Jon Rainford – författare

Thriving in Part-Time Doctoral Study is a practical guide, designed to support part-time doctoral researchers in navigating their learning experience and providing them with the tools they need to succeed in academia, alongside the work and life challenges they may be facing. Featuring eight highly practical chapters, this book covers every aspect of the part-time doctoral journey from initial planning right through to completion.Easy to dip in and out of with realistic advice, learning points and reflective activities based on real experiences, this book: ● Reflects a diversity of voices across academic disciplines● Features real-world examples from doctoral researchers ● Can be referred to throughout the doctoral journeyThis key resource will support the reader in considering how best to access and draw on the communities of support available, get the most from a supervisory team, and build professional networks. It recognises that each student’s learning pathway is different and offers support to allow each individual to take control and make it their part-time doctorate. The ‘Insider Guides to Success in Academia’ offers support and practical advice to doctoral students and early-career researchers. Covering the topics that really matter, but which often get overlooked, this indispensable series provides practical and realistic guidance to address many of the needs and challenges of trying to operate, and remain, in academia.These neat pocket guides fill specific and significant gaps in current literature. Each book offers insider perspectives on the often implicit rules of the game – the things you need to know but usually aren’t told by institutional postgraduate support, researcher development units, or supervisors – and will address a practical topic that is key to career progression. They are essential reading for doctoral students, early-career researchers, supervisors, mentors, or anyone looking to launch or maintain their career in academia.

Thriving in Part-Time Doctoral Study is a practical guide, designed to support part-time doctoral researchers in navigating their learning experience and providing them with the tools they need to succeed in academia, alongside the work and life challenges they may be facing. Featuring eight highly practical chapters, this book covers every aspect of the part-time doctoral journey from initial planning right through to completion.Easy to dip in and out of with realistic advice, learning points and reflective activities based on real experiences, this book: ● Reflects a diversity of voices across academic disciplines● Features real-world examples from doctoral researchers ● Can be referred to throughout the doctoral journeyThis key resource will support the reader in considering how best to access and draw on the communities of support available, get the most from a supervisory team, and build professional networks. It recognises that each student’s learning pathway is different and offers support to allow each individual to take control and make it their part-time doctorate. The ‘Insider Guides to Success in Academia’ offers support and practical advice to doctoral students and early-career researchers. Covering the topics that really matter, but which often get overlooked, this indispensable series provides practical and realistic guidance to address many of the needs and challenges of trying to operate, and remain, in academia.These neat pocket guides fill specific and significant gaps in current literature. Each book offers insider perspectives on the often implicit rules of the game – the things you need to know but usually aren’t told by institutional postgraduate support, researcher development units, or supervisors – and will address a practical topic that is key to career progression. They are essential reading for doctoral students, early-career researchers, supervisors, mentors, or anyone looking to launch or maintain their career in academia.

Widening access to university has become a major component of education policy in the past few decades, particularly in the UK and Europe. The aim is to make a university education more accessible for people from traditionally under-represented backgrounds and to ensure student bodies reflect the diversity of wider society. This key volume presents, for the first time, a critical analysis of the 'business of widening participation’ in a marketised context, featuring contributions from some of the major academic and practitioner researchers in the field. Encompassing how WP policy (as a subset of HE policy) is made, enacted and implemented at various stages, also presented are multiple professional and cultural perspectives on how WP is experienced and understood by those enacting policy.Chapter authors explore how the two aspects of the ‘business of widening participation’ work together to shape how WP is understood and done, as well as the possibilities for doing otherwise by employing a dual usage of the term 'business' in relation to WP. The first, figurative, usage explores the ways in which WP has been drawn into institutional positionality as HE providers differentiate themselves in the market; the second, literal, usage explores the ways in which WP policy is actuated by HE providers (including 'alternative' providers and FE colleges), state actors and third sector and private organisations increasingly engaged in the delivery of WP interventions and as policy stakeholders in this field. Offering both a comprehensive policy history of widening participation in UK higher education and exploration of how that policy has translated into institutional practices in different contexts, this timely work offers new analysis to academics familiar with the field whilst also offering sufficient background to practitioners who may be less familiar with the historical context and academic debates around WP.