Susan Robertson  0:12
So, I’m Professor Susan Robertson, and I’m a professor of Sociology of Education, and also the co-editor in chief of Globalisation, Societies, and Education. My preferred supervision method is to work very hard to try and understand each individual student who I’d always describe very much as kind of having their own unique fingerprints. And over the many supervisions that I’ve done, which total-this is completions, doctoral level, I’m not including Master’s-is between at least 60 to 70. Well, it’s much closer to 70. And it’s to try and see the project as a project though it’s the person’s project, but essentially to actually engage with the person’s project as a person that walks alongside that individual. So, when the going gets tough, for example, to be able to say, “What, if we thought of it this way”, is amazingly assuring to individuals who in that moment are really struggling, and to be told you go off and think about it, or you go off and figure it out, that kind of thing, is often quite counterproductive. So, my preferred style, essentially, is to see it as a journey, that a person basically it’s their thesis, they’re navigating it, they’ve got the questions in their head. But it’s a journey that I would walk alongside them as a wise guide, where and how I can actually facilitate that journey along. And what I would want out of that is a sense of the individual, when they complete that journey. Actually, they got more than they ever thought they could from themselves, that is their achievements, their capacity to stretch themselves, to be a different person, in many senses is what I think is the most amazing part of that journey.

Jamie Martin  3:28
My name is Jamie Martin, I’m an assistant professor of History and Social Studies at Harvard University. I would say that in my supervision, I try to focus on two broad kinds of aims. One is to encourage students to find topics that they’re very passionate about; that interest them deeply. And to also encourage them to develop ways of communicating that passion in terms that other people will get excited about too, and in terms that speak to the disciplinary demands and interests of their field, and that might also communicate clearly to a broader audience as well.

Krystal Strong  4:05
I’m Krystal Strong, I’m an assistant professor of Black Studies in Education at Rutgers University. Two things come to mind when I think about how I approach supervision. One, I’m really interested in supporting my students in doing what they want to do. I think sometimes supervision can feel like it’s about sort of reproducing yourself. But I’m very, very interested and curious about what someone wants to do with themselves, what they understand their purpose is, and trying to nurture that as best as I can. The other thing that’s become very important for me in terms of my supervision style is collaboration. I have developed a number of projects over the years, and I always think about how I’m creating space for my students, but also community members to participate and be a part of that work. And that has been very meaningful for deepening my relationships with my students but also sort of learning by doing and supervising by doing. And it’s been an incredibly just meaningful praxis in terms of developing those relationships and kind of imparting and learning together.

Dinur Blum  5:15
I’m Dinur Blum. I’m a lecturer in Sociology at California State University in Los Angeles. So, I tend to be a little bit more hands off with my students in the sense that I don’t send weekly emails checking on their progress because I know that my students have a lot on their plates, be it school, be it caregiving, be it outside work. So, what I let them do is I tell them pretty early on, “I’m here, when you need me. Here’s my email”. I usually will use a Google number so they can reach me that way, or they can reach me through I use Remind app a lot, but I give them different ways to contact me. I tell them, “Look, I trust you to do the work. I know that there are going to be parts that are going to be tough for you because that’s the nature of research. We come up with a plan and then find out that reality doesn’t really match with it. And so, when that happens, or if you get frustrated, or if you want to tell me what you’re finding or if you’re not finding and you’re feeling frustrated, you need to vent, here’s how you can reach me, and we’ll set up a meeting we’ll talk.

You Yun  6:11
My name is You Yun and You is my family name. So, I’d prefer to be called in that way. And I’m now associate professor in the Department of Education at East China Normal University. So, I like to have this combination of reading club, group supervision, and individual supervision. So, students may learn from each other by actively engaging other students work and sharing, and also from the feedback that supervisor provides for each. And then the individual supervision can be more specific and tailored.

