1. Supervision as pedagogy
2. Supervision as relationship
3. Supervision as Management
4. Supervision as Contributions to Knowledge

and which was published under the title ‘Diffracting the Practices of Research Supervision’ in a collection of papers published by University Putra Malaysia. http://www.otago.ac.nz/research/graduate/otago029654.pdf
I have in the last two years added two additional themes.

• The first was a series of blogs related to my work in helping research supervisors advance their supervision practice through reflection.
• The second was a response to many inquiries about the first six months of research degree candidature and ways for research supervisors to ‘know’ that their student was progressing.

Each of these themes can be accessed using the portal index to the right of the screen labelled ‘I think of research supervision as…’

This year I plan to write a series of blogs related to the research culture. Part of this agenda has been influenced by my own candidature and experiencing elements of research culture through the different activities of candidature, such as attending coursework, presenting colloquia and being part of a student community of practice. I am also pleased to welcome William Stevenson, an English editor with Enago based out of the USA as a guest writer.

Industrial research managers often require their personnel to provide them with quarterly reports on their progress. This is most common when the manager himself is required to turn in progress reports to a funding agency and needs to present summaries to a third party. The quarterly reports not only summarize the experiments carried out and discuss the results, but give more or less detailed data to support the findings. For in-house funded work, quarterly reports are less common and in academic research they are seldom used.

Nevertheless, a few professors do require their students to write quarterly reports on their research. Graduate students hate writing these reports, reasoning that this takes up time they could use to do research and what’s the point of writing up the results twice—once in a quarterly report and again in a thesis? But I think the professors have the right idea. The quarterly report is a powerful tool: it can speed up the progress of research and make writing publications easier.

Organization and Motivation

The quarterly report helps to organize a research project. It’s a milestone that must be met. Consciously or subconsciously the graduate student will set up a plan to achieve enough results to make the report impressive. No one wants to turn in a progress report with no progress. There are few workers so self motivated that a deadline does not make them pick up their pace.

Publication Made Easier

The documentation within a quarterly report will also speed up the eventual publication of the research results, so long as the report is well written. When preparing the report, the graduate student must think about why he did the experiments and explain the results in a coherent fashion. This provides the groundwork for the body of the eventual paper—introduction, results, discussion. Just as important are the details of the experimental work—synthetic procedures, analysis, all the relevant data. This should be written up in the same manner as a research paper, with tabulated data and copies of spectra. The best quarterly reports are close to a research publication, albeit of a work in progress.

Doctoral Dissertations Made Easier           

Graduate students may gripe about the chore of writing quarterly reports, but talk to one after he’s turned in his thesis and he’ll sing a different tune. He will grudgingly admit that his collection of quarterly reports saved him a lot of time. True, all of the information he needed was in his lab notebooks and files—but where? Hunting down the scattered notes and assembling and transcribing the sloppy writing into elegant language would have taken far longer than abstracting the information from the quarterly reports.

The quarterly report is a powerful tool, one that more researchers should use.

This post was written by William Stevenson, an English editor with Enago based out of the USA.

One thing that seems important in the meetings with one’s supervisors is the way in which the student’s knowledge is valued. A research degree is all about knowledge. By the end of it a researcher needs to have made a clear contribution to knowledge so the ways in which knowledge is referred to and managed in many ways represents a threshold concept for research students. Inadvertently, with intent to give the student confidence in the supervision, the supervisor may be excluding their knowledge. The assumption that I work from is that if the university has seen fit to invite a student to undertake a PhD then there must be something about their topic that is tantalising and worthy of making the essential contribution of knowledge. I have never seen myself as the expert in their topic. I see my role as supervisor as a process consultant, helping them fathom the mysteries of university and university based research. I have always believed that the student is knowledgeable about their topic and that perhaps my knowledge base is related to the processes of getting a doctoral degree.

As Oscar Wilde suggests in The Importance of Being Ernest, ‘first impressions are the most important impressions’. If a university is hoping for students to contribute to the research discourse and make a contribution of their own, considering how welcomed they are into a culture is an important factor, and often the research supervisor acts as both the immigration official and the welcoming party.

