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TEACHLING  September 2016

TEACHLING September 2016

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Subject:

Managing all the dissertations

From:

Dave Sayers <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Dave Sayers <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Tue, 6 Sep 2016 22:31:00 +0100

Content-Type:

text/plain

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Parts/Attachments

text/plain (83 lines)

Hi TeachLingers,

(And a big hello to all you new members joining us during the annual recruitment drive!)

In this year's card shuffle of departmental teaching responsibilities, I've been 
given overall responsibility for managing the undergraduate dissertations. This 
includes such excitements as:
- deciding which students should be allocated to which members of staff;
- hoping that neither the students nor my colleagues are offended that I 
fundamentally misunderstood their research interests;
- cleaning up the mess if I did!

I've supervised plenty of dissertations before, but never managed the whole process. 
And it seems an unusually tricky responsibility, with plenty of uniquely electrifying 
potential for disaster. Does anyone have any advice about the varied and intricate 
politics of this predicament?

By way of adding something vaguely constructive here (in addition to just bleating), 
I've at least decided on a novel way to gather the students' initial research 
interests. In previous years I've seen colleagues do this by asking students to 
specify their interests at the end of the academic year before their final year, then 
allocating supervisees in the autumn on that basis. The inevitable result is a lot of 
students changing their mind! So I've decided to poll students afresh now. And to do 
this... (long-standing list members will know where I'm going with this...) I'm using 
Google Drive! Specifically I've designed a Google Form asking them the following 
questions:

==============================================
1. First of all, as briefly as you can, what topic do you think you'd like to do your 
dissertation on?
[Paragraph text answers slot]

2. Was any member of staff's teaching particularly influential on your choice of 
dissertation topic?
[Checkboxes against every potential supervisor's name.]

3. Which FIRST year topic(s) most closely matches your chosen dissertation topic?
[Checkboxes against all our first year offerings.]

4. Which SECOND year topic(s) most closely matches your chosen dissertation topic?
[Checkboxes against all our second year offerings.]

5. Are there other curricular or extra-curricular influences on your topic choice you 
think it would be helpful for us to know about?
[Paragraph text answers slot]

6. Finally, do you think your research will involve human participants, or would your 
research be entirely based on documentary sources?
Multiple choice:
My research could potentially involve human participants.
My research definitely will not involve human participants.
==============================================

This is designed to help me work out who might make the best supervisor for them now, 
in a more informed way than just going on whatever was top of their mind in the spring.

And the final question, number 6, is so that I can work out how many of them to enrol 
on my research ethics workshops! Last year these went well for those who attended, 
but not enough attended because they hadn't thought through whether they might (even 
possibly) involve human participants.

Once I've got their responses I'll make a spreadsheet, also in Google Drive, so that 
all my colleagues can always see the latest version and I'm not stuck sending endless 
revised spreadsheets round by email (and dealing with old versions floating around 
confusing the whole process).

(I have told this email list before, and I'll repeat again, I'm not on the Google 
payroll... honest.)

Any advice much appreciated!

Dave

--
Dr. Dave Sayers, ORCID no. 0000-0003-1124-7132
Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University | www.shu.ac.uk
Honorary Research Fellow, Cardiff University & WISERD | www.wiserd.ac.uk
[log in to unmask] | http://shu.academia.edu/DaveSayers

---
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