Creating Postgraduate Collaborations › Forums › CPC Supervision Development Course › Module 1 › Module 1, Session 2: Variables and dynamics in the supervision process
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Hi every one. I am Rox!
I am a Chilean-born, racially identified as a mestiza (mixed between indigenous and European ancestry), cisgender women, migrant for the last decade. I am currently working as a lecturer at Rhodes university. Such attributes of my identity has allowed me to be very aware that there there are policy and institutional walls that intervene in the access to funding, networks and informational resources for students with different racial, gender, class, age, dissability status, among others. More important, in my opinion, is that there are also symbolic, less tangible walls, that deeply impact the predisposition and self-confidence of supervisors and postgraduate students in graduate education.
As Abosede indicated above, international status deeply affected my access to funding in graduate studies, but what really caused me “trouble” was my language proficiency in English. For instance, when I started my postgraduate studies in the United States, I started noticing that my English worsened when I interacted with individuals that I have attributed certain degree of authority (typically senior white male academics). I used to be reluctant to ask for help to my professors because I had fear of being judged that I was not doing enough. That fear decreased only when I could “sit down” with it and I found a community of people of color, whose testimonies made me aware that I was not alone in that perception.
I have supervised anybody formally yet, but I informally advise an international colleague who is doing his PhD my department. My experience as an international student has helped to develop conversations and trust among us.Hi every one. I am Rox!
I am a Chilean-born, racially identified as a mestiza (mixed between indigenous and European ancestry), cisgender women, migrant for the last decade. I am currently working as a lecturer at Rhodes university. Such attributes of my identity has allowed me to be very aware that there there are policy and institutional walls that intervene in the access to funding, networks and informational resources for students with different racial, gender, class, age, dissability status, among others. More important, in my opinion, is that there are also symbolic, less tangible walls, that deeply impact the predisposition and self-confidence of supervisors and postgraduate students in graduate education.
As Abosede indicated above, international status deeply affected my access to funding in graduate studies, but what really caused me “trouble” was my language proficiency in English. For instance, when I started my postgraduate studies in the United States, I started noticing that my English worsened when I interacted with individuals that I have attributed certain degree of authority (typically senior white male academics). I used to be reluctant to ask for help to my professors because I had fear of being judged that I was not doing enough. That fear decreased only when I could “sit down” with it and I found a community of people of color, whose testimonies made me aware that I was not alone in that perception.
I have supervised anybody formally yet, but I informally advise an international colleague who is doing his PhD my department. My experience as an international student has helped to develop conversations and trust among us.Hi every one. I am Rox!
I am a Chilean-born, racially identified as a mestiza (mixed between indigenous and European ancestry), cisgender women, migrant for the last decade. I am currently working as a lecturer at Rhodes university. Such attributes of my identity has allowed me to be very aware that there there are policy and institutional walls that intervene in the access to funding, networks and informational resources for postgraduate students (and academics) with different racial, gender, class, age, disability status, among others. More important, in my opinion, is that there are also symbolic, less tangible walls, that deeply impact the predisposition and self-confidence of supervisors and postgraduate students to be part of the community who can speak the “language of power”.
As Abosede indicated above, international status deeply affected my access to funding in graduate studies, but what really caused me “trouble” was my language proficiency in English. For instance, when I started my postgraduate studies in the United States, I started noticing that my English worsened when I interacted with individuals that I have attributed certain degree of authority (typically senior white male academics). I used to be reluctant to ask for help to my professors because I had fear of being judged that I was not doing enough. That fear decreased only when I could “sit down” with it and I found a community of people of color, whose testimonies made me aware that I was not alone in that perception.in my context, the most common variables are status, age, ethnicity and fiances. religion, culture, topic also are significant. Officially there shouldn’t be any discrimination but somehow it plays out in covert ways.
Hello Everyone. I will comment on the issue of Topic.
My experience as a student (being supervised), was then the Faculty was lean and I had a limited choice of supervisors. The supervisors had areas of research interest. This in the long run to some extent restricts areas of specialization in the Faculty staff especially if the student decides to stick to the Topic of research. Apart from my Faculty supervisor, I had to get my first supervisor from a different country and worked on his area of interest, which fortunately was what I wanted to pursue. My take is that when a student pursues a Topic which is the supervisor’s area of specialization, particularly when they have no choice, the supervisor has the knowledge and the supervision process is reduced to a master and servant relationship.