Schein (1990), writing about Organisational Culture is often credited with bringing the term into the vernacular. He recognised the provenance of organisational cultural awareness as having connections to Kurt Lewin’s notion of action research from the 1940s. Like many of the terms used to discuss organisational work, Schein (1990) suggested that organisational culture meant different things to different people.

In research management, organisational culture is important . As Castleman (1993) alluded to in her discussion of what is required to manage a research program, it is not only the resources and facilities that enable a student to complete their research program but also working in the context of clear but not restrictive policy and procedural guidelines. Whittle (1994), in describing a case study of research at university SA, also talked about policies, management and decision making, all as factors contributing to the overall practices of research at a university and influencing the way research was undertaken there.

Recently I have become aware of the impact of culture through marking assignments that explore the Bolman Deal framework (Bolman and Deal, 2003) for an MBA cohort. This framework applied to any organisation helps to look at specific problems operating within the organisation and categorises them on the basis of a framework. One of the sectors of the framework is Culture. This awareness raising, together with my own candidature moving me into an array of arenas each of which contribute to my advancement with my PhD, generates a timeliness to focus on the many and varied factors which impact on research culture at a university and specifically for the research students.
Under this heading I will write about

• The dilemma of a research culture
• Establishing a research culture through the supervision meetings
• Co-authoring and the research culture
• Research culture and the graduate centres
• Coursework and its impact on a research culture
• Colloquia and their impact on the research culture

and other topics pertinent to research culture as they emerge in my own practices of being a research student and observing the fabrication of a research culture around me.
As these topics are generated they can be accessed through the portal marked research supervision supporting a research culture
Bolman, L.G. and Deal, T.E. (2003) Reframing organizations: artistry, choice, and leadership 3rd Ed San Francisco, Calif. : Jossey-Bass.

Castleman, T. (1993) Building a research program. In Beattie, K. (Ed) So where’s your research profile? Union of Australian College Academics Melbourne, Australia.

Schein, E. (1990) Organisational Culture. American Psychologist, 45(2), 109-119.

Whittle, J. (1994) A model for the Management of Research Degree Supervision in a Post-1987 University. In Zuber-Skerritt, O. and Ryan, Y. (Eds) Quality in Postgraduate Education. Kogan Page  London, U.K.

Many supervisors would identify their own research dissertations and the publications that have arisen from them, as contributions to knowledge, but rarely do they look beneath their practices at the power of this assumption and how it informs so many factors of higher degree research.

My interest in this area arose out of discussions with supervisors about what they conceive as research, and several who suggested that their idea of research supervision was to help their students to make a contribution to knowledge. This assumption about research making a contribution to knowledge has its roots in the Ancient Greek schools from which we take the term thesis (θέσις) meaning position, a term often used synonymously with dissertation. The idea of research as a contribution to knowledge also embraces the ways in which that knowledge is articulated and in this regard draws from the provenance of scientific writing in the description of Boyle’s Pneumatic Pump. Boyle devised a reporting style that enabled his readers to witness his contribution to knowledge (Shapin, 1984) through reading the description of the experiment. Compte’s (1848) claim (in Habermas, 1968), ‘that scientific knowledge was the only true knowledge’ reinforced the dominance of scientific method as the way to articulate the contributions to knowledge. These claims were challenged by Kuhn’s (1962) revelation of paradigm, and Guba and Lincoln’s (1982) articulation of the paradigm which underpins research practice, all of which contribute to the philosophic fabric of research practice. When a research supervisor suggests that their view of supervision is to assist a student to make a contribution to knowledge, part of this agenda should include helping them understand the rules of academic writing and the ways in which those rules have changed in response to philosophical arguments and technology innovations.

In contemporary research, where methodologies are sometimes chosen on the basis of precedent or even the investigator’s own relationship with their topic, the philosophical roots can be overlooked. Rarely is an argument made from explicit epistemological and ontological considerations. The words may even be unfamiliar to many research students. Also in the contemporary world of higher degree research, in which there is a great emphasis on completion in stipulated amounts of time, I have heard some academics suggest that the doctoral degree no longer serves this assumption of making a contribution to knowledge and is a period of learning to be a researcher.

