Students as co-explorers: how to build a synergistic research environment

Actively building synergy between students looking for dissertation topics and research-active staff has led to a vibrant research, postgraduate and postdoctoral community in the field of midwifery. This expansion has taken time. In the early 2000s, there were taught master’s programmes with research dissertation components; midwifery has only begun to develop an active research portfolio in the past 20 years.

• Student-staff partnerships: seven strategies for adopting inclusive practices
• Co-creation: how to find the ‘super’ in supervision
• Research time disappearing before your eyes? Try student collaborations

This short piece sets out the link between encouraging and supporting research students and building a research team. It presents our experience at the University of Central Lancashire and covers the four areas that have been critical to this achievement.

Build on passion, not (just) fashion

It is important to foster students who have a passion for their subject, and whose passion links with that of the research team. Funded doctoral research opportunities can sometimes be driven by what is at the top of the political agenda at the time. This is a perfectly respectable route. However, it does mean that some postdoctoral researchers have to start again if they want to pursue the topic that really excites them. The alternative (or additional) approach is for a research team to have a broad vision for the field of enquiry that they want to progress together. Then, within that vision, the team can provide opportunities for doctoral students to pursue the topic that they passionately want to spend three or (part-time) six years investigating and which might be a strong launch pad for them for the rest of their research career.

Be realistic with potential students about what is involved

In applied disciplines such as healthcare, many master’s and doctoral students also work part time. Some potential PhD students in this position seem to believe that the step change between an undergraduate degree and a master’s is about the same as that from a master’s degree to a PhD, and that doctoral studies can therefore be fitted into the interstitial spaces of their busy clinical and home life.

It is critical to set out very clearly to intending part-time students that, in fact, the difference in scale of work and concentration required is significant. Being realistic at the beginning gives space for students to think about how they might manage their PhD in the months and years to come. Even for fully funded PhD students, there are times when they feel they just can’t do it any more.

Letting intending students know that this will happen and, at the beginning, helping them to think through ways they could overcome potential blocks and barriers might reduce the likelihood of difficulties happening. It will, in turn, enable students to recognise and deal with these issues when they do arise.

Foster engagement with the research community

PhD students can feel very isolated in their studies, particularly if they are off campus and particularly if they are part-time students also struggling with a professional workload. Building in opportunities for them to come together, with each other and with the broader research community, is critical.

Several of our doctoral students have set up an early career researcher group. The group meets on Teams, given that many are off campus. They have a small annual allowance, which they can spend on anything they feel will enable their community to grow and flourish. We have a biannual postgraduate seminar day, attended by 20 to 30 people. It provides a safe space where the students can present whatever they feel is relevant to the current stage of their work for discussion among peers, the research team and others, in a constructively critical and supportive environment. All attendees are invited to an evening meal to enable students and staff to meet and chat informally.

Students attached to large funded projects are invited to project working groups to see how such projects are managed and to gain confidence in procedures they may encounter later in their careers.

Build delight in gaining and spreading knowledge

The postdoctoral journey includes many times when things are difficult, when it’s really hard to get over a particular hurdle, and when it doesn’t seem that it’s worth it. Those are the moments when it’s important for the research community to foster delight among students. Delight and excitement are reciprocal. If we make the space for students to experience relief and pleasure in completing a difficult experiment successfully, or in carrying out an interview that is uplifting or devastating but really insightful, or in realising that something they have discovered hasn’t been written about before, then we gain a sense of joy and delight in synergy with them. Students who are regularly delighted in their work are likely to flourish (even when the work is difficult), and enthused students stay in research for the longer term.

In conclusion, seeing research students as co-explorers in the overarching research endeavour of improved well-being and thriving in the world is the basis for building successful research teams. Such research teams create virtuous circles for students that then build the basis for positive research and supervision careers into the longer term. This ensures the continuation and expansion of the research endeavour into the future.

Soo Downe is professor of midwifery studies and co-director of the Thrive Centre, which focuses on the first 1,000 days of life, in the School of Community Health and Midwifery at the University of Central Lancashire.

She has been shortlisted for Outstanding Research Supervisor of the Year in the Times Higher Education Awards 2022. A full list of shortlisted candidates can be found here.

If you found this interesting and want advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the THE Campus newsletter.

In this short video, I’m going to share four areas that we have used in our team to grow a research team alongside our research students. Midwifery research is quite new. Over the last 10 or 20 years, it’s been really expanding, and we have used these principles to work with initially our master’s students, building on their dissertations, through to now a situation where we have pre-doctoral, doctoral and postdoctoral students all working together in synergy.

So, the first issue that I want to raise is this idea of building on passion, not just fashion. So, we all know that research tends to go in fashions, and that often the money goes with where the particular area that, for example, the government or a research funder is interested in investing. But we have found that although we have to have a broad vision in our group, actually getting the students to come with their ideas and fashioning or creating a space within our overall vision to allow students to expand on the thing that really excites them means that they build up the capacity to take that idea forward into the future. So, this idea of student passion is extremely important to us.

But alongside that, there’s this notion that we have to be realistic with potential students about what is involved, especially because in our area and many others, where there is a professional link, many students who come to us come part time, because they continue with their professional career alongside their research career. And they often think that the step change between undergraduate and master’s is the same or similar to the step change between master’s and a PhD. But we all know that’s not true.

So, one thing that we think is critical is to be really realistic with potential students about what’s involved and also about the kinds of black holes they’re going to fall into throughout their progression through their degree, which everybody always encounters. So that they can have the opportunity to start doing “if, then” planning, even at the early stages, about how they’re going to make sure they’ve got enough time and space in their day and their week and their year to do their project effectively, and enough support when things begin to feel like it’s impossible to progress.

The other issue that we’ve been very keen to engage with the whole way through is to make sure that all our research students are fully engaged with our research community. For example, we do have a postgraduate seminar day twice a year, in fact two days, and we make sure that all the students are invited. We expect them to come at least once on those two occasions to present their work. And we invite their supervisors, but also other researchers in the group and beyond, clinical staff and undergraduates.

And the idea is that the postgraduate students can present elements of their work that they want support with, and the whole group is supportive. It’s a safe space in which they can have a discussion about the things that they are really enjoying doing, the things they’re really excited about, but also the kinds of areas they want support with.

And we also provide funding to our early career researchers group, which was set up by some of our PhD students, so they can use that any way they like in the year to help with this engagement with the wider research community, so they can see how their work might progress into the future beyond their PhD.

And finally, we think it’s really, really important to catalyse delight, catalyse delight in the students, so that they really have a sense of huge enjoyment and pleasure in the periods of time when they’re not obviously feeling that things are very difficult. But that basically the underlying sense they get is this enjoyment of doing their research, this sense of achievement at each step of the way, and that feeds reciprocally into the research team as well, so that we also feel that sense of delight and enjoyment and progression.

And ultimately, if we can instil that in our students, then they can actually see how valuable it is to them and to society and everybody else to continue with the research career into the long run and to keep enjoying it, and, in their turn, to instil that joy and delight into the students that come after them. So, these just seem to be four of the many, many characteristics, many, many approaches that have been incredibly helpful in helping us to build our team into the future.