Ezequiel Gómez Caride  6:43
I’m Ezequiel Gómez Caride, I’m working at the University of San Andres in Argentina, and I am an assistant professor. When I have a new student, my goal is helping the student to try to move because they always came with a question about what they like to research. I perceive my goal as trying to somehow move that question to make it somehow researchable. To try and to say, “Well, this is your question. I respect your question. But let’s think how we go through this question in a common academic way, in a scientific way, without kind of leaving the question behind, but somehow trying to make this is a question that can be answered through the research. Because some questions are wonderful questions, but they are not research questions. So, somehow, I perceive my role as kind of moving this initial question motivation and trying to transform it into a research question or research process.

Seu’ula Johansson-Fua  7:36
Seu’ula Johansson-Fua, I’m at the Institute of Education at the University of the South Pacific. My method for mentoring, I think it’s twofold. On the one level it’s trying to have time to ensure that there is a relationship, there is a connection between myself and my students, or whoever it is  that I’m mentoring. So much of that is about that relationship. It’s a relationship that you nurture, it’s a relationship that we guide through. In our part of the world, it’s not usually something that is only for a defined period of time. You’re actually investing in this person because you see the future in this person. And you invest in giving back to them because you yourself got something from somebody else. So, it’s also a gift of giving to the next generation. So, you’re investing in them because that’s our future. And that’s the whole idea behind my approach to it. The second part that I take for this is based on my own experience of being in the Pacific. One of the ways we teach children to swim is to push them into the deep end. So, in my way of being supervised in the past, I got pushed into the deep end and say, swim Seu’ula and we will come and rescue you when we see that you’re struggling. But I think to some extent that still remains with me with my students. I’ll keep pushing them, and then I’ll come and get them, and then push them again, because we want them to be strong. We want them to be stronger because of the challenges that lays ahead of us requires them to be strong.

Lachlan McNamee  9:19
I’m Lachlan McNamee. I’m an assistant professor of Political Science at UCLA and lecturer of Politics at Monash University. My preferred method of being supervised was to have regular meetings with a wide range of advisors, including advisors, not from a discipline and have them comments a new piece of writing. And that could only just be a page or two. But some idea that could be a basis for discussion. As soon as I had something to talk about with my advisor, having a meeting kind of kept me accountable, as well as provided grounding for discussions.

Alison Milner  9:57
Hello, my name is Alison Milner and I’m an assistant professor at Aalborg University in Denmark. What I would say is, having been supervised as a PhD student, what I have tried to do is take the best of the things that I learned from my supervisor; it’s a long process the PhD, is it not. And, you know, I think very key to the PhD supervision is trying to maintain positive relations throughout. And that can be complex, because it’s a very stressful period, lots of anxiety. So, I’m not actually a PhD supervisor yet. But I do supervise students on problem-based learning projects, which is at undergraduate level and master’s level. So, it’s a similar kind of procedure that goes on there. And very much part of that is giving agency to the learners, allowing them to direct their own learning through the process, trying to steer them away from going off course too badly and go down any rabbit holes, that’s the one thing I would say I took from my own PhD; don’t send yourself down a rabbit hole.

Aizuddin Mohamed Anuar  10:57
I am Aizuddin Mohamed Anuar, and I am a lecturer in Education at Keele University in the UK. So, in terms of supervision, I actually prefer somewhere in between kind of the approach where people are telling you what to do, and the kind of do whatever you want. So, finding a balance in between is very important for me. I do feel like in my own sort of supervisory experience being supervised for my PhD, I’ve had the opportunity to sort of follow my own interests in terms of where I want the work to go. But then also to be guided in a sense of being given some suggestions or some options in terms of whether or not some roads are more fruitful than others. And having that guidance, I feel, is very important.

