during leaves or extended absences. The supervisor is also supposed to
guide the student in selecting and planning a meaningful and appropriate research topic that can be successfully completed within the normal
time limit for the degree program. Students have responsibilities, as well,
including the duty to keep their supervisor informed if there are emerging problems in the supervisory relationship.
Dr. De Nil says that in his experience, many of the conflicts could be
avoided if there were a conversation early on to discuss the supervisor-
student relationship, including such topics as regular meetings, expecta-
tions for the student’s research, and authorship on papers. Dr. Audette at
Laval agrees, saying, “It is fundamental that the mutual expectations are
understood right from the beginning.”
McGill University, Martin Kreiswirth, dean of gradu-
ate and postdoctoral studies, routinely holds brain-
storming sessions with graduate students and separate-
ly with faculty to get a better handle on what’s working
well and where the university needs to provide more
training and direction. One of Dr. Kreiswirth’s favou-
rites is the workshop he conducts for graduate students
called “How to Manage Your Supervisor.”
“We close the door and anything that’s said in the
room will never leave the room. We just talk. People
will say ‘this happened,’ and we give advice. But, also, we learn a lot.” His
workshops with professors on how to enhance the supervisory relation-
ship are also invigorating. “I just let it flow. The people in the room take
over. They’re all professors. Someone in the room will say ‘I had this
problem.’ Someone else will say ‘I had the same problem’” – and off they
go, exchanging experiences and examples of what worked for them.
“I don’t want people to get the impression that there are big problems and we have to root them out – like the Charbonneau commission,
or something,” Dr. Kreiswirth hastens to add. At the same time, these
closed-door sessions do give him insights into issues that professors and
students are reluctant to air publicly.
Virtually every major university has a centre dedicated to helping
professors improve their teaching skills, Dr. Kreiswirth says, but gradu-
ate supervision is different. “Supervision is something that we [Canadian
universities] have only recently started to pay attention to in an analytic
and systematic way.”
The McGill dean is collaborating with the University of Oxford and
Australian National University to set up an interactive website that will
give users access to a wealth of pooled intelligence from the three insti-
tutions, with effective tools and strategies for managing the supervisory
relationship, scenarios that may crop up and ways of dealing with them,
and links to pedagogical research in the field of graduate and postgradu-
ate education.
Part of this can be traced to Lynn McAlpine, a professor of higher education development who is on joint appointment to McGill and
Oxford. She manages the Oxford Learning Institute website on research
supervision that McGill plans to emulate. (See “Oxford advice on supervising,” at top left.)
Dr. McAlpine says that one of the difficulties with graduate supervision in the past was that faculty members were, by and large, “left to
carry the load institutionally.” This is changing, with universities assuming a greater institutional responsibility, to varying degrees. “The way I
articulate it,” says Dr. McAlpine, “is that supervision is about us. It is a
collective responsibility.”
Oxford advice on supervising
The Oxford Learning Institute’s website on graduate
supervision ( www.learning.ox.ac.uk/supervision/) is a
rich resource for students, for experienced and new
faculty, and for anyone involved in a supervisory
relationship, not only people at the University of
Oxford. It is designed to be open, informative and
accessible, says Lynn McAlpine, a professor of higher
education development who is working with McGill
University to develop its own version.
The research supervision “chapter” has sections
on the doctoral student, being a supervisor, stages of
a doctorate, the examination, the research environment,
and the national and international context. Drilling
down further, each topic is structured into three parts:
Oxford information; Ideas and tools, gathered from
supervisors, the literature and doctoral students
themselves; and Insights from research and
literature, “written in a ‘chatty’ style, but firmly based
on research and literature in the area.”
How might it be used? Just one example is that
senior faculty at Oxford are often asked to mentor
younger colleagues or establish co-supervision
relationships. The site offers a checklist of matters that
should be discussed and agreed on at the outset of
such a relationship: How will differences in advice be
handled? Will the student decide, the principal
supervisor, or will different members of the team have
the final say regarding their own area of expertise?
What can be expected of a secondary adviser
compared with a primary adviser?
Worth checking out.
