Experiencing Master’s Supervision

Perspectives of international students and their supervisors

Nigel Harwood, Bojana Petrić

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138929807
• eBook ISBN: 9781317398646
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Master's degree programmes are on the rise, attracting growing numbers of international students who speak English as a second or additional language. Experiencing Master's Supervision: Perspectives of International Students and their Supervisors explores the experiences of supervising and being supervised at Master's level, charting the difficulties and joys of learning for second language speakers of English while based at a UK university.

The authors report the findings of a year of studying both supervisees and their supervisors in four different departments in the social sciences and humanities at a UK research-intensive university. Using a multiple case study approach, and examining supervision in its natural context, this book presents rich descriptions of five case studies: three student-supervisor dyads and two cases of individual students. Analysing rich, first-hand narratives, chapters identify key aspects of satisfaction and dissatisfaction through the eyes of the participants, focusing upon expectations, supervision styles, feedback and students' support networks, and discussing the broader implications for university and departmental policy makers, responsible for guidelines and requirements.

This book contains important insights into the supervisory experience at Master's level and will appeal to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of higher education, TESOL, TEFL/TESL and applied linguistics. This book will also be a useful resource for supervisors, leaders of training sessions for supervisors, and for postgraduate directors and teaching committees at universities who develop supervisory guidelines and preparatory sessions for Master's students.

1
Introduction

Overview

How do international master’s dissertation students and their supervisors experience supervision? What highs and lows do they encounter on their journey? Why? And what are the implications of their experiences for universities in terms of their supervisory policies, the kind of students they enrol, the nature of the dissertations they require, and the curriculum of their master’s programmes in general? These are the questions we address in this book, as we report the findings of a year of speaking to both supervisees and their supervisors, studying the students’ dissertation draft chapters and the supervisors’ feedback, and examining the official and not so official supervision policies in four different departments in the social sciences and humanities at a UK research-intensive university.

Our findings are at times uplifting, depressing – even shocking, as we uncovered evidence of marked variations in supervision experiences. There were some participants who spoke of the passion, fulfilment, and sense of achievement they associated with their role as supervisee or supervisor, but there were both supervisors and supervisees who discouragingly spoke of their experiences in terms of uncertainty about the role they were expected to perform, and supervisees who were less than fully engaged with their research and with the wider academic community. Some supervisees described supervisory experiences characterised by care and concern from their supervisors, while others felt much less cared for. We duly uncovered evidence of a vast spectrum of supervisory styles: from supervisors who would meet and communicate with supervisees repeatedly to those whose supervision can be charitably described as light touch, at best; from those supervisors who read and commented in detail on every draft chapter, to those who read a smaller selection of work, making only the briefest of comments. Different too were departments’ supervisory guidelines and requirements of supervisors, some departments permitting far more help and guidance to be provided than others, and indeed, different departments and disciplines were associated with different understandings and expectations of dissertation projects in terms of content and format. It is also fair to report there was a whole range of types of supervisee, in terms of personality, intellectual curiosity and ability, motivation, linguistic proficiency, and academic literacy – to say nothing of differences in terms of their work experience, aspirations, and in terms of how the supervisees hoped to benefit from their master’s degree in the future. A full spectrum of personnel, supervisory experiences, styles, and practices, then, both across departments and within the same department. There is much to tell; there is much for universities to ponder.

Before we proceed any further though, a note on some of the terminology used in this book. Because of our UK context, we use the term ‘dissertation’ rather than ‘thesis’ to describe the document reporting a piece of research which comes after the coursework stage of a one-year master’s programme, being roughly 10,000–20,000 words in length in our setting, depending on the discipline, programme, and institution. Supervisees normally work on their dissertation from around April to mid-September. In this book, we mostly focus on supervisees’ ‘traditional’ dissertations, produced in the form of a written document reporting the results of an empirical project, but acknowledge that the genre is more flexible and emergent than it was, with master’s students on certain programmes now having the option to produce submissions which take somewhat different forms, such as artwork or reflective portfolios (for examples of less traditional dissertations, see Paltridge 2004; Starfield & Ravelli 2006). Accordingly, one of the supervisees in focus produced a less traditional project consisting of a film plus accompanying text. By ‘international’ ¹ students, we are referring to speakers of English as a second or foreign language studying in a foreign country (the UK for our purposes). There were other terms we could have chosen instead, such as ‘non-native’, ‘L2’ (second language), ‘ESL’ (English as a second language), or ‘EFL’ (English as a foreign language) students, but we opted for ‘international’, as we wanted a term that would be maximally familiar and transparent to what we anticipate will be a readership not only from higher education studies but also from other disciplines who are interested in our findings. This ‘international’ term also usefully avoids defining this cohort of students solely in terms of language abilities and language learning.

What motivated our research? In brief, our own happy and not so happy experiences supervising international master’s students, the fact that our extant research focuses predominantly on international students, and because much of the literature on both master’s and doctoral supervision shows there is considerable work that still needs to be done to understand supervision and to propose ways to enhance supervisory pedagogy which are research-evidenced. We mention above that we uncovered problems with the supervision of international students, and indeed, we found evidence suggesting that some of the students – and supervisors – in focus were less than fully equipped to perform their roles satisfactorily. However, we should also make clear that we are not of the view that it is international students alone who should be associated with problematic supervision experiences; we believe many of the troubling attitudes, beliefs, and practices we identified would also have been in evidence if our study had been confined to home, ‘native speaker’ students and their supervisors. We do not seek, then, to claim that the issues we uncover are necessarily to be associated with the dramatic increase in international student numbers in master’s programmes in English-medium programmes in the UK or elsewhere. Nonetheless, international rather than home students are where our interests lie; we both have backgrounds in English language teaching and in language teacher education. Furthermore, as Manathunga (2014) intimates, the population of international students being supervised is only set to grow, ‘within the present context of globalisation, aggressive university marketing, widening access and increased student and supervisor mobility’ (p.1), making our international student focus apt. Indeed, according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, numbers of international students worldwide, currently over four million students, have grown steadily in the last two decades and are likely to continue to grow (UNESCO 2016), while OECD’s data shows that there is an increase in the numbers of international students in the highest educational levels, with over 30% of research students, i.e., master’s and doctoral students, in Australia, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the UK being international students (OECD 2013).