In contrast, when a dissertation is examined, one of the questions asked of the examiner is to comment on the contribution to knowledge. This maxim of academic work is consistently reinforced by the drives for publication.

This theme of research supervision as helping a student make a contribution to knowledge seems to have hit a nerve with several readers of this blog, as the article ‘How can you tell when there is a contribution to knowledge’ is one of the most frequently downloaded articles in the whole blog

My own interest in the contributions to knowledge is focused on the provenance of the dissertation and particularly in those people who try to do something different in their dissertation. This may be writing in the first person or including video footage in their dissertation. This agenda has led me to write and perform a cabaret on ‘what happens when a student wants to do something different in their dissertation?” (Hill, 2012)

The blogs I have written under this heading include:

• Making sure that there is sufficient Ph in a PhD
• How can you tell when there has been a contribution to knowledge (in a doctoral research study)?
• Authorship- who has actually written the dissertation
• Arguing (philosophically) for something different in a dissertation
• Problematising knowledge which has been drawn from experience
• How I know rather than what I know

Use the Research Supervision as Contributions to Knowledge portal at the end of this blog to access each of these articles.

Comte, A. (1957, 1848) A General view of Positivism Official centenary ed. of the International Auguste Comte Centenary Committee / [Translated from the French by J. H. Bridges].New York, U.S.A : R. Speller

Floud, R. (2006), The Bologna Process: Transforming European Higher Education, Change: the Magazine of Higher Learning , 38(4), 8-13.

Guba, E. and Lincoln, Y. 1982. Epistemological and Methodological bases of Naturalistic Inquiry. Education Communication and Technology Journal, 30(4), 233-252.

Habermas, J. 1968. Knowledge and Human Interests Beacon Press: Boston

Hill, G. (2012, May) What happens when a student wants to do something different in their dissertation? – Cabaret as academic writing. Inaugural Global Storytelling Conference, Prague: Chezk Republick

http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/What-happens-when-a-student-wants-to-do-something-different-in.pdf

Kuhn, T. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, U.S.A., Chicago Press.

Shapin, S (1984) Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology
Social Studies of Science, 14(4): 481-520.

Although not using the term ‘pedagogy’, Connell (1985) established this strand of thinking about research supervision in her personal account of research supervision in which she referred to it in the context of an academic’s other teaching practices. Lee and Green (1995) added to this agenda and made explicit the term pedagogy in their Australian Universities review special edition dedicated to Postgraduate Pedagogy. By the early 2000s, when this particular slant on research supervision took its stride, it was being commonly referred to as Research Supervision as Pedagogy (Pearson and Brew, 2002; Bruce and Stoodley, 2010; Grant and Manathunga, 2011; Zeegers and Barron, 2012)

Coming into this debate while completing my doctoral degree (Hill, 2002) I was influenced in my thinking about research supervision as pedagogy by a discourse to which I had been exposed in my consultancy work called Productive Pedagogies. In essence this was an array of strategies for teachers to use to make them much more effective in their teaching. Although designed for an audience of Early Childhood, Primary and Secondary teachers, I found the agenda useful for naming the pedagogies involved in research degree supervision, an aspect of the literature which I felt had not been sufficiently advanced. I specifically advanced my thinking with regard to the productive pedagogies of making assessment criteria clear (Hill, 2007) and prior knowledge (Hill, 2008). I also put forward the idea that the whole frame work of Productive Pedagogies was beneficial to a study of research supervision (Hill, 2110).

The series of articles in this blog advance the agenda of trying to name specific pedagogy for research supervision, either by borrowing from names of pedagogies in other contexts of teaching or by promoting a name myself.
These included:

• Narrative (taken from the Productive Pedagogy suite)
• Problem solving pedagogy (taken from the Productive pedagogy suite)
• Career pedagogy
• Reflective practice, and
• A pedagogy for group supervision

…as well as a number of articles related to supporting academic writing. The strategies for supporting academic writing have been developed in conjunction with other research supervisors and the Enago the editorial service. The articles about supporting academic writing include:

• Using Powerpoint to support academic writing development
• Helping a student with their thesis statement
• Providing feedback on academic writing
• 5 strategies to help your student learn to write.

