Understanding Supervisory Practices: Commonalities and Differences in Ways of Working with Doctoral Writers

Thesis supervision is a crucial aspect of the doctoral writing experience. While scholarly attention to both doctoral writing and supervisory dynamics is increasing, supervisory support of doctoral students as novice academic writers is still an under-investigated topic. Not having a clear understanding of the way supervisors treat writing gives insufficient insight into a crucial aspect of the doctoral experience. To counter this lack of information about supervision as it pertains to writing, I conducted interviews with seven supervisors who were identified by their doctoral students as a good supervisor of writing. In this paper, I will discuss the practices that unified and those that distinguished these supervisors in their role as supporters of doctoral writing. The supervisors interviewed expressed similar ideas in three areas: reflexivity about academic writing; awareness of variability among doctoral writers; and acceptance of the profound challenges facing doctoral writers. In three other key areas, the supervisors expressed significant differences: attitudes towards the appropriate degree of supervisory support; commitment to writing support as professional development; and facilitation of peer mentoring. These patterns of commonality and difference suggest that good supervisory writing support may allow for significant variations while still drawing upon crucial shared precepts.


Introduction
doctoral writers often assess the efficacy of their supervision without considering the amount of attention paid to writing. To get beyond this tendency, I wanted to be sure that the recommended supervisors had been identified as particularly helpful on the topic of writing. These supervisors came from departments of religion, comparative literature, sociology, anthropology, criminology, and education. They had different levels of experience: one was new to supervising Ph.D. students, and the others were either mid-or late-career. Once I had a list of supervisors, we arranged to meet (in person or via Skype) for 60-minute interviews. The interview questions were designed to elicit holistic reflections on how each supervisor oriented themself towards writing and towards the supervision of writing. The following six themes emerged from a thematic analysis of the resulting transcripts: (1) reflexivity about academic writing; (2) awareness of variability among doctoral writers; (3) acceptance of the profound challenges facing doctoral writers; (4) attitudes towards the appropriate degree of supervisory support; (5) commitment to writing support as professional development; and (6) facilitation of peer mentoring. These six themes were determined to be present in some form in all the interviews.

Limitations
The most significant limitation of this project was the difficulty in defining what it means to say that a supervisor is good at supporting writing. I am treating these supervisors as good writing supervisors for the purposes of my study when all I know is that they were good supervisors of writing for the one person who recommended them. These interactions may also have been influenced by a range of factors outside my scope here. For instance, the student and supervisor may have shared a basic temperament; they may have been motivated by shared enthusiasm for the research topic; or they may have been bound together by methodological commonalities. And it may well be that each of these supervisors has had other doctoral students who found them less effective at supporting writing. Cognizant of this limitation, I will nonetheless explore what these supervisors-each of whom were identified by at least one student as good at supporting writing-said about how they support their doctoral students as writers. These in-depth interviews will allow us to hear reflections from supervisors on an aspect of supervision that requires more attention.

Commonalities and Differences
As I said above, the supervisors all paid attention to the six key themes, but that attention contained significant variation. For the purposes of this discussion, I have further subdivided the six categories into commonalities and differences. The transcripts showed a strong commonality in three areas: reflexivity about academic writing; awareness of variability among doctoral writers; and acceptance of the profound challenges facing doctoral writers. These commonalities left three categories in which there were significant differences: attitudes towards the appropriate degree of supervisory support; commitment to writing support as professional development; and facilitation of peer mentoring. Good supervision is, of course, contextual in that it relies on external factors such as the demands of the discipline and internal factors such as the coherence of the approach and its suitability for a particular student. Despite the essential specificity of any supervisory relationship, identifying patterns can help to define what makes for good supervision. By allowing these six categories to emerge and then breaking them down between commonalities and differences, I hope to be able to show the importance of specificity while still attempting to identify good supervisory practices.

Commonalities
In the interest of space, I will not quote from all seven interviews in each of the three common categories; however, to be treated as a commonality, the sentiment had to have emerged in each interview.
Reflexivity about academic writing. The first area of commonality, a relatively straightforward one, is that the supervisors I spoke with all showed a high degree of reflexivity about their own experiences of the writing process. It is easy to conjecture that supervisors who have learned about themselves as writers-generally by experiencing the challenges of research writing, especially during the thesis writing process-would be better able to help their students develop an identity as an academic writer.
I struggle with writing, who doesn't I guess, but my bigger problem is not so much style emotionally bruising and you're being supervised, even though it's becoming less and less bearable as you feel more and more [as if you're too old] to be supervised.
It's a tough journey. You really learn to organize your life and your time in a way that almost no other role that I can think of requires because you're on your own in terms of all these decisions, how to use your time. And that's why I feel it's also a great experience of self-understanding.
The compassion shown here is noteworthy, especially since we will also see below a great deal of variation in the amount of support deemed appropriate. That is, we will see that these supervisors differed significantly in the way that they understood their obligations to manage the writer's productivity and emotional challenges; the striking similarity is the underlying awareness of the vulnerability of doctoral writers.

