Researcher Identity Development
Training courses
Agency and networking in researcher career development
The objective of the course is to help ECRs develop strategies to cope with and ultimately solve critical situations they face by developing an agentic position, and use this position for networking and researcher career development. The course uses multimodal educational tools (such as Journey Plots and Network Plots) to facilitate ECRs’ reflection on their career development and the relationship with agency and networking.
Encountering and resisting inequitable policies and practices
This workshop is designed to help ECRs: a) recognize the work structures (policies and practices) that limit and enhance their current work, career potential, and personal lives; b) develop a sense of agency and concrete strategies for engaging individually and collectively to question and challenge inequities in their context; and c) connect and actively engage with a wider community of European scholars to promote solidarity in shared experience.
The workshop uses visual approaches to engage researchers in thinking creatively about their own experiences and challenges and develop individual and collective strategies to deal with these issues.
How and where to publish?
Strategies to prepare and edit a manuscript and criteria to select the journal to publish a paper
This course aims at promoting changes in participants’ writing regulation strategies and their identity by means of reflection and reconceptualization of the outcome (how the article should be), of the subject (how they define themselves as researchers-writers) and the motive and the meaning of the entire activity (writing an article for the scientific community). The course also helps students understand and master the discursive mechanisms and structural characteristics useful to write scientific articles. In the session, peer-revision and feedback, group discussion and individual mentoring activities are used to promote participants’ learning. Blended or online modality.
Navigating the landscape of Ethics and integrity in supervision and researcher development
This training module helps ECR adopt the All European Academies code (a European common code of conduct) as their European guideline and the national codes of conduct and guidelines. The module builds in such material to help them envision and identify potential challenges and incidents related to ethics in research, integrity and institutions’ and research communities’ culture of integrity. It focuses on the knowledge and competence needs of ECR to equip them with tools and resources to analyse and deal with such challenges.
Training materials
Researcher supervision and support: from PhD supervision to interdisciplinary researcher community
These training materials consist of a review of the research on the function of supervisory and researcher community support for doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers. They also include innovative materials for doctoral and post-doc supervisors that focus on personal, social and institutional variables to take into account when developing functional strategies to support PhD students and post-doc researchers; and also specific materials to guide other researchers and institutions to develop their own training modules and programs addressed to supervisors
Balancing personal life and academic career
On-line resources to equip ECR with theoretical and practical knowledge about the different ways in which personal life and academic career intersect to anticipate strategies and feelings regarding how to balance personal life and academic careers in different working conditions. Participants analyse different cases to identify workplace stressors and potential strategies to manage them appropriately.
Interactive Platform A Researcher Like Me
This Integrated Interactive Platform A Researcher Like Me is intended to provide not just training, but a social space for ECRs in Europe. It is a social network aimed both at contributing to the development of researchers' identity and their effective participation in the community. More specifically, the interactive platform offers training and resources, the possibility to connect with other researchers and to build collaborative networks to solve doubts, ask for or offer help to others.
The social network maximizes access, dissemination and exchange of knowledge generated by students and teachers, and promotes competitiveness and quality of training. All interested individuals can sign up and use the platform for free.
Guide for Researcher development (GRED)
The GRED consists of a booklet introducing good practices on doctoral education and career development, early career trajectories cases and innovation courses. It is targeted to university-based individuals providing support to ECR, as well as to ECRs themselves. The GRED offers different resources and it is divided into four sections, one for each target group: ECRs, doctoral supervisors, policy makers and general resources for any of the former groups.
Interactive Questionnaires on research experience, critical Incidents and networking
Two interactive questionnaires (focused on PhD experiences and Post-PhD experiences respectively) and their manuals and user guides were developed. These interactive questionnaires complement videos promoting participants’ awareness of their strategies to face Critical incidents and networking.
This IO is intended to help ECRs to be aware of a) the CIs they often are faced with; b) more effective strategies to regulate their thinking and actions when facing those CIs; and c) how networking helps them not only to regulate their CIs but also to develop their own identity, by means of developing awareness and agency in their researcher trajectory. As a secondary aim, the questionnaires are also intended to help supervisors and decision makers know what are the main CIs that ECR face and how they tend to react to them.