently stable position in their field to be able to challenge those who are already established (Leonard & Becker, 2009; Peixoto, 2014). Also, given the relatively large total number of people present in the first three seminars (up to 37 people), the doctoral students’ limited scope for action in the circle can be understood in terms of risk-taking.

Another way we used the physical room for staging a learning situation was to offer participants to place themselves on a level above the others in the room. Occupying a high-level place from which to speak is something that has been granted to few, such as royalty and priests (or, in a less extreme form, lecturers or keynote speakers at a podium). A photo from seminar V shows three improvising students taking a seat on a balcony near the ceiling, several metres above us seminar leaders and other participants who were placed below, looking up. The physical experience of students taking a place in the room which was not only equal but in fact superior to senior participants, created a shift in power and a reversed hierarchy, resisting the more traditional form characterising doctoral seminars, where implicit codes of conduct govern who is allowed to speak and how (Schnaas, 2016). Documentation photos from the seminar show that even doctoral students who usually did not physically or verbally take up much space in the group acted with assertive body language up on the balcony. In line with other situations where distance between speaker/singer and audience is greater than usual, for example for a priest in a church or an actor on stage, the doctoral students on the balcony above us had to speak louder and gesture more vigorously, thus forced to claim more space both acoustically and spatially.

Working with movement and dynamics

To design something also means putting something in motion. To explore movement and dynamics, we alternated between smaller groups offering a greater sense of security, and larger groups offering a plurality of voices and greater collective intensity. In addition, alternating between different locations and levels in a room invited movement and variation in concrete and bodily ways, as opposed to habitual sedentary academic subjects seated in front of the computer or around a seminar table—the latter often in congealed form where fixed seats reflect status. In our sessions, participants were often encouraged to move around, rearrange the furnishing, approach the writing board, and so on, in other words, to use all resources the room offered in order to vary conditions for meaning-making. Movement and role changes demonstrated the ways in which physical and social space interacted with each other, changing the rhythm of the seminar (Levine, 2015). After performing a fictional conversation between well-known theorists at seminar V, a doctoral student wrote:

The energy was there all day. The very thing of being “on stage” for a while generates new energy. Maybe a good strategy for other occasions as well? To exchange seats and play the leading role for a short moment if you present a comment or a text, for example.

We also alternated between different university buildings to see how their location, architecture, and interior design would affect social relations in the room. Seminar II was, for example, held in a more traditional lecture hall with fixed chairs and folding tables in terrace form. We clearly observed how the room invited the audience to just sit quietly and listen, rather than to interact with others as they did during other sessions with more flexible furnishings. To a certain extent, this inflexibility was compensated by the setup of writing questions on sticky notes, which created movement.

Our pursuit of dynamics furthermore resulted in designing the seminars so that different perspectives and understandings could contrast and cause friction. The reason for this was partly to further complex understandings of the object of knowledge, partly to train the doctoral students to handle disagreements as a fundamental part of academia. Our choice of panellists was for example made to include a plurality of perspectives, and we explicitly encouraged dynamics to enable creative discussions. Similarly, when working with texts we selected articles to include contrasting perspectives. Despite these ambitions, conversations did on several occasions end up in a comfortable sense of agreement. In such situations, we the seminar leaders consciously raised questions intended to disrupt consensus. Acknowledging that disagreements might entail a risk of doctoral students feeling exposed, we observed that the use of sticky notes partly reduced that risk by shifting focus from individual participants to the artifacts of the sticky notes and to the object of knowledge being discussed.

