Students are active rather than passive participants in their learning and in managing their doctoral work (Jazvac-Martek, Chen, and McAlpine 2011). To this end, they actively seek out developmental experiences for themselves via the practices and groups in which they participate. But we lack knowledge about the types and nature of experiences that foster students’ learning and their identification with the role of researcher (Mantai 2015).

Following the framework that Christine adoptedChristine informed us about the framing of the seminar in e-mail exchanges.↩︎, we reproduce below the terms used to describe the ways in which the different dimensions of the training programme intertwined.

• “Research training by doing research”: this idea is the equivalent of apprenticeships in jobs involving manual labour. Students learn by watching what others do and reproducing the same movements. The objective here is to interest the students in a project other than their own, but that will provide them with methodological tools which their own research can benefit from.

• “Doctoral student participation”: our interest here was to give the doctoral students a role in the research group on the same basis as the other participants (researchers), even if the students had far less scientific experience.

• “On the social level”: choosing the group as a training context was based on the assumption that surrounding doctoral students with people who are more advanced than they are in scholarly terms serves a heuristic function. The group, consisting of participants with different levels of knowledge, created the conditions for a zone of proximal development between doctoral students and postdocs in particular. In this respect we made sure that exchanges in the group took place in a safe atmosphere, in order to give the doctoral students the opportunity to express themselves, regardless of their level of knowledge on the subjects discussed. We also wanted to create a context that encouraged students to speak up and express ideas even if their critical thinking and self-confidence were not yet fully advanced.

• “On a technical level”, doctoral students were often more at ease and more proactive than established researchers.

• “On a scientific level”, bringing together colleagues from different disciplines and levels exposed doctoral students to new perspectives and offered them a broader methodological perspective than just the support of their supervisor.

The training programme also involved former doctoral students who had obtained their degrees and for whom this experience constituted a kind of “continuing education”. The programme also offered a discipline-specific and methodological opening toward linguistics for participating colleagues from other disciplines.

In France, the doctoral degree has recently been added to the French National Directory of Professional Certifications (RNCP)More on the National Directory of Professional Certifications, or Répertoire National des Certifications Professionnelles (RNCP), which is managed by the organisation France compétences.↩︎, which places it at level 8 of the learning outcomes of the European Qualifications Framework (EQF)More on the European Qualifications Framework (EQF).↩︎ for lifelong learning.︎ The related competencies are described as follows:

The most advanced and specialised competencies and techniques, including for synthesis and evaluation, that are required to solve critical problems of research and/or innovation or to expand or redefine existing professional practices or knowledge (“Le doctorat enfin au RNCP !” 2018) Also see Le doctorat à la loupe, Confédération des Jeunes Chercheurs et Association Nationale des Docteurs, 2018.↩︎.

Synthesising recent research, Claire Bonnard and Jean-François Giret (2016) describe five main categories of competencies:

1. Academic competencies specific to a field of research,

2. Organisational competencies,

3. Interpersonal competencies,

4. Project management competencies,

5. The capacity to solve unforeseen problems.

These constructs are similar and sometimes used synonymously, but they represent somewhat different processes. “Collaboration”, first of all, is a complex process which can occur on different scales, involving different groups and at different times as well as multiple processes. We will describe joint work in general as a “collaborative practice”, but it is also a matter of “collaborative effort”: i.e., of moments when collaboration is the subject of discourse and requires planning that involves the construction of teamwork. Teamwork entails communication processes that rely on interactions among actors, resources (shared spaces) and acts of synchronisation. In our case study, Amélie, a doctoral student, raises the question of the quality of the data; this illustrates a collaborative effort deriving from collaborative practice.

Collaboration also involves moments of “coordination”, of “collaborative consultation”. Collaboration as a process entails the orchestration and synchronisation of activity, which is defined by Wendy L. Bedwell et al. in their review of the literature as “the interactive process by which individuals with differing expertise creatively resolve mutually identified issues” (Bedwell et al. 2012, 132). Note-taking, for example, illustrates this aspect in our analyses.

