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The number of doctorates being awarded around the world has almost doubled over the last ten years, propelling it from a small elite enterprise into a large and ever growing international market. Within the context of increasing numbers of doctoral students this book examines the new doctorate environment and the challenges it is starting to face. Drawing on research from around the world the individual authors contribute to a previously under-represented focus of theorising the emerging practices of doctoral education and the shape of change in this arena. Key aspects, expertly discussed by contributors from the UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand, China, South Africa, Sweden and Denmark include: the changing nature of doctoral education the need for systematic and principled accounts of doctoral pedagogies the importance of disciplinary specificity the relationship between pedagogy and knowledge generation issues of transdisciplinarity. Reshaping Doctoral Education provides rich accounts of traditional and more innovative pedagogical practices within a range of doctoral systems in different disciplines, professional fields and geographical locations, providing the reader with a trustworthy and scholarly platform from which to design the doctioral experience. It will prove an essential resource for anyone involved in doctorate studies, whether as students, supervisors, researchers, administrators, teachers or mentors.

This chapter discusses a set of pedagogical practices associated with the establishment of an international online doctoral education network, Doctoralnet. Our title refers to the work of bringing together a set of people and circumstances to attempt to build a virtual graduate school, an international community of researchers and doctoral students working in a single extended field. This field is the complex, extensive and multi-dimensional field of education and learning in adult life, drawing in spheres such as higher education, professional education (including specific professions such as health), vocational education, professional and workplace learning, organisational learning and online and e-learning beyond childhood and school. The reference to emergence in our title signals how our experiences of conceiving, planning, designing and enacting this network have involved sequences of activities and engagements with technologies, systems, structures, beliefs and assumptions that could never have been fully worked out in advance, but which came together over time to create the conditions in which the network has its life. It is this complexity that we are concerned to try and represent in our discussion of the pedagogical work that emerged in Doctoralnet. At the same time we see the pedagogical work in Doctoralnet as offering insights into the challenges and opportunities of building doctoral education in an international context.