Enhancing postgraduate learning and development : a participatory action learning and action research approach through conferences

Abstract

Anxiety often prevents postgraduate students from maximising learning opportunities at a conference when presenting their work publicly, or interacting with experienced researchers. Since supervision is an opportunity for supervisors to help postgraduate students most fully develop their ability as emerging researchers, overcoming such anxiety is an important task for supervisors as well as students. As supervisors, we developed a participatory action learning and action research (PALAR) support program to help postgraduate students prepare for a conference to make overall participation, presenting a paper and subsequent publication a true learning experience. We generated and analysed data from the written reflections of 11 postgraduate students who participated in our PALAR support program. The findings suggest that action learning, specifically PALAR, can be used to enable a rich learning experience for postgraduate students attending conferences through fostering relationships, building trust, a supportive environment, collaboration, communication and competence among them. Postgraduate students who experienced our PALAR support program developed not only skills, knowledge, confidence, and deeper appreciation of learning opportunities through conferences, but also understanding of the principles of PALAR that apply not just to the conference context but across all aspects of learning and research and life at large.