Finally, we refer to “cooperation” when the collaboration is conceived in terms of a dyad and a contribution to the joint task. As Bedwell et al. point out, the parties involved are supposed “to be concerned about the overall collaborative goal rather than their own individual goal” (Bedwell et al. 2012, 136). For example, when Morgane, a doctoral student, says that she is mainly concerned about whether all participants (ex or in-situ) are able to follow what the speaker is saying, she is adopting a cooperative posture.

The collaborative situation allows us to study the place occupied by the team’s doctoral students, and the ethos they are constructing, in the collaborative activity of the seminar. The concept of ethos is studied particularly in linguistics and in the pragmatics of language (Amossy 2010), but also in the fields of education and professional pedagogy. In this study, we will use the definition of professional ethos proposed by Anne Jorro: “The way in which [people] organise their relationship to the professional world, how they define and redefine their field of action with respect to an ethical approach to the activity” (Jorro 2009). According to the author, this ethos borders on a quest for identity. We share the view that “the doctorate is as much about identity formation as it is about producing knowledge” (Green 2005, 153; Barnacle and Mewburn 2010) and that the doctoral seminar is the site of a social process of identity construction by way of the acquisition of certain roles. In the previous chapters, we have highlighted certain roles that are instantiated in collaborative actionSee, for example, the idea of instantiation in the chapter on “Artefacted intercorporeality, between reification and personification”.↩︎. Here we focus on the ethos of the researcher-in-the-making in their doctoral studies and, more specifically, during the challenge that the doctoral seminar represents. The concept of role in the sense of “situational involvement” (Cefaï 2013, 215) distinguishes between the role itself and the performance of the role:

Individuals get involved and are involved in-situations and their involvement is neither existential nor structural, but it is not entirely free either (Cefaï 2013, 215).

This is why we also rely on the notion of “role identity” (Jazvac‐Martek 2009). The theory of role identity posits that identity is a continuous process of social construction, which is based on an interaction between the social order and agents’ creative actions. This process is enacted via role identities that are formed as people categorise themselves, classify themselves, and associate themselves vis-à-vis a social group. In a situated and ecological approach, we need to distinguish between the notion of role and that of posture:

Whereas role is virtually defined in advance and imposes a certain type of behaviour, posture consists of an agile identity that is adapted to the context (Jorro 2009, 6).

Idealised roles are thus supported by the reactions or behaviours of other people and are performed in interaction. In this way, role identities, which we call postures, are dynamic. They evolve according to the context constructed by the expectations, motivations and actions of others, but also according to the way in which individuals present their intentions and react to what others bring into the interaction.

Doctoral training is to be understood as a social practice (Lee and Boud 2009), and actors are still in need of processes of legitimation and self-verification. The characteristics of the processes of socialisation and identity construction can be revealed through an analysis of the collaborative activity entailed by the specific configuration of the polyartefacted seminar. Our analysis focused on enunciative postures in the students’ discourse in the reflexive interviews. “By organising a distribution of roles between interlocutors, the discursive ethos is believed to ensure a self-image in an intersubjective space riddled with values and norms and in which social interaction is experienced as something important” (Jorro 2013, 110).

Two activities can be distinguished on the screen capture below which shows a seminar session in January 2017 (Session 3): some of the members present in the seminar room are having a discussion (blue arrows) while others are looking at screens (red circles).

Two people, Morgane and Julien (red circles), are using their cell phones to adjust the frame of the camera – also in a red circle – which is on a table near the Beam robot. They are constructing a space of cooperation on-site, while another space of collaboration – represented by the blue triangle that shows the remaining members of the group talking with one another – is being developed by way of mutual listening. The seminar workspace supports multiple activities, governed by two parallel spaces of activity based on a form of attentional vigilanceCheck “Attentional affordances in an instrumented seminar”.↩︎ specific to each. The first space relates to cooperation in that it is a process of voluntary contribution to the shared collective activity. The second refers to collaboration that is characterised by communication among the actors about a common task. These tasks entail different communication devices used by the members who are present in the picture and involve bodies in different ways. Listening is different for each participant, and this can be seen from the posture of the hands holding the telephone, as well as their gaze and their head turned toward the screen and not toward another artefact or someone physically present.

The picture illustrates the intertwining of the synchronous communicative and interactional spaces involved in the joint project. Although the two activities in fact take place in parallel, they belong to one and the same script: that of the seminar.