Use the Research Supervision as Pedagogy portal at the end of this blog to access each of these articles.

Bruce, C., and I. Stoodley. (2010). Science and technology supervision resource and cases. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology.

Connell, R. W. (1985). How to Supervise a PhD, The Australian Universities Review, 28(2), 38-41.

Grant, B. and Manatunga, C. (2011) Supervision and cultural difference: rethinking institutional pedagogies, Innovations in Education and Teaching, 48(4), 351-354

Hill, G. (2007) Making the assessment criteria explicit through writing feedback: A pedagogical approach to developing academic writing. International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning 3(1), 59-66.

Hill, G. (2008) Supervising Practice Based Research. Studies in Learning, Evaluation, Innovation and Development, 5(4), 78-87

Hill, G. (2010, September) Making use of pedagogic models as reflective catalysts for investigating pedagogic practice. In The 5th International Inquiring Pedagogies Conference (iPED 2010), Coventry, United Kingdom.

Lee, A. and Green, B. (Eds) (1995) Postgraduate studies/Postgraduate pedagogy. Australian Universities review.

Pearson, M. & Brew, A. (2002) Research training and supervision development, Studies in Higher Education, 27(1), 135–150.

Zeegers, M. and Barron, D. (2012) “Pedagogical concerns in doctoral supervision: a challenge for pedagogy”, Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 20 (1), 20 – 30

At the beginning of 2012, as a PhD student myself, I embarked on the first six months of my candidature. It was an ideal time to look to my own development as the basis for providing evidence of my progress. This agenda of providing evidence for my progress has arisen out of the Graduate Capabilities agenda which were first raised by the Pharmacy industry (Clark, 1996 in Kiley, Cumming and Thomas, 2009) and later became a major theme within the Research Degree discourse. Essentially the agenda is suggesting that along with a dissertation as evidence of competence acquired through undertaking a research degree, universities should look to other evidence of specific capabilities and help students acquire this.

Over the course of my own six months I looked at six tools that a supervisor could use to ascertain my advancement as a researcher and my heading toward the goal of a completed dissertation. There is a substantial body of evidence that the research proposal is a good indicator that a student will complete. I took the notion of a research proposal and looked at the sub elements that were necessary to undertake that particular milestone. These involved academic literacy in the form of being able to read journals and to write – presumably the research proposal. The proposal often has embedded in it an action plan, so it also calls on the skills of Project Planning. I would argue that another competency for a student undertaking this form of learning is knowing how they learn and how this translates into a relationship with a research supervisor.

The tools I am proposing in this series of blogs include:

Looking at the expectations – a tool for starting out the candidature which is based on Ingrid Moses’ (1984) Role Perception rating Scale.

Looking at how you learn uses Kolb’s (1984) tool for ascertaining dominance in learning

Analysing your student’s reading ability draws on an activity which my own professor asked me to undertake in the form of an annotated bibliography and through completing this I saw that it assessed my journal reading abilities.

Assessing the writing ability of your research student explores the ongoing adventure of writing a research proposal and for the analysis tool I have drawn on one of my own publication (Hill, 2008) about the pedagogy of scaffolding the writing into iterative exercises.

Analysing the Project Plan within a research proposal looks at the viability of the project plan and also provides insight into whether a student has an understanding of the doability of their project

Analysing the research proposal sets up a range of ways to read a student’s draft research proposal and draws on a rubric for the dissertation published as an appendix in Sankaran, Swepson, and Hill, G. (2005).

Alongside all these analytical tools for ascertaining your student’s progress, I have also written about:

• Looking at the ways you frame problems that you believe a student is experiencing, which is based on the Bolman Deal (2010) framework .
• Ascertaining your own progress as a research supervisor.

Use the Analytical tools for the early months of candidature portal at the end of this blog to access each of these articles.

Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2010). Reframing organizations : Artistry, choice, and leadership (4th ed.). New York: Jossey-Bass.

