The Bologna process, agreed in a declaration in June, 1999, aims to develop a common agreed framework for all higher education awards. The 2007 London communiqué affirmed the intent to develop an agreed three cycle degree system. This agenda has provoked trenchant critiques of standardization, marketisation and audit (e.g. Henckel & Wright, 2008; Huisman & Van Der Wende, 2004). Nevertheless, the notion of a Eurodoctorate seems to have an increasing hold in the imaginations of higher education administrators. However the doctorate is, perhaps ironically, rapidly becoming much more diverse in practice. More students are enrolling in doctorates; they are of a wide age range, come from different career stages and trajectories and want different things from their doctoral research and experience. They are all under pressure to publish their work.  Institutions have also begun to diversify the forms the doctorate can take with changes in regulatory frameworks to allow different forms of text as well as artefacts to be submitted as evidence of an original contribution to knowledge.

There is a growing body of research on the various forms of doctoral experience but to date there has been little focus on the growth of different textual requirements and what these might mean. We aim to contribute to understandings about the doctoral experience by focusing on the affordances and supervision implications of different kinds of texts, and the research practices that they frame. We focus on the kinds of scholarship that are implied by the textual forms, and the kinds of scholars that are to be produced. We offer a comparison, across two countries (Norway and the UK), of four types of doctoral texts and research experiences.

We draw here on reflective accounts of our own practice and experience. These accounts have been developed through an initial face to face discussion followed by a series of online conversations. We see this as a form of collective ‘self study’ which aims to produce reflexive narrative accounts which have wider applicability.

Our goal is to promote discussion about the various experiences that count as doctoral, and to probe the implications for supervision of different textual frames. We therefore anticipate that the workshop will be highly interactive and we plan to leave a substantive amount of time for participants to offer their own experiences and interpretations of them. We will begin by setting the national contexts and institutional requirements which frame the doctoral texts under discussion.

Four speakers, recent doctoral graduates will then discuss their doctorates: from the University of Oslo (1) a monograph in Norwegian expected to be turned into publications in English post award, (2) a PhD by publication in English, and from The University of Nottingham (3) a monograph accompanied by publications, and (4) a portfolio of publications accompanied by an exegesis. We will conclude the presentation part of the symposium with a discussion by a Norwegian and UK supervisor about the different pedagogies required to support the production of the particular research and the text.