What are doctoral supervisors supposed to do for their PhD students?

Abstract

I started my career as an associate professor at the University of Iceland, School of Education in autumn 2014. The year after, in summer 2015, I was charged with the responsibility of supervising a PhD student. In 2016 I got a second PhD student. Fortunately I was not supposed to work alone and my co-supervisors are much more experienced than I am. Nevertheless I felt uncertain about what to do. I did not know how much help I should provide and to what extent the PhD students should manage their own work. I decided to try to reduce my uncertainty, or at least to make it more tolerable, by doing a little research. The data I gathered were: a) a diary of my own work with my PhD students from the beginning of November 2016 till the end of March 2017; b) Nine interviews with colleagues taken from February till April 2017. They were all experienced supervisors at the University of Iceland. Four of them were at The School of Humanities, five at the School of Education – five men and four women. Perusal of recent literature about supervision convinced me that the subject is under- theorized and there is lack of research on what methods of supervision are most successful and beneficial. The earliest paper I read is a short piece by Raewyn Connell, published in 1985, where she highlights two points supported by later research. The first is that each PhD project in unique and it is, therefore, not possible to make all supervision fit into one mould. The second is that, in addition to academic guidance, good supervisors provide personal support and take care of scheduling meetings with their students. These points are corroborated by later research and also borne out by my interviewees. They agreed that each project is unique and that it is, therefore, not feasible to lay down fixed rules about how to supervise. In connection with this uncertainty some of them talked about a search for balance between too much and too little control of student research, too much and too little help with writing it up, too much trust and too many checks. Most of them also touched on uncertainty related to Connell’s second point and raised questions as to what extent their task was purely academic guidance and to what extent it resembled counselling. In a paper, published in 2005, Barbara M. Grant describes different types of discourses about supervision. She denominates the four most powerful ones psychological, traditional-academic, techno-scientific and neo-liberal. According to her, the first two discourses (i.e., the psychological and the traditional-academic) are dominant among academics. They were both readily apparent in my interviews, whereas the remaining two types were not. The managerialism, inherent in the techno-scientific and neo- -liberal discourses, seems as alien to the academics I talked with, as to those Grant was aware of. One way to conceptualize my interviewees’ search for balance, between taking too much care of their students and requiring them to work too independently, is to think of it as attempts to provide a proper mix of academic guidance and personal counselling, or find the golden mean between the psychological, and the traditional-academic approach. My results, and the research I review, give reasons to think that, even though PhD projects are different, and each one like a journey into uncharted territories where no one knows what will appear next, the supervisor should organize some crucial aspects of the journey. I have already mentioned the importance of scheduling meetings and reserving time to meet the students. One reason why this is important is that most academics are busy, and students sense this, and are, therefore, hesitant to claim enough of their supervisors’ time. Supervisors also need to reserve time to read scholarly works related to the projects, be ready to help with academic writing and, last but not least, get to know their students.