There is growing interest in using coaching and mentoring strategies to improve the learning and development experiences of postgraduate research students. Previous studies from England and Denmark indicate that providing doctoral students with access to a coach helped them to overcome a range of challenges, including difficulties with interpersonal relationships and managing work–life balance (Lane & De Wilde, 2018). However, there has been little research conducted around how research students could act as mentors to their peers, despite global concerns about declining mental health and isolation among doctoral students in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic (see for example Naumann et al., 2022).
In this blog, we discuss some of the potential benefits of mobilising interdisciplinary peer-to-peer mentoring between postgraduate research students. We draw from the case of a pilot mentoring initiative developed by the Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) centre at Lancaster University. Two participants in the scheme share their experiences – Rebecca (a doctoral student in Education, and a mentee on the scheme) and Anastasios (a research student in Linguistics, and a mentor on the scheme).
Corpus linguistics is a research method which involves using specialised computer software to identify linguistic patterns in large bodies of text. For early career researchers who wish to explore using corpus methods, events such as the Lancaster Summer Schools in Corpus Linguistics can offer a helpful way in. However, such one-off introductory events ignore the important sociocultural process of learning, which recognises that effective learning takes place when students are sensitively scaffolded by a more experienced guide: as Liechty et al. (2013, p. 483) state, ‘Optimal learning is promoted when students can work alongside a more knowledgeable other such as a mentor [or] a more skilled peer.’