Kehaulani Vaughn  11:41
Kehaulani Vaughn, assistant professor of Pacific Island Education and Education, Culture, and Society at the University of Utah. So, I love to talk about mentoring as I just did in the previous episode, in terms of really trying to figure out how I can assist students in finding out what their passion is. Also, like utilizing their gifts, as I said, in terms of creating either research, or creating arts, creating social media, because nowadays, we find different modalities as actually having more of a reach than the dissertation project. And so, like thinking about different modalities, but also thinking about the ways in which you approach research in the first place. So, what is your methodology? What is your protocol? Who are you thinking about? Are you asking the questions that needs to be asked? Are you consulting, and not just coming in thinking that you kind of know better than the community itself but working with the community. So, I would say that I am like more of a cheerleader in terms of mentoring, because oftentimes, being in higher ed is very isolating, and could leave you feeling disempowered. And I think that’s strategic. It’s been a tradition in higher ed to create these divisions and hierarchies and systems of power. And so, for me, it’s about creating that space and creating that relationship with students where they know they have someone that they can go to hopefully, be themselves, but also really talk through what they’re interested in, and feeling empowered and reminding them of their resilience in these spaces.

Derron Wallace  13:25
My name is Derron Wallace, I’m an assistant professor of Sociology and Education at Brandeis University and a research fellow at the Center on the Dynamics of Ethnicity at the University of Manchester in England. My supervision method is for-an international audience, they call it your doctoral advising method. I operate on a high trust culture, right? I don’t like the language supervisor. I find it to be too colonial. I like to think of my doctoral students and my master’s students and my undergraduates as interlocutors. We’re working together, right? We’re thinking together, learning together. And yes, I’m more experienced, and I may have some directions to share. But I learn a tremendous amount. And I find that I can be a better teacher, better supervisor-better advisor that’s the language I prefer-when I am open to learning that my students have much to teach me. And that is the model I prefer, right? And it’s what I practice.

Sharon Walker  14:20
I’m Sharon Walker, I’m a lecturer in Racial Justice and Education at the University of Bristol in the UK. My absolute ideal is to have a very small group of students sounds like a big ask but a very small group of students. The reason being is that I prefer that simply because I think that supervision is based on relationship or the kind of exchange and discussion of ideas and knowledges based on relationship, and you can only really build that up if students are working in small groups together. So, that’s my preferred and very simple thing, but not to be taken for granted, I don’t think.

Ian Cook  14:51
My name is Ian M. Cook. I am the director of studies of OLIve which is the Open Learning Initiative which is based at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Well, I don’t supervise students who are in undergraduate or in master’s programs. I supervise students who are in informal education, and I supervise them in my role as director of study. So, often that’s helping them find what they want to do in life and helping them do that. So, I think a lot of that type of supervision is helping people find the good balance between desire and realism.

Michele Schweisfurth  15:35
Michele Schweisfurth, a professor of Comparative and International Education at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. I like to start the kind of supervisory relationship or the discussion about how we’re going to work. So, I don’t have a kind of monolithic approach that I use with every student. But more often than not, I find that it’s helpful to respond to a piece of writing because in the end, everyone’s got to write a thesis. And so often, supervisory meetings are structured around discussion of a piece of draft writing that the student has sent in advance. But different students also need support in different ways. And I try to respond to that. But that sort of rhythm of monthly meetings more or less, with some substantial piece of writing submitted beforehand. And then a really good discussion about what led to that piece of writing how it could be improved, how it fits into the wider thesis.

Michael Crossley  16:30
Michael Crossley, professor of Comparative and International Education at the University of Bristol in the UK. One-to-one supervision in somewhat of a traditional way, but with doctoral students then working with me, working together in related buddy groups. And that comes from longtime experience. I directed the PhD on the EdD programs at Bristol for over a decade and that combined model evolved over time.

Janelle Scott  16:58
Janelle Scott, I’m a professor at UC Berkeley. My method of supervision is such that I try to encourage students to lean into their curiosity, to take that curiosity and find out who else has had similar curiosities, and how they’ve taken them up, what they found. And then I really push them to find and develop really good questions that align with not only their curiosities, but with what they already know. And then I work very hard with them to try and identify their voice, encourage them to understand that there will be bumps along the way, and that the bumps are to be expected and normal and have nothing to do with one’s ability, but rather the difficulty of the work, especially if you’re asking difficult questions or pushing on traditional ways of knowing, and then I just try and be a wonderful passenger along their intellectual ride.