Working with spatial arrangements of content

To create mobility and flow, not only in terms of physical positions but also in terms of ideas, we worked with thematisation and other methods offering opportunities to arrange issues spatially, rather than by sequential text only. One example is the thematical arrangement of sticky notes through which the audience submitted questions in seminars I–III. This form enabled covering a variety of questions in a short time. More participants could contribute with questions compared to if asked one by one in spoken form, and the same participant could submit several sticky notes without dominating sonic space. Instead of a seminar logic where only a few voices were heard, everyone’s questions could be treated as part of thematic clusters. The removable and reusable sticky notes allowed a speedy thematisation. The following student reflection following seminar I illustrates how the sticky notes functioned as a resource for a democratic form of meaning-making:

I think the concept of sticky notes and thematisation was ingenious—it partly meant that the audience participants who [usually enjoy rank/privilege/precedence etc.] due to their academic position, ethnicity and/or biological gender were granted less space when reduced to one voice among others. This can potentially also result in more open and generally directed answers from panellists. Which in turn can enable answers to be less governed by the above-mentioned system of rank/gender/ethnicity.

In addition, the fact that the notes were anonymous offered an opportunity to submit bolder questions. In seminar IV, the doctoral students participated in arranging thematic clusters with sticky notes. This ability of taking a meta-perspective to analyse arguments is perhaps one of the most important ones that a doctoral student needs to develop during their education.

The portable feature of sticky notes also offered the opportunity to create mind maps where participants could map out and negotiate different meanings of a concept, and the relationships between these meanings – which ones were closer or farther from each other – and how they related to different theoretical lines of thought. In seminar IV, where we employed this kind of exercise, we saw negotiations unfold in a kind of convergent/divergent oscillation in which a concept or a keyword could be distributed in its manifold possible meanings in one moment, to be defined and categorised in the next. While negotiations in a traditional seminar generally require verbally challenging others, the sticky notes enabled other forms of negotiation. For example, a student could silently approach the whiteboard and simply move one or more sticky notes to another location in the mind map.

Working with figuration and improvisation

In several of the seminar sessions, we chose to work with figuration, i.e., fashioning or shaping a figure in the sense of “a person, thing, or action representative of another.”¹ These seminars were designed to open for creative improvisation, but also to break with the frequently strong focus on written texts. Figuration was most clearly explored at seminar V, where participants performed imagined conversations between different well-known scholars after a short time of preparation. As on several previous occasions, we used a room with an open space, flexible furniture, and spiral stairs up to a balcony. The features of this room were significant for the seminar design, as it offered certain spatial opportunities.

Improvisation as a form offers the opportunity to challenge ingrained safety, and this figuration-centred seminar was the one most evidently to open to the unexpected. Not only were the participants to play a theorist role character, but also to perform a form of knowledge by imagining what that theorist would say and do in the flesh. What exactly will happen during an improvisation is difficult to predict, requiring a strong presence and ability to make quick choices. As improvisation entails a significant risk of blurting out something ill-considered in the heat of the moment, it might produce feelings of being exposed and vulnerable. It was to our surprise that everyone accepted the challenge of giving life to an article by assuming a role and speaking with the author’s voice. We found that a small group can be advantageous in exercises placing participants outside their comfort zone. A doctoral student wrote after the seminar: “It was nice that the group was small, I think that part of today’s sense of ease and the conversations that happened were due to the fact that we were not so many.”

Paradoxically, however, speaking with someone else’s voice also proved to create security by offering distance to one’s own position. In a more traditional seminar form, participants would usually be expected to present knowledge in the following manner: “In this text, Author X argues that…. What a doctoral student utters during the seminar thus forms a kind of declarative self-presentation which, during the course of the doctoral program, accumulates into some sort of performance capital. Figuration instead offers an opportunity to step aside from expectations and hierarchies associated with one’s own position, if only for a moment. In such embodied exercises, the role of someone else is temporarily taken on, hence it is not “I” who utters something. The imagined characters can be allowed to get angry, lose an argument, or making a fool of themselves, resulting in conversations less declarative and more explorative. A doctoral student wrote afterwards:

The method of letting us take the positions of the authors of the various texts in dialogues was easy and relaxed, but at the same time demanded great depth as one had to try to understand the texts on all possible levels, as if one had written them oneself. It was liberating to be able to free myself from my own position, it helped me to gain new perspectives.

