Abstracts - Earli

actively, do not facilitate the candidates’ "legitimate peripheral participation" (Lave & Wenger,1991). At the same time, the senior members need to actively help the candidates internalise thecultural codes that give access to active participation. In the opposite case, such activities promotea candidate-peer culture, and do not enable the candidates’ progression from peer-student to peercolleague(Boud & Lee, 2005).Communities of learning in postgraduate education: a UK case study of the experiences of socialscience research studentsLisa Lucas, Graduate School of Education, United KingdomRosemary Deem, Graduate School of Education, United KingdomMarina Gall, Graduate School of Education, United KingdomThe paper reports findings from an exploratory, interview-based, study of UK social scienceresearch students and their programme directors at a research-intensive university, ParkUniversity. The experiences of research students have been studied by other researchers but theemphasis of previous research has tended to either on supervision practices and experiences or hasconcentrated on research training. In this paper, however, there is a particular focus on thecollaborative and peer learning experiences of a small purposive sample of social science PhDstudents, and also consideration of the gaps in that experience. The pedagogical consequences ofthese experiences are debated, including thinking through how research students are supportedoutside the context of their main supervisory relationship and how to faciliate the eventualcontribution of research students to knowledge production and the knowledge economy throughmembership of teams and networks. In the UK, although joint supervision of doctoral students isnow becoming somewhat more widespread, it is still common for students to have only one mainsupervisor, so more collaborative learning often requires a special effort. Group co-operation andlearning amongst doctoral students in the laboratory-based natural sciences is found morefrequently than for PhD students in the social sciences, so the latter can often feel isolated and donot necessarily benefit from learning within a group of peers except when undertaking researchtraining. The paper suggests ways in which existing collaborative and peer learning experiences ofdoctoral students can be enhanced and developed by using pedagogies that go well beyond thesupervision of individual students.Research leadership: Productive research communities and integration of research fellowsSten Ludvigsen, University of Oslo, NorwayTuri Oevre Digernes, University of Oslo, NorwayIn this paper we focus on what may be described as especially productive research environments,aiming to understand how productive research environments are developed and maintained. Wewill in particular look at different approaches related to research leadership and what this meansfor research communities, and the research fellows’ work. Previous studies of research emphasizethat research organizing is going through a change, from individual to collective models. Here, theresearch leadership will play a significant role. This tendency, which has been seen for a long timewithin the research communities in medicine, science and technology, is starting to break throughalso when it comes to knowledge domains within social science, educational science andhumanities. In these domains collective models for research organization are probably the field ofresearch where this trait of development is the weakest today. We have chosen three differentresearch communities, and the analyses of these are based on interviews, observations anddocument data (media studies, computer science and historical studies). All three communities arerecognized both nationally and internationally, and they have all been awarded several large– 809 –