Back to the Promising Practice

Dissertation Workshops at UC Berkeley

David L. Szanton
Executive Director
International and Area Studies
UC Berkeley
Szanton@uclink4.berkeley.edu

By all accounts -- from both participating students and faculty -- these thematically-based, multi-disciplinary, internationally comparative workshops have dramatically assisted doctoral students in clarifying the intellectual issues embedded in their dissertation projects. In the process, they have accelerated the completion of their dissertations; created intense and highly productive inter-disciplinary discourse across the social sciences, humanities, and professional schools; fostered wider audiences for their individual projects; and created on-going intellectual communities and collegiality on campus, and beyond. 

Much of this success turns on the unique format or pedagogy of the workshops. Briefly, each workshop involves 12 students and 4-5 faculty concerned with a common but broadly defined theme. (The attached list of the 32 workshops convened between 1992 and 2001 gives some sense of the variety of themes addressed.) In response to a flyer announcing the workshop, students are asked to submit simply a copy of their CV and a (sometimes draft) dissertation proposal. If they are already well into their research, they are instead asked to provide an 8-10 page description of the project. Students are then selected on the basis of overlapping interests, with an eye to maximizing the spread of the disciplines, world areas (including the US as an international case for comparison), time periods, genders, intellectual approaches, etc. 

Six to eight weeks before the workshop the students are provided with the 12 selected proposals and asked to imagine them as the 12 chapters of a book, for which they must write a 5-6 page "Introduction." This exercise forces them to read, think about, and construct an intellectual framework for the entire set of projects. Their "Introductions" are then distributed a week before the workshop, so that everyone can see how their own project is being interpreted, and how many ways it can be (re)framed. 

The workshops themselves are held off-campus (at a low-key conference center a one hour drive from Berkeley). They usually begin on a Thursday evening and run through Sunday lunch. Introductions and explanations are provided on Thursday evening. Friday, the full first day, is divided into 12 half-hour segments for discussion of the 12 projects. For each half-hour session one student is assigned to make a 5 minute presentation of someone else's project, in another discipline. During the remaining 25 minutes of that session all of the other participants join in discussing the project -- except the project's author, who is not allowed to speak. The author of the project under discussion can only listen, take notes, even record, how their project is being understood, mis-understood, stretched, queried, and critiqued by knowledgeable peers with closely related interests, but varying theoretical perspectives, disciplines, world areas, time periods, etc. 

On Saturday, the second day, the students are given 20-25 minute time slots to respond to the more important queries, issues, and suggestions raised on the first day, and, most important, to seek feedback or further discussion of areas of their projects with which they recognize they are having difficulty. Later Saturday afternoon, the faculty caucus to identify key conceptual, methodological, practical, ethical, etc., issues underlying the various projects. Saturday evening is used for plenary or small group discussions of the generic issues that have been identified, and for one-on-one student/faculty meetings about specific projects. Sunday morning is used for further plenary discussions. Just before the closing the sessions for Sunday lunch, we take a half hour for a brief evaluation of the workshop itself and to discuss if and how the students would like to continue meeting after the workshop. They invariably do, and this can be facilitated by minimal seed money to cover continuing meeting costs. 

Two more general notes: One, the faculty -- and so far, 67 from Berkeley (and 28 from other institutions) have participated and quite a few have repeated -- are asked to remain attentive, but relatively quiet, during the 30 minute sessions on the first day. The concern is to give the students time and space to find their voices and to establish their ownership of the workshop. But faculty are fully unleashed thereafter. At least some of the faulty have also incorporated some of the innovative techniques of the workshops into their regular teaching. I should also note that we do not pay, nor have we been asked to pay, honoraria to any Berkeley faculty. (The only exception has been the African Development Workshops funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. These workshops run a full extra day, and most of the students and some of the faculty come from other universities.) For the regular Berkeley workshops faculty participation has been entirely pro bono - because of their interest in the topic (and the lack of long term responsibility for the students). 

Second, while most of the workshops have been exclusively for UCB doctoral students, a number have been opened to students from other campuses (e.g., UC Davis, Santa Cruz, Stanford). However, two recent workshops were jointly organized with the UC Davis Center for History, Society, and Culture that contributed half the students, half the faculty, and half the costs. And the Centers for Southeast Asian Studies at Berkeley and UCLA organized a jointly sponsored UC system-wide workshop on South and Southeast Asia drawing students from four UC campuses and faculty from three. And most recently, the Diaspora Studies Program at UC Berkeley did a joint Dissertation Workshop with the Department of African Studies at York University, Toronto. All of these workshops were extremely successful, and among other things, demonstrated that it is possible to build on-going cross-campus and cross-national intellectual communities. The University of Auckland, New Zealand, has experimented with one Dissertation Workshop and is planning more, and both the Association for Asian Studies and the African Studies Association are currently considering organizing Dissertation Workshops of this sort in conjunction with their Annual Meetings. The techniques, pedagogy, and successes seem to be widely replicable.

A final note on costs: Twelve students plus five faculty, for three days and nights at an off-campus facility, plus xeroxing, mailing, and local transport now costs a little over $6,000. The core funding for the program has come from Ford and Rockefeller Foundation grants although 14 other UC Berkeley units have contributed funds for individual workshops in their areas of concern. 

The workshops have clearly proven their worth. We have not attempted to develop statistical evidence that workshop participants do better than other students in grant competitions. However, the Rockefeller Foundation has noted that workshop participants do significantly better in the Foundation's research funding competition. In addition, numerous Berkeley students have indicated that workshop participation has charged, or re-charged, their intellectual batteries and significantly accelerated the their research and writing. The Getty Research Institute has now used the model to run a dissertation workshop on "Rethinking Los Angeles," and UC Davis is now running them on its own. The workshops obviously require an initial investment of time, energy, vision, and funding, but the intellectual, institutional, and collegial returns are very large. 

March, 2001