Hill, G. (2008) Supervising Practice Based Research. Studies in Learning, Evaluation, Innovation and Development, 5(4), 78–87.

Kiley, M., Cumming, J. and Thomas, M. (2009, April). Higher degree by research candidates and skills development: what do we really mean?  International Quality in Post Graduate Research Conference.

Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. New Jersey, USA: Prentice-Hall

Moses, I. (1985). Supervising Postgraduates. Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia. Sydney, Australia.

Sankaran, S., Swepson, P. and Hill, G. (2005) Do Research Thesis Examiners Need Training? Practitioner stories. Qualitative Report, 10 (4)

Johnson (1995), writing early in this agenda, and undertaking an action inquiry on research supervision, pointed out that change to research supervision practice did not take place overnight (or in one workshop) and needed the time and energy of sustained reflection on practice through action inquiry. Although she did not consider that the action research process had been a success, the study posed a possibility for exploring this aspect of professional practice in this way.

Pearson and Brew (2002) similarly advocated reflective practice as a way in which research supervisors ccould advance their practice, and encouraged groups of supervisors to work collaboratively in Communities of Practice to explore the complexity and ever changing nature of research supervision practices. They drew attention to the possibility that different research supervisors will have different constructs about research practice itself, and that therefore advancement of the practice involved not only reflection and acknowledgement of previous experiences, but also critical reflection involving exploration of assumptions underlying practice.

Brew and Peseta (2004) described the reflective practice program which they initiated at Sydney University, in which participants wrote case studies about research supervision, drawing on their experiences of being supervised. They critically reflected on these case studies, identifying one or two features that they wanted to improve. Similarly Bruce and Stoodley (2011) discuss a program they developed for a Science and IT faculty, which encouraged research supervisors in that faculty to reflect on their superivsion practices and offered a scaffolding of nine elements of teaching by which to do this.

My own writing in this blog about advancing the practices of research supervision has been based on a university wide project with which I was associated for the past ten years, providing professional development for research supervisors at a Queensland university. This project was underpinned by Schon’s (1983) notion of reflective practice, specifically focussed on research supervision in studies such as Johnson (1995), Pearson and Brew (2002) and Brew and Peseta (2004).

The topics I have written about, summarised below, are accessible via the portal labelled advancing research supervision at the end of this blog:

Advancing research supervision practice by looking backwards.
I believe that reflecting on practice requires firstly an understanding of the provenance by which that practice has evolved. This means generally understanding the ways in which literature has defined and developed the practice and how the individual practitioner, wanting to advance their own practice, has developed this as part of their professional repertoire. Looking backwards at the emersion of their research supervision practice for many supervisors invovles exploring their exposure to researach supervision by being on the receiving end of it in the role of a research student.

Practicing and reflecting on the practice of research supervision.
This approach to advancing research supervision is the one that most supervisors consciously or unconsciously use. They get underway with the practice and they reflect on what happens when they supervise. Just the practice without the reflection is unlikely to lead to any improvement in practice. I even suggest that without reflection many supervisors would be unaware of their practice. The flipside of this assertion is that even with minimal reflection, a research supervisor can be assured that their practice will be improved and the chances of their research student completing their degree will be enhanced. This pay off of seeing improvement and an easing of the pressure of research supervision is perhaps the greatest motivation to invest some time in reflecting on what is happening when you supervise a research student.

Being mentored
Anmother common way in which academics learn about research supervision is through a process of mentoring. A more experienced supervisor, or in the case of the research supervisors I mentor, a person who has access to and knowledge about the range of strategies useful in research supervision, can help a novice research supervisor to learn the practice. Even without intending to, when you are working with another supervisor you are learning. Hopefully all of this is good practice. It helps if the supervisor doing the mentoring is conscious of how they act and aware that their every act of supervision is also an act of mentoring their supervising colleague.

Co-supervision is a model of supervision which while it has evolved essentially to provide for continuity in research supervision in the event of one of the research supervisors being unable to continue in their role, it is also lauded as a vehicle for a more experienced supervisor to mentor a less experienced supervisor.

