Postgraduate Supervision: Knowledge economy incentives and collaborative practices in the Arts & Humanities

Keith Comer

University Centre for Teaching & Learning 

University of Canterbury

How is it important?

Performance based research assessment mechanisms are increasingly common in national funding models for universities, whether the specific practice is that taken with New Zealand’s PBRF, Australia’s new Excellence in Research Australia, the UK’s RAE, or related approaches.  Within such frameworks, numbers of scholarly outputs – as discrete units of knowledge production – often become proxies for research excellence.  Practices designed to measure research contributions have created pressures in a number of disciplines, particularly within the humanities, arts and social sciences.  Disciplinary practices and expectations surrounding publication in these fields have long tended to favor single-author monographs, with corresponding traditions of doctoral supervision emphasizing scholarly independence and, even today, a certain Romantic emphasis on individuation rather than collaboration (Johnson, Lee & Green, 2000). If programmes within these disciplines are to prosper within output-focused research criteria, associated practices for academics as researchers and as postgraduate supervisors may need to change markedly.  Further, there is good evidence that more collaborative practices between supervisors and postgraduates, to include co-publication of research, leads to greater doctoral student satisfaction (Engebretson et al, 2008).  Following on Adkins (2009), a key question for research and exploration in the current higher education environment concerns how enhance the pedagogic and supervisory relationships in ways that foster cooperation, collaboration and interdisciplinary integration. 

How will it be run?

This session will open with a brief discussion of the context for these areas, partly based upon SoTL research and partly derived from interviews with academic staff and doctoral students at Canterbury.  With those interested, I then propose to explore a framework for applying research to practice with regard to attracting postgraduate supervisors to consider and implement enhanced approaches to collaboration and shared publication of research.

References

Adkins, B.  (2009).  PhD pedagogy and the changing knowledge landscapes of universities.  Higher Education Research & Development 28(2), 165-177.

Engebretson, K., Smith, K., McLaughlin, D., Siebold, C., Terrett, G., & Ryan, E.  (2008).  The changing reality of research education in Australia and implications for supervision: a review of the literature. Teaching in Higher Education 13(1), 1-15.

Johnson, L, Lee, A., & Green, B.  (2000).  The PhD and the autonomous self: Gender, rationality and postgraduate pedagogy. Studies in Higher Education 25(2), 135-147.