Having set the scene and, we hope, whetted readers’ appetites to learn more about our research and our findings, we next provide a brief survey of the most relevant previous research on supervision. This is necessarily very condensed; there is a plethora of literature on supervision and we can only be very selective here because of space constraints. We draw on literature focusing on doctoral as well as master’s supervision where appropriate, since there has to date been far more research on the former than the latter. We also focus particularly on the supervision of international rather than home students.

The importance of demystifying supervision

Why is research on supervision important? Why is it necessary to understand supervisory experiences and journeys? In this section, we state our case under a number of themed subheadings.

The phenomenon of supervision is opaque, poorly understood

Exploring and uncovering supervisory practices and experiences can be less than straightforward. Many researchers describe supervision in terms of its occluded nature. Supervision is ‘to a large extent each professor’s private concern’ (Dysthe 2002: 496), ‘a secret garden where student and supervisor engage with little external scrutiny or accountability’ (Halse 2011: 557), an ‘individualised and privatised affair’ (Hockey 1997: 65), a ‘black box’ (Goode 2010: 39), a ‘private act between consenting adults’ (Lee 2008: 269), and supervisor-supervisee relationships are characterised by ‘an almost sacred quality that will rarely be challenged by others’ (Weidman et al. 2001: 66). The process of supervision, then, is ‘largely unsupervised’ (Weidman et al. 2001: 67) and the practices often ‘tacit’ (Grant 2008: 12), despite universities’ increasing attempts to monitor and micro-manage both staff and students. The literature is clear that, at its best, supervision can work for good, leading to transformative, liminal moments of academic enculturation and growth. It is important, then, to demystify supervision to understand what makes it effective, to understand its processes and outcomes. Yet the literature also features testimonies of supervisory strife and neglect, and so again the need for understanding the supervisory phenomenon is evident: in these cases, we may have grounds to wonder Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?, to believe that these murky practices need closer, more public inspection.

Bad supervisory experiences are not uncommon

When we look at the literature on both doctoral and master’s students’ accounts of supervision, what is striking is how many disturbing stories there are: we read about dysfunctional supervisor-supervisee relationships, miscommunication, and unhappy experiences. For instance, Delamont et al. (2000: 143) report that ‘horror stories’ of bad supervisory experiences abound, with one of their supervisee informants reporting she had had just two supervisory meetings in three years as a PhD student, and another describing how they ‘felt remarkably scarred’ by their experience of (non-)supervision (p.137). Similarly, one of Guerin et al’s (2015) supervisors spoke of ‘an absolutely disastrous’ experience as a doctoral student, calling her supervisory team ‘unprofessional, inexperienced and conflictual’(p.109). Grant & Graham (1994) had both supervisors and supervisees recount ‘dismal’ experiences of supervision ‘frequently’ to them during staff development sessions (p.165). And Green (2005) describes the account of one ‘neglected’ doctoral student in Australia who claims some supervisors believe that ‘to see someone in the corridor and to say ‘how is it going?’, constitutes a supervisory meeting’ (p.161). Here are two more accounts by supervisees whose experiences appear to have been tainted by supervisory indifference:

I would say to him [my supervisor], ‘Well I would like to see you’ and he would look a bit disconcerted, flick through his diary and say ‘Oh well, I can give you half an hour on such and such a day.’ He would be ten minutes late and he would be constantly looking at his watch, and you just got the feeling that you shouldn’t be there, that you were wasting his time.

I found when I got her [as my supervisor] that if you met old postgrads and lecturers and say who you are being supervised by, they look at you and say ‘Oh, you like working on your own then do you?’

(Acker et al. 1994: 490)

Acker et al’s study was conducted some time ago, and readers may believe things have changed for the better since then, but worryingly, numerous other accounts, both old and new, of dissatisfaction, dismay, miscommunication – or downright supervisory abuse – can be found elsewhere (e.g., Aspland 1999a; Belcher 1994; Cotterall 2013; Delamont et al. 2000; Heinrich 1991; Jazvac-Martek et al. 2011; Krase 2003, 2007; Lessing & Schulze 2002; Li & Seale 2007; Löfström & Pyhäitö in press; Manathunga 2014; McAlpine et al. 2012; McClure 2005; McCormack 2005; Nelson & Friedlander 2001; Phillips 1994; Salmon 1992; Strauss 2012; Times Higher Education 2014). Understanding more about supervision and how these deleterious experiences can arise and can be avoided would be to the benefit of all parties.

Uncertainty about supervisory roles and expectations ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Our study
• 3 ‘This is not my topic but I’ll help as much as possible’: Jay and Billy’s story
• 4 ‘I’ve not done this before, I want to be told exactly what to do’: Victoria and Harriet’s story
• 5 ‘And I panicked and I couldn’t focus and I felt it all crumbling down on me again!’: Laura and Rosie’s story
• 6 ‘I had this opportunity. So yes – I took it’: Clara’s story
• 7 ‘My objective is not to learn how to work without supervision. My objective is somebody can teach me something’: Janet’s story
• 8 Discussion and conclusion
• Appendices
• Author index
• Subject index