As a supervisor I am still grappling with “what are my research interests/what is my area of specialization?”. Supervision for me now, usually at Masters Level, means reading widely, depending on the Topic the student wishes to pursue in order to provide adequate guidance during the supervision process. Nevertheless, students usually ask “What is your area of interest?”. Their intention, I presume is to gravitate towards what I am keen on as a supervisor probably so that I offer “better supervision” or that I suggest a Topic of study.
Hello Everyone. I will comment on the issue of Topic.
My experience as a student (being supervised), was then the Faculty was lean and I had a limited choice of supervisors. The supervisors had areas of research interest and usually as a student you work on their areas. I had to get a supervisor from a different country. Working on supervisors’ areas of interest in the long run to some extent restricts areas of specialization in the Faculty staff especially if the student decides to stick to the Topic of research. Further, when a student pursues a Topic which is the supervisor’s area of specialization, particularly when they have no choice, the supervisor has the knowledge and the supervision process is reduced to a master and servant relationship.
As a supervisor I am still grappling with “what are my research interests/what is my area of specialization?”. Supervision for me now, usually at Masters Level, means reading widely, depending on the Topic the student wishes to pursue in order to provide adequate guidance during the supervision process. Nevertheless, students usually ask “What is your area of interest?”. Their intention, I presume is to gravitate towards what I am keen on as a supervisor probably so that I offer “better supervision” or that I suggest a Topic of study.
Hello Everyone. I will comment on the issue of Topic.
My experience as a student (being supervised), was then the Faculty was lean and I had a limited choice of supervisors. The supervisors had areas of research interest and usually as a student you work on their areas. I had to get a supervisor from a different country. Working on supervisors’ areas of interest in the long run to some extent restricts areas of specialization in the Faculty staff especially if the student decides to stick to the Topic of research. Further, when a student pursues a Topic which is the supervisor’s area of specialization, particularly when they have no choice, the supervisor has the knowledge and the supervision process is reduced to a master and servant relationship.
As a supervisor I am still grappling with “what are my research interests/what is my area of specialization?”. Supervision for me now, usually at Masters Level, means reading widely, depending on the Topic the student wishes to pursue in order to provide adequate guidance during the supervision process. Nevertheless, students usually ask “What is your area of interest?”. Their intention, I presume is to gravitate towards what I am keen on as a supervisor probably so that I offer “better supervision” or that I suggest a Topic of study.
I want to reflect a bit on the issue of language. I read a really interesting blog post recently (link here: https://educationallinguist.wordpress.com/2020/02/01/are-people-who-support-the-concept-of-academic-language-racist-an-faq/), and it gave me pause for thought. I am still thinking through these issues, but for a long time I have been uncomfortable with just correcting students’ language as if there is one way of saying something ‘academically’, and I as supervisor have the right to judge and also correct my students. I do think that helping my students express their ideas clearly and effectively is important – that’s not what I am talking about here – and I have had a lot of help with that from my own supervisor and critical friends over the years. What am I talking about is a bit what Bailey Bridgewater talks about in her research on ‘standard’ English in the multicultural and multilingual US educational context, where students who don’t speak and write ‘white’ English are made to feel less, or stupid, or not university material. Language and racism intersect quite powerfully, I think, in ways that we really need to think quite carefully about, especially when we are reading and commenting on students’ work, and worrying about examiners’ judgements that will reflect on us as supervisors, as well as on our students. I think it is really important to ask ourselves what we are saying when we comment on language, expression and student ‘voice’, and how we might unconsciously be imposing some kind of standard that has its roots in rather exclusive, or even racist, notions of what ‘proper’ academic language is, and what kind of academic person is being signalled as valuable, or worthy of recognition.
It is great to read all the different experiences here in the forum and understand how varied our realities are. I have noticed in the Netherlands that supervision becomes challenging with students of different cultures. There are often communication issues. We are used to argumenting with our supervisors and really discussing with our students what the contribution of their work is to science and society and this is sometimes challenging for students coming from cultures in which hierarchy plays a critical role, where they are taught to be listeners and observers rather than participants in the knowledge process. It is important as supervisors to acknowledge cultural differences and understand how we can deal with them and tease out the best in our students no matter where they come from.