The “we/I” (on/je) dialogism constructed in the young doctoral student’s interview clearly expresses the posture that he is going to adopt throughout the research project, as reflected in the following verbatim extract:

At the beginning, for me, I didn’t really know what we were doing. But as time went on, when I finally figured it out [what we were doing], I knew a bit about the subject and also [I wanted] to explore it a bit, even if I haven’t really understood (laughs). So, in the end, I’m always curious about the research, about what we’re doing.

The personal pronoun on is used in a verbal expression that underlines the primacy of action: the seminar is about doing something together. Yigong indicates his involvement in the joint action undertaken. But the “I” allows him to express the way he is involved: Yigong lexicalises his introduction to research (“figuring out”, “explore a bit”), positions himself as someone who is learning (“I didn’t really know”, “I haven’t really understood”) and affirms his interest (“I’m always curious”). The doctoral student adopts the posture of a novice, but one who is active and involved. Over the course of his experience, as the analysis of the interviews shows, he seems to have developed a meta vision of the research project, from its development to its conceptualisation, by observing the polyartefacted seminar and the implementation of the research project. When talking about how the seminar helped him, he says that the “Digital Presence” research project allowed him “to discover… how to conduct scientific research”.

The notes taken during the seminar materialise the way in which participants position themselves with respect to the work of the group. Of the four doctoral students, only two, Yigong and Morgane, mention their note-taking in the interviews. The two doctoral students make the status of these notes explicit: they could be personal, shared or cooperative. Yigong refers to them as an essential part of his participation (“I focus on note-taking”), the aim being to understand what is going on in order to learn. But they are also a memorisation and work tool: “I reread my notes, I remember what I’ve seen during the speakers’ interventions”.

Group member identity is constructed in interaction with the other members, since it requires legitimation, which is brought about in interaction. The seminar is a space of opportunities in the process of legitimating doctoral identity; the participants make use of this space in different ways. Through this space participants can confirm or test their identity roles, in light of the fact that these roles “are supported through the reactions or behaviours of others that act to confirm the person as an occupant of a particular social position” (Jazvac‐Martek 2009, 255).

The notion of role identity is particularly useful, because it allows us to pay attention to both interpersonal experience (the way in which idealised role identities are verified or not) and intrapersonal experiences (the meaning and the expectations that are used to determine deviations from the identity of the idealised role). Here, the doctoral student does not perceive the validation of his group member identity by the other members. He explains the divergent expectations that are linked to this non-validation: the others are expecting oral participation in the seminar, whereas he prefers a different, more peripheral form of participation. In the two excerpts, the student wonders about his own participation and engages in a process of legitimation by affirming a “legitimate peripheral participation” (Wenger 2005). For him, this form of participation is related, above all, to personal activities (note-taking, web searches, reflection) as opposed to speaking, which he feels is an imperative and the primary recognised legitimate activity.

The development of this technical strategy enriched the acquisition of competencies related to the use of the robot. This practice produced multiple foci of attention distributed over different parts of the screen and entailed the manipulation of two software interfaces. Amélie’s competence in mastering her remote presence was thus enriched due to the research apparatus itself. Amélie became aware of her difficulty in getting the floor via the robot when viewing the data a posteriori:

When I looked a little bit at the videos again, actually you can see that I start [speaking]She cannot see all the participants and hence cannot know whether someone is going to speak.↩︎. I have to repeat the beginning of my sentence maybe twice to get through; so either I insist [or] I wait for them to be nice enough to let me talk.

This growing awareness of her interactional practices (the need to cut off other participants and to repeat the beginning of her sentence several times) when she views the data allows Amélie to adjust her remote behaviour and to improve her interactional competencies in the artefacted seminar.

Amélie’s posture in the seminar is thus tightly connected to her artefactual presence. In her interview, a dialogic “I/they” (je/on) relationship appears in her discourse. In her interview, a dialogic “I/they” (je/on) relationship appears in her discourse. The first reason for this is the spatial isolation of the “I”, the on or “they” referring to the group physically present in the seminar room. What is at issue is a form of isolation within the research apparatus, and de facto in the group, due to the artefact (“they talk to me a lot in fact by saying the robot”), which places the “I” at the mercy of this “they” (“they give me a chance to talk”, “they ask me and I have nothing to say”, “there were things that were not necessarily satisfactory for me [like] where they put me to attend the afternoon session”).