Michael Rumbelow  17:56
Michael Rumbelow, and I’m a PhD student at the University of Bristol School of Education. In terms of supervision, I’ve not experienced a wide variety of methods. The ones that I’ve appreciated is quite light, touch, regular, doesn’t have to be a great length of contact with the supervisor, and really just intermittent sort of nudges in good directions for me. So, I think, supervisors who tend to listen and step back a little bit, I find that really quite liberating and motivating myself.

Monisha Bajaj  18:38
My name is Monisha Bajaj, I’m a professor of International and Multicultural Education at the University of San Francisco. So, where I work at the University of San Francisco, I work with a lot of first-generation students, and also students who are not first generation, It’s a real mix in our programs. We have master’s students and doctoral students. And I really try to think about differentiated mentorship based on people who may want to work in educational practice, people who want to go into the academy, I try to understand what people’s goals are, and mentor them according to what their goals are, and also push back. So, for example, I’m thinking of one of my students whose first gen who has just finished her doctorate. And when she came in, didn’t really think that she could publish anything, or really offer anything and reading her papers. I mean, her work is stellar. And I really pushed back on some of that impostor syndrome and the ways that she didn’t feel like she had anything to say. So, building up that confidence and giving her opportunities to really read a draft and let’s submit it to this journal. And, we were just looking at, you know, she’s published now three things and she just finished her doctorate and really thinking about where that mentorship needs to be more aggressive and challenging some of the received limitations that students have felt and also supporting students who may be overconfident and want to send out everything they write to a journal, you know, being realistic with them and say, you know, here’s what’s new for an article and how can I support you in doing that. And really thinking about collaboration, whether that’s helping give feedback or co-authoring, or working with students. We run a journal out of the University of San Francisco, the International Journal of Human Rights Education, and we try to provide opportunities for students to be involved in the editorial process, doing book reviews, sometimes after they’ve done their dissertations or their theses, publishing their work, and also facilitating professional connections, encouraging students to go to conferences, going with them, being on panels with them, facilitating introductions to other people that they should be networked with. That’s how I try to approach mentorship in ways that both are reproducing what I liked in my graduate training and filling in some of the gaps that I saw there as well of what I would have liked to have, I try to do that with my students.

Mir Abdullah Miri  20:43
My name is Mir Abdullah Miri, I’m an educational researcher now in the UK. I was a faculty member, a researcher, and a trainer in Afghanistan, but I had to leave Afghanistan after the collapse of the government after the garment fell after the Taliban. I prefer the one-on-one supervision method because I think it provides a chance to look at the work more in detail and exchange more ideas. But I also think that supervision as a group would be beneficial, but I would prefer one-on-one conferencing, one-on-one supervision.

Natasha Warikoo  21:28
I’m Natasha Warikoo and I am Stern professor in the Social Sciences in the Department of Sociology at Tufts University. So, I’ll talk about how I advise undergraduate students. So, it’s interesting that I use the word advise versus supervise, partly, that’s a language thing. In the US, we tend to say advising. But when I was thinking about this question, I realized that I also like the word advise because I kind of leave more to the student to say, Well, what do you need? My job is not to sort of police you and to tell you what to do and what not to do, but to guide you, and be like, well, what are your goals? And how can we help you meet those goals? What are you trying to do? You know, what are the best classes? How do we think about the future? But I really sort of leave it to students to come to me because I find forcing students to sort of say, like, okay, come and tell me, you know, what your future plans are. It’s like, if they’re not ready, they’re not ready. And again, you know, this is a particular age, right? They’re so young and just trying to figure out their place in the world and so much else going on in their lives.

Greg Skutches  22:31
I’m Greg Skutches, I am director of Writing Across the Curriculum at Lehigh University.

Will Brehm  22:36
So, could you please describe the supervision method you prefer?

Greg Skutches  22:40
Yeah. So, I would say establish that you have a common purpose; that you’re rolling together. So, I think it’s important that the student understand the context, understand the objective, understand the tools available, and there’s buy-in there, and then you’re just there kind of working together. I mean, there’s always going to be a power dynamic. It’s hard to work. But it undercuts that feeling. So, the student feels like this is a meaningful project, and I have agency and so I’m in.

