From stalled projects to scholarly confidence: supporting postgraduate students in Gaza through remote research mentoring

When students are studying through conflict and the collapse of ordinary university structures, academic progress can become fragile very quickly. In this post, Dr Kinan Mokbel and Dr Ahmed Nijim reflect on remote research mentoring with postgraduate students in Gaza. The work built on Dr Kinan Mokbel’s publication mentoring developed with his postgraduate students at Exeter, then adapted it to help students in Gaza keep research questions, methods, ethics, feedback and publication pathways visible under disruption.

When the university route is interrupted

Postgraduate research is often described as independent work. That is true, but only partly. Students also need regular supervision, access to resources, clear feedback, ethical guidance and enough stability to keep returning to the work.

In Gaza, those conditions have been profoundly disrupted. UNESCO has reported that hundreds of thousands of students have been out of education, including tens of thousands of higher education students whose studies have been put on hold. A later assessment of higher education institutions in Gaza described extensive damage to campuses, buildings, ICT infrastructure, laboratories and staff capacity. UN experts have also warned of the systematic destruction of the education system.

That context matters for educators. This is not simply a story about online mentoring. It is about what becomes possible when normal university structures are damaged, supervision is interrupted, and students are still trying to think, write and complete research.

Building on an Exeter model of publication mentoring

Before working with students in Gaza, Kinan had developed a publication-mentoring approach with postgraduate students at Exeter. The idea was simple: strong student work should not always stop at submission. Where appropriate, a dissertation or project can become the start of a scholarly conversation.

This did not mean treating publication as an extra prize for a few exceptional students. It meant making the process of academic writing more visible. Students needed help to see how a project could be reshaped for a journal audience, how feedback could be turned into revisions, how authorship should be discussed, and how a manuscript moves from draft to submission.

This experience in Exeter hugely shaped the Gaza collaboration. It gave us a practical model to adapt, but the context required more flexibility, more patience and more attention to disruption.

What we did

Over the past couple of years, through collaboration between Exeter and colleagues in Gaza, we supported a group of Master’s students and early-career researchers whose academic progress had become uncertain. Some students had experienced long gaps in supervisory contact. Others needed help narrowing research questions, organising methods, interpreting feedback or simply knowing what to do next.

The support took different forms depending on what students needed. Sometimes this meant small-group online meetings. Sometimes it meant one-to-one discussions. At other times, because connectivity was fragile, it meant written feedback that students could return to when they were able to reconnect.

Most of the work centred on four practical questions.

• What is the research question now?
• What method is realistic in this context?
• What feedback needs acting on first?
• What is the next manageable piece of writing?

These questions sound simple, but they mattered. When students are overwhelmed, feedback can easily feel like a wall rather than a route forward. We tried to turn feedback into actions: revise this paragraph, check this ethical point, clarify this table, send this version by this date.

From dissertation to publication thinking

As projects developed, some students moved from dissertation completion into manuscript preparation and journal submission. For some, this was the first time they had seen publication as something possible rather than distant.

We treated publication as a structured learning process. That meant making the hidden parts of academic writing visible: choosing a journal, clarifying authorship, responding to comments, rewriting the discussion, tightening the methods and learning how to make a contribution clear.

Some of this work has already progressed into submitted or published manuscripts, and further work is still developing. Those outputs matter, but they are not the whole point. The more important educational lesson is that publication becomes less mysterious when it is broken into stages. Students begin to see that academic writing is not magic. It is a process of revision, decision-making and persistence.

What other educators can take from this

Although this example comes from Gaza, the lesson is much wider. Postgraduate students in any setting can lose momentum in many situations: conflict, displacement, illness, caring responsibilities, weak supervision, unstable internet or loss of access to research materials.

In those moments, the educator’s role is not only to give expert advice. It is to reduce uncertainty. Students need to know what matters most, what can wait, what needs an ethics check, and what the next manageable step looks like.

For us, the central lesson is simple: when the wider system is unstable, structured mentoring can protect academic agency. It cannot remove the disruption. But it can help students keep moving, keep writing and keep seeing themselves as researchers.

Inclusive postgraduate education is not about lowering standards. It is about making the route to meeting those standards visible, especially when students are working through disruption.

Suggested further reading

1. UNESCO. In Gaza, UNESCO supports students amid a devastated education landscape. Available from: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/gaza-unesco-supports-students-amid-devastated-education-landscape

2. UNESCO. Assessment of damage and reconstruction needs for higher education institutions in Gaza. Available from: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/unesco-presents-assessment-damage-and-reconstruction-needs-higher-education-institutions-gaza

3. OHCHR / UN experts. UN experts deeply concerned over “scholasticide” in Gaza. Available from: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/04/un-experts-deeply-concerned-over-scholasticide-gaza

4. INEE. Minimum Standards for Education: Preparedness, Response, Recovery. Available from: https://inee.org/minimum-standards

5. Pollard, R., & Kumar, S. (2021). Mentoring Graduate Students Online: Strategies and Challenges. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 22(2), 267–284. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v22i2.5093