In her interview, Dorothée affirms her technical expertise related to handling the Beam robot: she can “either do some things concretely or make suggestions”. This competency is also a scientific, since it is derived from her doctoral work. But above all, she assigns herself “a mission” during the seminar: that of managing the remote-controlled webcam that serves to retransmit the sound and image from the seminar room in Lyon to the remote participants. In her interview, Dorothée first recalls the difficulties related to the attentional load created by dealing with this artefact, which prevented her from following the seminar. She felt frustrated about not being able to follow the discussion and participate in it. But subsequently, due to technical habituation and repeating the movements over the course of the sessions, the webcam then becomes a “third eye”:

Now it’s a bit like my third eye because I do it... But yes, I have a quick look at the wall when we’re using Adobe, but I can tell from the camera’s ball-shape where it’s pointing, where its frame is; so finally now I can do that and take part in the discussion at the same time; actually it doesn’t require as much of an attentional load, it’s become very easy.

Dorothée’s repeated handling of the webcam allows her to focus less attention to it. Once she has acquired this technical competency, she is able to undertake several activities simultaneously and thus to become involved intellectually in the seminar. Dorothée clearly positions herself in a peer group. In her reflexive discourse, Dorothée uses the French on almost systematically in an inclusive way as “we”, such as to insist on the group’s cohesiveness (“we are among friends, we speak our minds”, “we know each other well”, “I remember that we were relieved”), on an emotional level in particular. The je or “I” is not opposed to the on, as for the two other young researchers, but is opposed to a “you” that is institutionalising and refers to the local institution hosting the seminar (“you are lucky to have this team”, “you have a good wifi environment at the ENS”).

Dorothée was supposed to present an analysis that she had carried out with another group member. She claims that in the collective memory, this research was only attributed to the person who was present to defend it orally.

There were a lot of people who said that “ah Samira did a presentation last month, it’s Samira’s research”. And so I thought “well no, it’s also my research, but Samira said so in fact at the beginning, but I know that it had been interpreted [like]:”Dorothée wasn’t there, she wasn’t there to defend it”.

This was a decisive episode for Dorothée, and she refers to it repeatedly (“I wanted to say something because there were questions that I’d worked on”) while, at the same time, asserting her competencies (“I know what has to be done”), which leads us to conclude that the dominant posture in the researcher’s discourse is one relating to an epistemic knowledge that makes her competent and allows her to claim a place in the scientific discussion.

My role in this case is really to act as an intermediary between the research team and the CCC teamThe Cellule (Complex Corpora Center) is the interdisciplinary team that supports the group’s research. Its missions involve collecting and exploiting so-called “complex” corpuses. The team was in charge of video recording the seminar sessions and also contributed to their digitisation and sharing.↩︎ ... since I was the intermediary, I was asked and what if we put the camera there so is that okay I had the responsibility even before we viewed the data of saying well okay there if we take into account the people who are interested in the robot, in the spatial movements, so I took the keywords of our seminar, so I could think up an apparatus that would be best suited to everything that we were thinking about doing.

This role required her to contribute to making technical choices by orienting and positioning the cameras depending on the research focus of each of the research subgroups being presented. During the data digitisation phase, choices were also made about multi-view video editing and were submitted to the rest of the research group. These choices, which had a considerable impact on the research, were made collaboratively by the two teams, but they had to be decided upon prior to the seminar. Since the other members of the research team were not necessarily present when these technical choices were made, Morgane had to explain the research objects to the technical team.

First we find [a] an inclusive on, in the sense of “we”, which designates the collective of the seminar and which Morgane uses to make explicit her belonging to the group (“we talk a lot about the quality of the presence”, “we have roles whether we want them or not”, “we learned as we went along”).This on designates the participant in a group of peers.