Being in a community of practice
In more recent literature about advancing research supervision (Brew and Peseta, 2004) there has been some discussion about the value of communities of practice to help both novice and experienced research supervisors advance their practice. Bringing together a group of practitioners and creating an atmosphere in which they feel safe to share their practice and constructively critique each other’s practice is an ideal way for any practitioner, including research supervisors, to advance their practice. The tricky part of such professional development is providing a process by which they can critique each other’s practice when there is no single correct way to supervise students. When I run communities of practice for research supervisors, I usually make explicit a set of protocols for sharing and commenting on each other’s practice to ensure that everyone is edified in the process.

Advancing your research supervision through rigorous investigation.
It is one thing to reflect on your practice. I advocate that investigating your practice is a step higher. By investigating I mean observing your practice in such a way as to make tacit knowledge about your practice explicit. It helps if the process by which you intend to make the practices explicit, is also made explicit. These acts of making tacit knowledge explicit brings a level of transparency to the practice and this helps to illuminate not only the nature of the practice but the decision making that works behind the practice. Such rigorous investigation is part and parcel of the movement of practice related researchers. When you pursue this line of advancing your research supervision, you not only improve your own knowledge about research supervision, but through an agenda of publishing your findings as a way of authenticating the investigation outcomes, you share your knowledge and findings with other people. Even with as few as a single research student, articulating the interventions you make in the pursuit of helping your research student to complete their degree, adds to the body of knowledge about this often private academic practice.

Evaluating your own research supervision practice
In the context of a university demonstrating to the funding bodies of government that they are actively improving the quality of research supervision at their institute they may well instigate formal evaluation processes or emphasise the element of research supervision within the broader performance appraisal system that is already established.

These topics are accessible via the portal labelled advancing research supervision at the end of this blog are:

Bruce, C. & Stoodley, I. (2011): Experiencing higher degree research supervision as teaching, Studies in Higher Education, 1-16

Brew, A. and Peseta, T. (2004) Changing postgraduate supervision practice: a programme to encourage learning through reflection and feedback, Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 41(1): 5-22

Edwards, H., Aspland, T., O’Leary, J., Ryan, Y., Southey, G. and Timms, P. (1995) Tracking Postgraduate Supervision, A.S.D.U. Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.

Moses, I. (1984): Supervision of Higher Degree Students — Problem Areas and Possible Solutions, Higher Education Research & Development, 3:2, 153-165

Pearson, M. & Brew, A. (2002) Research training and supervision development, Studies in Higher Education, 27(1), 135–150.

Schon, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action. U.S.A., Basic Books.

Johnson, S. (1995) Professional development for postgraduate supervision Australian Universities’ Review, 38(2), 16-19.

Other theorists in the early days of writing about research supervision also alluded to the relational aspect of research supervision, suggesting it was a ‘mentoring’ relationship (Shannon, 1995) and some of these ideas further developed into the notion that research supervision is pedagogy. Still other theorists took what might be considered a critical approach to examining the mentoring relationship, exploring issues of power involved in research supervision (Green, 2005; Manatunga, 2007) drawing attention to the power imbalance in the relationship that is often related to both the term supervisor suggesting a power differential and the knowledge of doing a research degree disadvantaging the student. As the student comes to understand better what is involved in a research degree, and through this research they become an expert in their topic, this serves to equalise the power imbalance, but supervisors who like to maintain control may still exercise their power and thus disempower their students.

The relational side of research supervision opened up an element of boundary spanning between Research Supervision and Interpersonal Communication, with exploration of some of the strategies for resolving conflict in relationships as well as some of the more emotional aspects of the research journey (James and Baldwin, 1999). My own background as a Psychologist and Crisis counsellor influenced the way in which I saw the relational side of research supervision and drew my attention to Interpersonal communication skills such as Reflective Listening (Nelson-Jones, 1986, p. 168), and Reframing (Egan, 1975, p. 173), as well as to emotional issues such as
• Impostor hood
• Resilience
• Thesis depression
• Motivation
and the types of skills that were useful in supporting students experiencing these issues. Within this I also recognised the limitation of one’s communication skills as a research supervisor and advocated the need to refer to skilled counsellors.
I advocated critique of the relational aspects by pursuing the agenda established by Grant (2008, 2010) of using the supervisory dialogue as a basis for exploration.

