Fostering honours and postgraduate participation in university research communities

This paper addresses a problem Kiley (2005) and others have noted is endemic to Australian universities. In 2007, we look the first small practical steps to address the difficult task of drawing honours and postgraduate students of literature into the research culture of their discipline. Our focus was a conference we organised and that took place in July 2007. We chose keynotes who are not only internationally pre-eminent in their fields of literary theory and criticism, but have also participated in the recent wars that have surrounded the teaching of literature in the universities. We wanted to offer our students the opportunity to be more than awestruck listeners at the feet of Great Men; we wanted them to be conference-ready so they would engage directly with the new research that would be presented; we wanted them to experience a level of intellectual excitement that might feed into their own work. To that end, we set up a number of formal and informal enabling structures that brought groups of students and staff together in ways that included an informal reading group, a formal honours course based on the keynotes’ work, and how-to-write-and present- a-paper workshops for postgraduates. All were geared to the conference and fed into it as they fostered students’ awareness that they belong to, indeed are essential to, an ongoing vital research community. Our next step is to encourage and facilitate others who might wish to adopt and adapt these strategies