Sometimes the on is not inclusive, but allows Morgane to make explicit one of the roles she took on in the research project:

they [on] didn’t force it on me which is why I say in quotation marks that the role was assigned to me because of the fact that I’m already working in the Cellule Corpus Complexes (CCC – Complex Corpora Center) with Justine, Daniel, etc.

This explanation allows her to interpret [b] a set of on, whose reference is the group that is responsible for the data collection set-up. Morgane moves from a third-person on (“they [on] gave me precise training with the cameras”) to a second-person plural on (“you [on] are going to prepare the equipment on diagrams you’re going to visit the seminar room, everything is predefined in advance”) corresponding to a role that Morgane claims and occupies (“you [on] put so much effort into it you [on] set up so many things that it’s disappointing when it doesn’t work”).

The co-existence of these two memberships in different groups [a] and [b] constructs a third role at the interface between the first two. Morgane’s identity role is explicitly that of an intermediary between two groups to which she belongs.

The different roles played by Morgane entail reifying a number of exchanges, decisions and information in the form of notes whose status will allow us to understand both the competencies and the roles at stake. As the person responsible for ensuring that the polyartefacted set-up was working properly, she wrote personal notes or notes addressed to other members of the group, technical notes to facilitate the use of the apparatus and help to improve it:“They are technical specifications sheets there are two there is one for me and another for all of us that I post on Ortolang”, their purpose is to “resolve the problems we encountered so we can be more efficient the next time there is a problem”. Morgane affirms the importance of these notes within a process of technical cooperation.

As a research assistant, Morgane also takes “notes for [her]-self and for Christine”, “since Christine asks me to since when she is in the seminar she is occupying her position as conductor, she tells me that she sometimes finds it difficult to take notes ... so I simply suggested sending her my notes”. The notes have a dual status: they are personal and individual, but they also have to be shared. They are a means for inscribing her participation in the group research project via cooperation with the project director. This competency is established because “it’s internalised, it happens very fast”, she says.

References to two other note-taking spaces show that this form of participation has its limits and raise the question of the doctoral student’s legitimacy. At one point in the interview, Morgane mentions a note-taking space in which she is not participating:

I got some comments from Caroline who said Morgane why don’t you take part in the collaborative notes on Google Drive which is a word (sic) document which everyone can use to follow along.

Her explanation refers to a personal way of doing things, which she does not regard as suitable to collective exchange:

I don’t want to impose my way of taking notes on the collective document since, for example, there will be an “important ideas” section at the very start of my document with links and I don’t want to impose this in the collective document, for example, because maybe the others, when reading it, won’t find it interesting.

Later on in the interview, when the interviewer brings up the issue again, she adds an explanation related to her status.

I have the status of a second-year doctoral student in this seminar, I can only see myself sharing a collective document with doctoral students rather than with other people who have so to speak a superior academic status as assistant professor, teacher, professor. I would think that my notes are too basic.

In this excerpt, we see the path taken by the doctoral student’s reflections on how she could conceive of sharing notes with the collective and how the cooperation could be undertaken. This questioning is part of the pragmatic negotiations involved in the work of coordination, the acquisition of collaborative work competencies taking place in a dynamic way in a team.

The reification of collaboration constituted by note-taking allows us to read the ethos of the doctoral student, who is willing to cooperate, but for whom collaboration is still problematic. These shared spaces are symbolic spaces of positioning and practical spaces of transactive memory defined as a shared system that allows us “to encode, store and selectively retrieve the necessary information to conduct joint work” (Wegner, Erber, and Raymond 1991). They promote collaboration as a form of collective cognition to the extent that team members are conscious of where everyone’s expertise is located and agree upon the exact location. They tend to favour a horizontal posture among researchers, even if support is required in the case of junior researchers, as we just saw.

The doctoral student Morgane thus collaborated in the organisational and communicational dimension of the seminar by writing summaries that allowed the participants to follow how the collective thought processes were evolving and to progress towards the next stages of the research project.

Often, Christine would ask for a debriefing after each seminar on Monday ... So, she was the one as conductor who made the connection between the seminars. I take note of what she says to me, and I create reminders to myself; ... and what’s good about it is that she gives me deadlines that provide a continuity between all the seminars and when I send her my notes, it’s so that she can prepare the email she’s going to send to you collectively. And so often she sends me a first version of the e-mail that I review; I say [if] I agree [or] not, what needs to be changed. So, ultimately, this relationship between doctoral student and thesis supervisor does not run in just one direction. I see that I can contribute to things, it’s really win-win.

