The intricacies of PhD supervision were highlighted in the workshop entitled “Engaging students through supervision and writing” held on Friday 13th October at CATL. A common theme was the need to find a balance between possible extremes, and to adapt the point of balance to different students, stages of the candidature and research topics. Presenters were Karen Hall, an “almost completed” PhD candidate, and two experienced supervisors, Prof. Philippa Maddern and Prof. Catherine Belsey.
There’s the need to find balance between having a professional working relationship of the employer-employee type, and allowing for the sort of personal involvement inherent in working together on a long term project that needs to make a significant and original contribution to knowledge. Research is done by people within the broader context of their lives, and not by “research automatons”.
Two key balances within this relationship are between intervention and autonomy, and between criticism and encouragement. An appropriate balance in these areas will facilitate the development of independent researchers who produce the best work they are capable of, without falling into the traps of excessive perfectionism.
According to Karen Hall, students need their supervisors for guidance, mentoring and perspective. According to the supervisors, facilitating interaction between their students (eg critical reading of each other’s work) makes supervision easier and more effective.
Students need guidance in the practical as well as academic aspects of their research.
On the practical side, they need help with project management skills (eg time management and goal setting), with procedural aspects of candidature (eg research proposals, annual reports, protocols for thesis submission, applying for travel funding) and establishing a constructive and emotionally safe framework for supervisory meetings. Reciprocal trust between student and supervisor was seen as crucial by all speakers.
On the academic side, students need guidance in conceptualising the project as it evolves from an idea into a thesis. As Karen said, research is often a search for direction in what can be useful and what can be stimulating, and students need help to see where their work is situated in the wider body of knowledge. This sort of help often provides the impetus that takes the research in creative and useful directions.
Feedback on work is a crucial part of the guidance supervisors provide. Feedback will function most effectively as guidance if students feel free to ask for the sort of feedback they need at a particular time, and if they feel supervisors have engaged with the work presented. Feedback also needs to be structured to help students “find their own voice” within the conventions of academic writing.
Feedback requires meetings. Approaches to scheduling meetings varied among the speakers. Prof. Belsey found that scheduling meetings at regular time intervals tended to encourage avoiding behaviours such as excuse making and frequent rescheduling, and therefore to be counterproductive. Her approach is to ask students to meet with her when they have something to show. She also expects it to appear in reasonably polished form. A cat bringing its owner “the dead mouse” was the metaphor used to describe the situation here. Prof. Maddern prefers to be flexible, and to meet at intervals that would be most helpful to students. Often students are surprised at this and expect her to impose an external structure, which she felt was a shame because it means they are writing for her and not, as they should, for themselves. Where there are multiple supervisors, joint meetings were seen as necessary, though individual meetings with individual supervisors were also considered useful.
Students can develop tunnel vision with respect to their research and may become obsessive about it. Supervisors are needed to give a sense of perspective: when is the work good enough? when has enough work been done? how important is a particular part of the research in the overall scheme of the thesis? etc. In this context Prof. Belsey requires her students to develop and continually refine a plan of their thesis. They begin early in their candidature with a single A4 sheet on which they outline the titles for chapters and write a sentence or two about what the chapter might contain. This plan is revisited and amended after each meeting to discuss a particular piece of writing. Prof. Belsey maintains that meaningful work on a thesis cannot start until the student has an hypothesis.
Supervisors act as role models to their students, whether they intend to or not. Students gain their impressions of academic life from their supervisor’s academic life including approaches to teaching, publishing and winning research grants and also to the ‘work-life balance’.
In the final part of the workshop, Prof. Belsey outlined her approach to writing. She aims in her writing to capture the reader’s imagination, to stimulate their curiosity and to incite them to think. One favourite technique is to begin with a surprising proposition, so that the reader knows where she is going, but can’t imagine how she’s going to get there.