I think these variables hold an integral part in the supervision process. I will take the case of age,gender and topic/field. From my little experience as a supervisor, gender will always be an issue and age a thorn in the flesh if not handled professionally.The two challenges are overcome if and when both parties are knowledgeable in the area of research with the understanding that “no one owns knowledge”. Topic/field – if influenced by stake holder’s interest and government funding, students tend to complete their research on time as funding arrangements are often stricter. Hadi and Muhammad (2019) on “factors affecting postgraduate student performance” summarized these factors/variables as student related,institutional related and supervisor related. Thanks @ Esther on ‘age’, @Lilian on ‘gender’ and all participants – your reads are stimulating!
I will comment on the issue of Topic. My experience as a student was then the Faculty was lean and I had a limited choice of supervisors since they had their areas of research interest. I had to get a supervisor from a different country. Working on supervisors’ areas of interest in the long run to some extent restricts areas of specialization in students from the faculty especially if the student decides to stick to that area of research. When a student pursues a supervisors’ area of specialization particularly when they have no choice then in the supervision process, the supervisor has the knowledge and the supervision process is reduced to a master and servant relationship.
As a supervisor, I am still grappling with “what are my research interests?”/”what is my area of specialization?”. Supervision for me now, usually at Masters Level, means reading widely, depending on the Topic the student wishes to pursue in order to provide adequate guidance during the supervision process. Nervertheless, students usually ask “What is your area of interest?”. Their intention, I presume is to gravitate towards what I am keen on as a supervisor probably so that I offer “better supervision” or that I suggest a Topic of study.
In my experience of being both supervised and supervising, all of these factors have impacted on the relationship in one way or anther, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively. I think the relationship is such an integral component of postgraduate supervision and the success of the project. However, every single relationship is a unique interplay of all of these factors and depends on high level of awareness of this from the supervisor and the student and a willingness to engage in a conversation about the dynamics of the relationship. The factor, however, that has created the biggest issue for me is perhaps the one of language, since ultimately it is language which has mediated the communication between us. In about 80% of my supervisory relationships and experiences there has been the challenge of having different home languages which is exacerbated by my inability to communicate easily in anything other than English. The student is always left with the difficulty of having to express themselves in a reasonable English to be able to communicate with me due to my inability to communicate in any other language. Added to this I hold belief that academic English is no-one’s mother tongue. I therefore find it very difficult to facilitate the student in finding and giving expression to their own voice, while trying to guide them in the use of academic English. It takes a huge amount of constant awareness to suspend stereotypical judgemental responses within myself to be able to give feedback that is constructive and developmental. Language has also at times required me to find creative ways of approaching the supervision relationship, for example resorting to recorded conversations where the student and I together find the academic language which most closely give voice to their thoughts and ideas.
I would fully agree with Sherran who suggest that we have to guard against being exclusive and even racist when we hold very “fixed notions of what proper academic language is”.Gender indeed has an impact on the supervision process. I have supervised and co-supervised female students and male students. My experience was that male students found it easier to come to me for consultation anytime compared to some female students who due to gender dynamics and cultural issues became a bit not so forthcoming even in asking for clarity about some issues we would have discussed.
Some of the students were coming from a different educational background and were well grounded in qualitative research designs compared to quantitative designs. For that reason it tool a bit of time for us to agree on the designs. We ended up learning from each other which made the supervision process easier as we ended up agreeing that all forms of knowledge creation are valid and equally the same
@Thando, I empathize with your experience of the student ignoring your feedback but listening to the same advice from a white colleague. I had a similar experience, but my feeling is that it had to do with the colleague being male, rather than white in my case. The student was a Black African male student who argued incessantly with me and showed no respect and many times paid no attention to my suggestions. In one case, he in fact followed the method I had suggested after having argued against it for a long time, but never acknowledged it. In other cases, he had no issue when some of my suggestions came from an older male (who happened to be white) colleague. However, this was an exceptional case for me. I have worked with many other Black African students with whom I have had excellent working relationship. So the gender dynamics can sometimes have a significant impact for female supervisors.
All the factors listed impact on supervision. Other factors which may impact on supervision & therefore leading to social exclusion include age of student, period between undergraduate & postgraduate studies, marital status and whether or not the student has children.
I have seen scenarios in my institution where supervisors have a preference for younger students who are ‘fresh’ from undergraduate because of the perception that they are able to grasp concepts faster. This leads to older students being discriminated & may lead to them being excluded. Furthermore, balancing between having children & progressing with studies is a huge challenge. I have interacted with students who were progressing well & but had to take a break to bear children. This mainly affects female students.
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