Paris, France
March 7, 2005
Europe is not innovative enough
when it comes to pedagogy geared towards the training of young
researchers, and suffers from a lack of debate on the issue,
says
Marie-Claude Roland, who is seeking to launch EU-wide a
project that has already proven extremely successful at national
level.
Reflexives, funded by the French
National Institute For Agronomic Research (INRA), created in
1995 a new pedagogical space for the training of researchers in
general and young researchers in particular.
'The fundamental idea of Reflexives is that the training of
young researchers cannot only include PhD students, but should
also involve supervisors and the two should work together,' Dr
Roland told CORDIS News.
Dr Roland is a linguist who obtained a PhD on the writing
practices of researchers. Very soon she realised that if
research is done through a system of reproduction - students
continuously reproducing the way a paper is written - this will
damage the quality of scientific research. Dr Roland felt she
wanted to change those practices and decided to become a
trainer. Since then she has been working on writing techniques
and the conception of research, that is, formulating research
questions.
Basing her work on more than one thousand PhD projects in
France, Denmark and Canada, Dr Roland developed the theory that
PhD students find it difficult to formulate research questions.
'Often PhD students are technique-oriented and tend to loose
sight of the objectives and issues of their research,' explained
Dr Roland. Yet the competences asked for in a competitive job
market, the soft skills, 'can only be acquired if students work
on analysis of issues, problem solving and formulating
questions,' Dr Roland told CORDIS News. 'Otherwise they just
gain technical competences and non-transferable skills.'
'PhD students must learn to get away from the bench in the lab.
They must learn how to analyse and explain and not simply
describe their experiments,' added Dr Roland.
PhD students often suffer from a problem of employability, and
it is necessary not only to train them but also to inform
potential employers of how research works, believes Dr Roland.
Reflexives therefore organises seminars where all these
questions are addressed, not through discourse and speech, but
through collective learning, reflexivity and epistemology in
practice. The target audience is researchers, supervisors, PhD
students and postdocs, and they should also interest
journalists, private sector employees and companies.
Dr Roland realises that she is touching on a very sensitive
subject as supervisors might feel offended if they are told what
to do. Yet, as she explains, 'supervisors tend to say they have
no time and most of them don't want to get involved. However,
one aspect of the researcher profession is to be a trainer. We
need to emphasise this. Tutors need to get involved,' she added.
'Our team has been conducting
Reflexives
seminars since 1997 with greater and greater success,' Dr Roland
noted. 'Supervisors are getting more and more involved. We have
touched a large sample of researchers, mostly in France, but
also in Denmark and Canada.'
In response to the success of the project, Dr Roland is now
trying to develop an EU-wide project for the training of 'active
facilitators', who would develop Reflexives for their own
country.
For further
information on the Reflexives project, please visit:
- en français:
http://www.reflexives-lpr.org
- in English:
http://www.reflexives-lpr.org/index-en.html |