Francine Menashy  23:07
My name is Francine Menashy, and I’m an associate professor at OISE, the University of Toronto. I just believe in a lot of communication. I try to be as approachable and open as possible with my students. I tell them to email me if they’ve run into a roadblock, don’t hesitate to contact me if they just need to talk through something. I think it works really well when you have frequent very organic communication with your students. And things tend to fall apart when they go away, and you don’t hear from them for a really long time.

Prem Kumar Rajaram  23:47
My name is Prem Kumar Rajaram, I work at the Central European University. It centers really on trying to be available for my students, trying to give them the confidence that what they know and how they know and what they’re interested in is valuable and important.

Zeena Zakharia  24:08
Hi, I’m Zeena Zakharia, and I’m an assistant professor at the University of Maryland in College Park. My method of supervision is inspired by the mentorship I received, which is to take care of the work and the person.

Jusso Nieminen  24:25
I’m Jusso Nieminen, I’m an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong and an honorary fellow at Deakin University, Australia. Extremely flexible. Born and raised in Finland, I don’t care about what my supervision is. Whatever my students need, I can provide them. Weekly reports that something that students in Hong Kong seem to enjoy once in a while. All right, if that helps you do it. No recourse at all. Wherever, whenever you need to as long as the job gets done, do that. Be as flexible as needed.

Mario Novelli  24:54
My name is Mario Novelli, I’m a professor in the Political Economy of Education at the University of Sussex in the UK. I think that my aim as a supervisor is not to produce clones of myself. I’m very conscious of the power inequality between supervisor and supervisee. And want to kind of reassure the student that it’s their project and they can go in whatever direction they want. And that I’m there as a kind of critical friend, somebody that’s been down that road already, and hopefully can support them in that journey and give some ideas. And I guess, and again, you know, I was fortunate that my own supervisors, Susan Robertson, Roger Dale, were good models for this idea that you can model being a good academic, and I think what that means is that the process of supervision is a kind of apprenticeship. It doesn’t just take place in that room for one hour every month, as our schedule is in this, it takes place in your reading groups, it takes place in the way that you conduct yourself. And that one hopes that by the end of the period of PhD registration, that the person doesn’t just have a PhD, but they also have an ethics and an attitude around the way that they should operate inside a space of the university and ties in intellectual community, and hopefully, also that they have not only their PhD but also some publications, some experience of teaching, some experience of working on research projects. So, you try to offer students-it’s not always possible-a range of experiences that hopefully provide the foundation for their future career.

Judith Landeros  26:52
My name is Judith Landeros, I am a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin studying Curriculum and Instruction in the Cultural Studies in Education program. Communication, I like a relationship. I think relationships are key and essential to everything. So, having a relationship where there’s respect, reciprocity, that there’s a sense of responsibility from both ends and accountability. And just knowing that at the end of the day, the relationship in itself speaks for everything.

Luis Urrieta  27:25
My name is Luis Urrieta, and I’m a professor of Cultural Studies of Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. I’m a little uncomfortable with the term supervision. I feel like I try to disrupt the hierarchies, I try to let my students know me as a person, and I suggest things. I give advice on things, but I never tell a student you have to do this, or you have to do that. So, I want them to see me as a human being.

Nazmi Anuar  27:59
My name is Nazmi Anuar and I teach architecture in Taylor’s University. I do supervise architectural thesis projects. And the way that I tend to supervise is I tend to have a conversation with them rather than telling them what to do but trying to understand what is it that they’re doing and then working along with them. And I think in finding a supervisor for my own thing, I felt that it was important to find someone like that someone who’s of course knowledgeable in terms of methods, in terms of structure, in terms of how it’s done, but who is able to have a genuine conversation with my interest. So, I feel that being able to converse rather because I think at the graduate level, you’re no longer being taught, right? You’re discovering things as you go along. And I feel that as a supervisor or for my own supervisor, I feel that it’s important to have someone who serves as a guide, who serves as someone who you can have a continuous conversation with.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com