Studying the supervision of PhD writing at a STEAM university

Övrigt konferensbidrag, 2023

At our university of technology, we have access to a great deal of data on the supervision of PhD-level research and writing. We have survey data, self-assessment plans, and reflection essays from supervisors; we have survey data from PhD students, and data from their interviewing supervisors about publication processes.
There are very many writing courses for PhD students and, at least in our country, supervisors are expected to take supervision courses as well as continuous professional development. Supervisors self-assess or reflect on their supervision in faculty training. Furthermore, supervisors and PhD students, are encouraged to complete a survey as a basis for discussing the supervision contract. Do the various expectations align? Are supervisors attentive to the contingency inherent to supervising writing? Are PhD students prepared for the different roles required in a collaborative-cum-co-authoring writing context?
The initial set of research question we investigate at this stage of the study includes three core concerns:
• How do established or semi-generic supervision models translate to our STEAM, EME, and intercultural context in terms of research and publication? Models and approaches might include such suggested in for example Gatfield, 2005; Lillis & Curry, 2006; Boehe, 2016; Simpson et al., 2016; Robertson, 2017; Lee, 2018; and Khuder & Petric 2020. Here we study supervisor surveys, self-assessment plans, and reflective essays.
• What expectations do supervisors have of doctoral students and themselves in terms of research and publication? Here we study surveys, self-assessment plans, and reflection essays.
• What are the potential tensions in division of labour between PhD students and supervisors for research and publication? Here we study surveys of both supervisors and PhD students as well as self-assessment plans from both groups.
The main purposes of analyses are manifold. For writing programmes, analyses would offer revision of courses and increased educational quality in both PhD writing courses and in supervisor training courses. For research purposes, these studies would connect well with interests in collaborative writing, co-authoring for publication, and supervision in STEAM or engineering education contexts. For the wider research context, it appears to be a conjunction of data analysis and model testing that would contribute to equally to ERPP literature as well as to engineering education research.
Preliminary findings from cases suggest that supervisors have very limited toolboxes for supervision writing processes and struggle to negotiate the tension between their supervision and brokerage roles in co-authored publication processes; that adjusting for roles between publications is challenging; and that PhD students benefit from not only from genre knowledge but from an added meta-perspective on research and publication processes. The generalizability of findings depends somewhat on the research supervision environments at other universities but ought to hold potential in many STEAM and EME
contexts. Our cultural context is potentially more specific but nonetheless of interest to a wider circle of, at least, supervision of compiled theses.