More than an apprentice model: legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) and the research conference for postgraduate students

With the various proposals surrounding government policy on the position of postgraduate research students in Australia, there has developed a sense of urgency about the efforts of organisations to apply positive and constructive measures to issues of particular interest to the postgraduate research community. This paper examines an instance of an established postgraduate student association's conduct of a national research firstly to stimulate new, and secondly to support current, research endeavours of its constituents. A university wide survey of postgraduate research students' perceptions of faculty support for their work suggested a number of areas in which the university was lacking. There was concern about the lack of systematic approaches within this community of students as a whole to facilitate these students' operations on the multiplicity of levels required for their success as research students. The conference aimed to tackle these levels, initially as part of an induction into the research community and ultimately as part of making the transition from acolyte to master.