Workshops

Aula 1, FCT (!): How To Make Your Thesis Shine 

Aula Magna, FCEE: Writing for your Research Community, Writing for EERJ

Led by:

Dr. Shosh Leshem, Oranim Academic College of Education, Israel

Professor Emeritus Vernon Trafford, Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford, UK

 Assume that you are reading a doctoral thesis that explores a topic in your field of interest. You may wonder why the author chose the topic, what it was seeking to discover or prove and its presumed importance to other research in related fields of knowledge. As you read further into the thesis, you would want to know why the research had been designed and conducted in a particular way. When you reached the conclusions, you would want to understand how the evidence enabled the author to relate them to the research of others. You would look for arguments that provided coherence to the research and allowed you to accept it as a contribution to the particular field of study. You would also note how the thesis had been presented and the appropriateness of the language that was used.

These questions represent critical aspects of research that readers expect authors to address. If authors appreciated these expectations in their thesis, they would demonstrate the scholarship that makes a thesis shine. But isn't this what happens when examiners recognise that a doctoral thesis is worthy of a pass?

The workshop will present and explain examples that:

• Distinguish between forms of high and low level thinking;
• Provide textual examples in which thinking is either visible or invisible;
• Contrast description and conceptualisation as forms of explanation;
• Illustrate how to acknowledge and explain contested issues;
• Show how scholarship can be made self-evident;
• Exemplify both linked and disconnected text;
• Contain ‘good/acceptable’ or ‘poor/unacceptable’ forms of presentation.

Discussions of these features will enable participants to explore their own ways of handling these aspects of accounting for doctoral-level work.

Led by: 

Professor Martin Lawn, University of Edinburgh, UK

Professor Edwin Keiner, University of Nuremberg, Germany

This session will discuss the purposes of research publication and its audiences, and it will focus on the EERJ as a medium for publishing about the changing landscapes of educational research across Europe and how to 'write' for a European audience.