Creating a Delicate Balance: the doctoral supervisor's dilemmas

Abstract

Central to the problems facing supervisors of doctoral students is creating a delicate balance between dominating the student's research and neglecting it. Too much control threatens the originality of the PhD and the autonomy of the novice researcher; too little can delay completion and even lead to total failure. Here, supervisors reflect on their successes and failures in the management of that delicate balance. They frequently construct their accounts using contrasts between the past and the present: comparing their own experiences as students with how they supervise now, or comparing current practice with their own early experiences as a supervisor. Such individual accounts and their characteristic rhetorical formats reflect contemporary policy themes at a more general level within the academic profession.

A Reflexive Autoethnography of Doctoral Supervision

“…Research has been conducted on doctoral supervision: supervisors' dilemmas, doctoral supervision experience, cultural dilemmas in doctoral research, etc, but our attempt to work on reflexivity in doctoral supervision is an aspect which has not been explored by researchers such as Delamont et al (1998Delamont et al ( , 2000, Robinson-Pant (2005), Holbrook and Johnson (2009), Barbara (2009) or Pollard (2009. I must say that it became difficult for me to write and create a suitable narrative when the data was changing as each account rewrote the previous one.…”

Pedagogical practices in PhD supervision meetings from a conversation analytic perspective

“…However, prior research on supervision has shown that too much guidance from supervisors make students dependent on supervisors (Delamont et al, 1998;Overall et al, 2011). They also point out that if students are given too much freedom they may lose track of the research, thus possibly leading to failure in the PhD candidature.…”

“…The close analysis also indicates that the supervisors enact a variety of actions in order to accomplish their supervisory tasks. They switch from this action to another, creating a delicate balance between giving guidance and developing student autonomy -one of the most challenging tasks for supervisors (Delamont et al, 1998;Manathunga & Goozée, 2007;Overall et al, 2011). In this section, I discuss how supervisors create a delicate balance between giving guidance and developing student autonomy and the import of this balance in achieving the outcome of the interaction.…”

“…(p. 4) According to McCallin & Nayar (2012), this view supports the notion that research students will engage in capability expansion (Walker & Thomson, 2010) and do this better when they are taught (Dixon & Hanks, 2010;Goode, 2010). In order to gain this outcome, therefore, supervisors need to balance giving guidance and developing student autonomy, which is viewed as the most challenging task for supervisors (Delamont, Parry, & Atkinson, 1998;Manathunga & Goozée, 2007;Overall, Deane, & Peterson, 2011). Students, on their part, have to learn to conduct research independently but at the same time they may resort to supervisors as sources of advice and guidance.…”

“…More than twenty years later, the challenging role of the PhD supervisor is creating a delicate balance between guiding student's research and developing student autonomy and this challenge is described as a dilemma in Delamont et al's (1998) study. They argue that the balancing act is needed because "too much control threatens the originality of the PhD and the autonomy of the novice researchers; too little can delay completion and even lead to total failure" (Delamont et al, 1998, p. 157).…”