Use the Research Supervision as Relationship portal at the end of this blog to access each of these articles.

Egan, G. (1975) The Skilled Helper: Model, Skills and methods for the Effective Helping. Monterey, California, U.S.A. Brookes/Cole Publishing Company.

Grant, B.M. (2008) Agonistic struggle: master-slave dialogues in humanities supervision. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 7(1) 9-27

Grant, B.M. (2010) Improvising together: The play of dialogue in humanities supervision. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 9 (3) 271-288

Green, B. (2005) Unfinished Business: subjectivity and supervision, Higher Education
Research and Development, 24(2), 151-163

James, R. and Baldwin, G (1999) Eleven practices of effective post graduate supervisors. Centre for the Study of Higher Education, Melbourne University. Melbourne Australia

Manatunga, C. (2007) Supervision as mentoring: the role of power and boundary crossing. Studies in Continuing Education Vol. 29 (2): 207-221.

Moses, I. (1984): Supervision of Higher Degree Students — Problem Areas and Possible Solutions, Higher Education Research & Development, 3:2, 153-165

Moses, I. (1985). Supervising Postgraduates. Higher Education Research and
Development Society of Australasia. Sydney, Australia.

Nelson-Jones, R. (1986) Human Relationship Skills: Training and Self Help, Sydney Australia. Holt, Rinehart and Winston

Shannon, A. G. (1995). Research degree supervision: More mentor than master,
Australian Universities Review 38 (2): 12-15.

The agenda that research supervision is management or project management embraces the notion that research can be seen as an extended project that requires management both of its resources and its deadlines. Research supervisors who had project management skills from other aspects of their professional life, resonated with this idea. Research supervisors without these skills, spurred on by an emphasis on completion of the research degree that arrived with changes to the Federal Government formula for research funding and emphasised completion of the degree within a specified time and meeting dedicated milestones, began to acquire project management skills.

In the bigger picture of Graduate Research Capabilities, Project Management was a skill set which had been identified in the early discourse about Graduate Research Capabilities as being in deficit in graduating research students (Cumming and Kiley, 2009). For a research student to develop these skills, it not only advanced their engagement with their research, it provided evidence of their having these skills in their researcher repertoire and increased their likelihood of using the skills in day to day research which followed their graduation from a research degree.

A student can acquire these skills by engaging in project management related to their research project. They are more likely to acquire these skills if they also observe their own supervisor using them in their day to day research as well as in the act of supervising research.  The acquisition through observation can be enhanced if the research supervisor not only uses the skills, but in doing so, makes this explicit to their student, particularly the naming of such skills, such that the student sees these skills as embodied in the research process. Using terms such as deadlines, milestones and scoping of the project helps the student to see the application of these elements of project management as well as recognise how they are acquired in the day to day work of undertaking research.

Like many aspects of research supervision, the actual skills of project management are rarely elaborated, and elsewhere in this blog I have endeavoured to illuminate what I see as the range of skills in the research supervisor’s repertoire of supervision practice which together make up a project management approach to research supervision.

This has included

• Introducing a student to the notion of a project plan.
• Helping the student to develop a project plan in achievement of their early milestone document such as a research proposal.   
• Modelling the value of project management by having a project plan for their research supervision.
• Modelling the skills that form part of a project management skills set, such as
  • Reconnaissance and surveillance as they apply to project planning.
  • Reviewing a project plan in the context of an annual progress report.
  • Critically analysing the ways in which time is used within the undertaking of research supervision
  • Strategies for juggling multiple priorities and managing time.
• Looking to the Research Culture and its impact on project planning within a research project.

Use the Research Supervision as Management portal at the end of this blog to access each of these articles.

Cumming , J. and Kiley, M. (2009) Research Graduate Skills Project. Australian Learning and Teaching Council

Vilkinas, T. (2002). The PhD Process: The Supervisor as Manager, Education and Training. 44 (2/3), 129-137