Cosupervision Pressures

There is growing pressure on UK academics to cosupervise doctoral students. Some of this is driven by explicit funding conditions, and some of it is driven by the deliberate use of cosupervision to access interdisciplinary projects through a student ‘shared’ by two (or more) disciplinary academics.

I was cosupervised very successfully, but I believe this is quite a rare experience. Looking beyond my own experience, cosupervision of my peers often seemed to go worse than single supervision (though is perhaps a more consistent experience?); it has often puzzled me why funders push for cosupervision as the norm.

The OxICFM projects are all cosupervised, and I’ve been thinking hard about how to help make them into the good sort of cosupervision rather than the bad sort.

Some of this rests squarely with the students, and the taught course portion of the CDT is designed to help them develop some of the generic independence which is needed to adapt to complex supervisory situations. There’s a fair bit of literature on the student experience of PGR supervision, though somewhat less on the experience of cosupervision. This is useful for identifying some of the things which go right and wrong from the student’s point of view. Some of the extreme cases are objectively terrible, but there are more ambiguous reports which are harder to transfer into principles of design. My broad view of the ‘being supervised’ literature is that the key issues are communication (especially between supervisors) and unclear project authority.

Drawing on Scholarship

The other half of the supervision coin is the supervisor themselves. Literature on the experience of supervising is surprisingly rare. This means that missing from the policy/enhancement discussion is any sense of the pedagogies adopted by PhD supervisors. In that context, I found Akerlind and McAlpine’s 2015 paper particularly interesting.

They ask supervisors what the purpose of doing a PhD is. Broadly, there were three answers:

1.      To become self-sufficient as a researcher;

2.      To become innovative as a researcher;

3.      To develop as an individual.

Alignment with each of these answers (supervisors often aligned with two of the three) had certain important pedagogical consequences. A supervisor who though PhDs were about self-sufficiency would emphasise certain things (e.g. research skills) in their teaching. Development as an individual might be associated with emphasising enjoyment (Figure).

Reflection and Application

I am preparing a presentation to academic staff about how to make OxICFM cosupervision as successful as possible, which is an intimidating pitch. Who am I to tell anyone how to supervise a student?

Ultimately, any kind of presentation has to rely upon staff seeing difficulties in cosupervision and being open to ways of addressing them. At heart, this frames cosupervision enhancement a cultural issue rather than a strategic one; the menu of tactics and strategies can be offered honestly in the spirit of ambiguity which characterises so much of the policy discussion.

In this light, I’m most excited about the paper because it’s so free of blame: it respects supervisors’ educational experience, intuitions, and decisions. While the paper does not focus explicitly upon cosupervision, it gives a powerful insight into a plausible mechanism for poor cosupervision: good supervisors with different (and valid) views of the doctorate might adopt conflicting supervisory practices. This seems likely to be exacerbated by disciplinary practices such as the way Chemistry research groups are run.

My experience of University approaches to cosupervision is either ‘we’ve got to do it so here is the least disruptive route’ or ‘you’re doing it bad so here are some best practice things which now everyone has to do four times a year’. Akerlind and McAlpine seems like a neutral way into the discussion, but also one which invites professionals to reflect on their practice. It clarifies an issue without telling anyone they’re doing anything wrong; this seems like a way of treading the middle ground.

Treading the middle ground seems crucial to me if the problem is to remain situated in the sphere of culture rather than strategy. The whole point of a PhD is that it is weirdly, unapologetically specific. Supervision should respond to this specificity, but institutional supervision policies seem incapable of properly supporting an enhancement agenda constructively when painting with such broad brushes.