Differences
These supervisory comments suggest that these three stances were part of the way these effective supervisors supported their students; indeed, it is easy to believe that most thesis writers would welcome these attitudes from their supervisor. This holistic conception of doctoral writers can lead to supervisory support that acknowledges the unprecedented challenge of developing an identity as an academic writer; being supervised by someone who evinces an awareness of the challenges could lead to a secure foundation for developing a doctoral thesis. At this point, we can turn to the more interesting issue: the ways in which these strong supervisors differed from one another. As was mentioned above, the interview transcripts suggested notable differences in three areas: attitudes to-pervisor will get involved than it is to form a writing community, particularly one which the supervisor plays an active role. The former may teach a valuable lesson about getting feedback on writing and about broadening the circle of support during doctoral writing, but the latter may do much more to demonstrate how to create a writing community and to validate the importance of treating writing as a social act.

Conclusion
Overall, these interviews showed that the strong supervisors were united in some aspects of supervision and divergent in others. The collection of commonalities suggests that these supervisors may be effective supervisors of writing because they were thoughtful about writing: about their own writing challenges; about the profound challenges facing doctoral writers; and about wide divergence of writing practices among doctoral writers. Put more broadly, these commonalities suggest that strong supervisors may recognize the complex process of academic identity formation that accompanies thesis writing (Cameron, Nairn, & Higgins, 2009;Hall & Burns, 2009;Mewburn, 2011). While the number of interviews may not support such a strong conclusion, this finding is consistent with what we know about good writing support in general. The collection of differences, on the other hand, suggests that good writing supervision may be highly contextual. With the core commonalities in place, a supervisor can remain effective while demonstrating a great deal of variety in thinking about aspects of writing supervision: attitudes towards the appropriate degree of supervisory support; commitment to writing support as professional development; and facilitation of peer mentoring.
While some of the efficacy of these seven supervisors may, of course, be explained by a natural interpersonal fit or a shared affinity for the topic, it is also possible to look for a broader explanation. I am suggesting that beneficial supervisory practices may be best understood within the context of a particular supervisory style. That is, the supervisor who identifies the value of being tough on students and the supervisor who identifies the value of providing more support are each making those choices in a broader context. The decision about how supportive and accommodating to be is not made in a vacuum: each supervisory decision is balanced with others. In such a circumstance, students may not need a set amount of personal support, for instance, as long as the supervisor has an overall approach that is supportive of writing.
The value of this conclusion is that it suggests a core area for development-reflexivity about the writing process-without needing to touch upon all areas of supervisory style. A supervisor's temperament and pedagogical commitments are likely to be fairly fixed and, more importantly, beyond the purview of institutional support for supervisors. It may be useful to be able to say to graduate faculty that they can be strong supervisors of writing while remaining true to their own pedagogical habits, as long as they are willing to be reflective about writing, generous about the challenging nature of graduate writing, and cognizant of the way that different students will need different sorts of support. Understanding variety in this instance will mean grasping that a thesis writer may need different support from that which the supervisor themselves received and different from that which other supervisees may have needed, but not fundamentally different from what the supervisor is able to provide. Supervision is a form of teaching and, as such, requires supervisors to act in a manner consonant with their own pedagogical instincts. Significant variation among supervisory styles is inevitable, but reflexivity about writing can still be seen as fundamental to strong supervision. This insight could potentially be beneficial to supervisors, institutions, and graduate writing specialists.
Supervisors who wish to improve their supervision of doctoral writers could be heartened to consider an area for development that nonetheless leaves core aspects of their pedagogical practices intact. Institutions who wish to improve their support of doctoral supervisors could be guided by the notion that reflexivity about writing and its challenges should be a crucial focal point. Lastly, graduate writing specialists could deepen their support of doctoral writers-whether or not those writers have sufficient supervisory writing support-by acknowledging the importance of reflexivity about writing for anyone who seeks to nurture someone else's development as an academic writer.