This session was the one where the participants most evidently showed new sides of themselves. One of the doctoral students said that he after the exercise felt freer to express himself, without necessarily sounding intelligent. Another doctoral student stated that the exercise inspired him to start using creative methods in teaching undergraduate students, but he also pointed out some weaknesses with the exercise:

I did not get as much out of this as I hoped. This was probably largely because we participants interpreted the instructions in such different ways. […] This made it difficult to let the texts speak to each other. We had to spend a lot of time trying to find out to what extent the texts dealt with the same thing at all, and what that meant for which positions we could take as their authors. This made it difficult to have an interesting debate between the participants.

Trying to take a certain author’s position physically offered involvement and intensity, and some of the doctoral students commented that the participants in their group forgot most of what had been decided during preparation when performing in front of the rest of the class. The performance led to a shift in focus for meaning-making, especially considering bodily acts–how would, for example, Foucault sit and what would he wear? The exercise also generated other questions, such as “what would Foucault have researched if he were alive today?” We afterwards concluded that in this particular seminar, preparation and performance became two separate processes, and that the intended focus on theoretical concepts was maintained primarily during preparation.

Working with playfulness, creativity, imagination

In the redesign we strived for playfulness and creativity to facilitate situations where doctoral students may feel tense due to performance-related pressure. We also provided physical resources for playful purpose, such as the props in seminar V, something which may be considered unusual in doctoral education. Several of the quotes provided so far show that formation-centred exercises appeared to make the seminar “easier,” something we interpret both in terms of workload and mood. We worked with imagination by trying to open to the idea “what if …?,” for example in designing the exercises with imagined conversations between theorists and negotiation of mind maps with sticky notes, which we have described earlier. We also worked with “imaginary projects;” in seminar IV, we discussed an imaginary anthology, resulting in a table of contents with chapter headings. A doctoral student wrote:

Thinking of the seminar as planning an anthology was an interesting move. It gave me the opportunity to try to think like a researcher in some way. I mean thinking about how the things you read and work with can become a text resource that is part of a conversation and can help others think and answer, rather than something that should be reproduced in a text that shows that you have read what you were supposed to. It was also interesting to think about the mind map exercise as a model for how to start a book / article / research project.

For this student, the seminar design seemed to offer training in independent thinking, but also a form of identification training for the research role—a kind of skills training forming the backdrop to the entire redesign attempt. However, even when we tried new forms of seminars, it turned out to be easy to slip into more familiar behaviour. Another doctoral student wrote about the same seminar:

During the second part of the seminar, I perceived that not everyone understood that the conversation had an exploratory character and thus wanted to convince the others of the true meaning of the concept, which partly ruined the conversation’s possibilities. I consequently see that an introduction to the seminar’s open and exploratory form needs to be grounded in all participants.

Here we were reminded of the importance of giving clear instructions, so that even playful and creative projects can take place with a sufficiently shared focus. In seminar VI, where a professional sound engineer helped us to record the debate for an imaginary podcast, we sensed that the recording did something to our conversation. It created an air of strong presence—the fact that our conversation could be posted online and heard by outsiders meant that more was at stake. It was important to avoid overlapping speech and to sharpen one’s arguments. Consequently, this became our perhaps most democratic conversation; the rhythmic form changed as our attention turned to the microphone and no one interrupted anyone else—something we had not anticipated. Addressing not only an internal research group but also an imaginary external audience furthermore seemed to generate envisioning future potential situations. One doctoral student wrote:

I think I learned about the current state of research during this seminar and its preparations. This allowed me to see myself as a future expert in my field, as a person who might be called up by a journalist as a general expert in my field. Perhaps this happened in synergy with me practicing to speak as an expert, speaking with the author’s voice. Even though I did not fully take on that role, I felt that I could argue efficiently based on my text and defend its premises and conclusions.