Building Faculty Development Literacy for Doctoral Students: Preliminary Qualitative Insights Beneficial for PhD Course Stakeholders

The expression Faculty Development (FD) encompasses strategies to develop academics’ multiple competencies (Eble & McKeachie, 1985). FD actions could promote a holistic view of the academic institution by acting on micro, meso, and macro levels (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), coinciding with faculty members’ personal, professional, and institutional development (Steinert, 2014). This approach is also suitable for designing a holistic FD literacy program for doctoral students, perceived as emerging faculty members. This paper aims to present the first qualitative results of a DesignBased Research (Wang & Hannafin, 2005) aimed at elaborating an Italian FD program for PhD students. The research assumes the first two phases of Witkin and Altschuld’s needs assessment model (1995) within a mixed-method (qual-QUAN) exploratory sequential research design to identify students’ training needs. The pre-assessment phase involves collecting qualitative data through focus groups and interviews with stakeholders of PhD courses at the University of Verona. The results of the inductive content analysis (Elo & Kyngas, 2008) will be used in the assessment phase (QUAN phase) to construct a questionnaire to be administered to Italian universities. Data gathering and analysis are still ongoing, but aside from addressing a void in the existing literature concerning FD literacyfor PhD students, this research aims to make a tangible contribution focused on supporting the PhD courses’ stakeholders (for example, students, supervisors, and directors) by providing effective support by knowing the expected goals in terms of knowledge, skills, and competencies and thus enabling quality educational proposals for the future faculty members.