The individual support of her supervisor, which takes the form of cooperation, provides two different sorts of learning for Morgane: first, learning involved in synthetic note-taking on the exchanges that occur during the seminar and then learning how to frame a scientific project (time management, organisation of tasks...). Thinking is thus combined with action (the action of organising the seminar and communicating about it). This process allows the doctoral student to assume an active posture in her scientific and technical education. The doctoral student is attributed responsibility via this individual support, which she refers to as a “sign of trust” in the interviews, and she is given the opportunity to learn autonomously. The example reflects the reciprocity in the collaboration, which Morgane expresses as the “win-win” character of the work situation. Note-taking forms part of an extended coordination role as temporal orchestration and synchronises interactional dynamics, actions and tasks. This role is shared in a cooperative process.

According to Christophe Dejours (1993), collaborative work involves the construction of “connections with a view to deliberately carry out a common work”. This discursive construction, which we summarise below, reveals how individuals weave these connections.

We can summarise the use of on in the following table:

The enunciative postures are constructed in a dialogic relationship between an inclusive on, which expresses belonging to a group, and an exclusive on, which expresses the particularity of an “I”; the identified instances of the pronoun on correspond to a positioning of the “I” vis-à-vis the group. To inscribe oneself in this collaborative work situation consists in constructing connections to the others: connections via which the young researcher defines her position in the group and with respect to her training. The doctoral students are situated in an involving situation or, in a more complex manner, with respect to what they do together and the roles they take on. This inclusion in a collective implies its corollary, recognition by others of an identity that will be defined by the instantiation of certain roles that are seen to appear: the collective scientific activity of research, the relationships among the members of the group that give rise to a sense of belonging to the group, and activities of coordination among sub-groups and members of the group.

In the previous analyses, we observe that the notion of being present at the seminar varies depending on whether one is in-situ or ex-situ. Thus, where the artefacts made available to Amélie could have reinforced her presence within the seminar via the Beam robotCheck “Attentional affordances in an instrumented seminar”.↩︎, the interview shows that she made increasing efforts to develop strategies to ensure that the remote connection was achieved in an optimal way for her. If a seminar is a space of communication in which speech circulates, having access to the opportunity to speak is far from being a simple matter. The horizontality of the points of view is not entirely apparent in the interviews; the participants measure the differences in levels and professional status. Their representation of the profession remains stuck in the dichotomy of senior researcher/junior researcher whereas the principle of the polyartefacted seminar was to attempt to make this vertical model disappear.

Christine describes the polyartefacted seminar as relying on interdisciplinarity. This point appears fundamental in light of the complexity of current research issues, as well as the way in which research training should take this complexity into account. Frédéric Darbellay (2017, 4) writes about the profile of a researcher under construction:

A new profile of researchers whom we refer to as “interdisciplinary natives” (d) in the sense that they develop an interdisciplinary trajectory from the very start of their basic training, without a fixed disciplinary anchoring and whose research is spread over academic fields that include a broad sample of different disciplines. They are, so to say, born into and with a culture of interdisciplinarity.

According to Darbellay, the profile of these researchers is that of a “chameleon” given their capacity for adapting to the environment. In this sense, the polyartefacted seminar promotes many different sorts of learning due to a variety of zones of proximal development (co-organisation of the seminar with the thesis supervisor, preparation of the video collection tools and in-situ adjustments at the time of the recording with the technical support unit, etc.) that are generated by the process of collaboration. For Morgane, the polyartefacted seminar was an opportunity, by way of her dual status as a doctoral student and research assistant, to acquire multiple competencies (see Bonnard and Giret‘s (2016) five key competencies). This is how the doctoral seminar proposes an innovative configuration that is conducive to the co-construction of knowledge: i.e., collaborative learning. The doctoral students’ examples reflect the emergent feature of collaboration and how they became involved in it over time. They drew on their competencies to take an active part in a process of joint work. The development of these competencies contributed to the construction of their identity as a researcher.