Jumping into this thread mid-stream, but it strikes me that another element
in the supervisory approach/style/influence debate concerns what students
see going on in other supervisory situations. For example, when I worked on
my PhD I was in an office with 3 and sometimes 4 other PhD students, and
there was a fair amount of discussion about how each of our supervisory
teams handled (or didn't handle) various elements of supervision.
More broadly as part of the PhD process at my university we actually had
seminars and short courses that covered the mechanics of the PhD process (a
large part of which is supervision) and this included some discussion of how
the processes and norms tended to vary among disciplines (for example
scientific lab-based work versus book-work liberal arts). We read chapters
about "managing your supervisors" and the like, which also gave us some
views into norms for supervisory models and practices, whether our own
supervisors used all of these or not.
Invariably we also discussed some of these issues with other current PhD
students at other universities as well as colleagues who already had PhDs
(and in some cases were supervising their own students).
All of this amounted to a sense that an important component of my PhD
education was in fact learning about the role of and expectations for
supervision--not only in terms of the practice of my own supervisors, but
also more broadly through reflection on how a range of real life and text
book supervisory situations illustrated the way different academics
interpreted the roles/expectations. Good practice, it seems to me, can be
quite broadly interpreted depending on the people and circumstances.
For these reasons it doesn't ring true that new PhD supervisors would
emulate solely the conditions of their own PhD supervisory experience, or
that they would require slavish use of their own PhD methods. As with any
profession there are better and worse practitioners with varying levels of
skill. I appreciate Tim's comment that "each researcher knowing and being
the keeper of the quality of what he or she does is the
necessary basis for all that must be done"
Ann
Ann Thorpe, PhD
.....................................
American Association of Architects, Associate
Design Research Society
+44 (0)77 1747 1606, London
.....................................
Forthcoming book: Architecture & Design versus Consumerism: how design
activism confronts growth (Earthscan/Routledge July 2012)
www.designvsconsumerism.net
book: The Designer's Atlas of Sustainability (www.designers-atlas.net)
blog: http://designactivism.net
twitter: @atlasann
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