In contemporary doctoral education, much less attention is devoted to understanding how students engage with higher-level readings than to supporting the development of their academic writing skills. Reading is generally approached instrumentally for research and equated with an extractive process to retrieve, survey or review the information needed for writing.
The project (2024-2025) highlighted the under-explored area of reading habits, practices, and rhythms among doctoral students from the Education departments of a teaching-focused university (BCU, UK) and a research-oriented university (NTNU, Norway). Using an original methodology centred on the students' lived experiences, which combined Rhythmanalysis and Hermeneutic Phenomenology, it examined the material, cognitive, and affective aspects of reading and drew pedagogical and philosophical insights for doctoral education and supervision, while emphasising mutual learning through cultural differences.
The project was guided by a primary research question and two interrelated sub-questions:
How do English and Norwegian doctoral students relate to, make sense of, and engage with reading as a practice, cognitively and emotionally?
- What do different reading practices reveal about different cultural reading and schooling traditions?
- How do different languages and socio-political contexts shape reading as a socio-cultural practice, and what can be mutually learned from the Norwegian and English contexts?
Project Team:
Principal Investigator: BCU
Dr Fadia Dakka Dr Fadia Dakka - Education and Social Work | Birmingham City University
Co-Investigators: NTNU (Norway)
Dr Dagrun Engen Dagrun Astrid Aarø Engen - NTNU
Professor Marit Hoveid Marit Honerød Hoveid - NTNU
Project Impacts:
The most significant advancement in knowledge and understanding was connected to the project's methodological design, which acted as a pedagogical intervention, actively involving doctoral students in both groups during each data-collection cycle (FG, diary, Episodic Narrative interview, CoV). Basing the approach on a solid theoretical foundation that supported a nested, iterative methodology allowed for the following key developments:
- Enhancing the quality and richness of the findings by integrating Rhythmanalytical and Hermeneutic Phenomenological dimensions coherently and synergistically throughout all stages of data collection and analysis.
- Enabling deep, reflective interactions among participants, which yielded theoretical insights and refinement through rigorous retroductive reasoning.
- Fostering cross-cultural learning between the English and Norwegian case studies through ongoing dialogue and praxis, underpinned by reflexivity and a double hermeneutic.
The ‘Circle of Voices’ has emerged as a successful standalone ‘live method’ that has already been implemented more than five times in Norway and the UK and is currently being incorporated into the doctoral programmes of both institutions. Thanks to these multiple iterations, we are already witnessing the transformative impact of this pedagogic intervention on students’ ability to articulate their doctoral voice through textual interpretation, engage creatively with complex texts, and, most importantly, enhance their confidence and mental health and wellbeing. This approach not only transforms doctoral learning by shifting focus to reading as a situated, socio-cultural practice but also influences current practices of doctoral supervision.
Furthermore, the analysis of the findings showed that students’ experiences cannot be simplified into harmful binaries and emphasised the pedagogic value of a rhythmic and hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to teaching and learning in contemporary universities.
- The project demystified the doctorate and academic life as idealised institutional forms, suffering from ‘cruel optimism’: contemporary academic life is actualised in pockets of autonomous space-time, often in hybrid settings (e.g. on the move or in short bursts of productive time).
- The articulation of various rhythmic configurations across the two settings exposed the limitations of critique (e.g., Fast vs Slow Academia) and highlighted diverse approaches to reading, thinking, and writing, emphasising an increased awareness and attunement to the development of voice, listening, and identity formation.
- Students possess multiple identities and assume various roles, necessitating ongoing negotiation and challenges over prioritisation.
- Learning processes are dynamic, plural, and socio-culturally embedded. The project established a clear equivalence between reading and learning. If we accept the logic, learning as a living process implies that reading is, fundamentally, a living process (as evidenced by the Episodic Narrative Interviews).
- The project facilitated the development of a rhythm-inspired pedagogy for higher education, based on questioning institutional structures and processes of educational development: are they fostering or hindering lifelong learning?
- A rhythmic pedagogy for doctoral learning should be grounded in the non-linear temporality signified by the ‘riff’: a short, repeated rhythmic phrase, the foundation of a song, a playful, informal discussion of a topic, talk via stream-of-consciousness thinking, and the rhythmic essence of a musical piece (return, patterning, stream of consciousness, playfulness).
- The project initiated the transformation of supervisory practice and doctoral learning.
The significance of these findings, and of research that will foster further progress in this field, cannot be overstated at a time when the ubiquity of AI threatens to undermine, if not end, the development of advanced literacy skills and, with them, the ability to create, critique, and transform the world that lies at the core of the humanities and social sciences endeavour.
Publications:
- Dakka (2025) SRHE Reading Time: Discovery, Meaning-Making and Resistance in the Accelerated Academy Reading time: discovery, meaning-making and resistance in the accelerated academy | SRHE Blog
- Engen, Hoveid (2025) – Når studentene skammer seg fordi de leser for sakte [When the students feel ashamed for reading too slowly]:https://www.khrono.no/nar-stipendiatene-skammer-seg-fordi-de-leser-for-sakte/998195
- Dakka, Engen, Hoveid (2026). Reviving the Relationship between Reader and Text. The ‘Circle of Voices’ as a Practical Pedagogical Intervention. (Forthcoming 2026)
- Dakka, Engen (2027). ‘Academic Writing as an interpretative act – cultivating scholarly voice in conversation’. Invited chapter in Writing the Humanities. Scholarship, Voice and the Future of Academic Text (eds.Mahon, Krawczyk, Gibson), Routledge Education. World Issues in Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education series. (in preparation)
