Writing feedback from generic learning advisors compared to supervisors

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feedback on writing, learning advisor feedback, Supervisory feedback

By Susan Carter

I was talking to a doctoral student nearing the final stages of her thesis. She identifies as an older PhD student. She wished that her supervisors would stay focused on the thesis project rather than on the relationship and practice of supervision itself. Yes, they were both wonderful, but she wished that they would just make clear practical suggestions about writing—as I had just done from a generic advisor position, causing her evident relief and a mini-breakthrough.

She also suggested that mature students were maybe more interested in just getting the job done to their own satisfaction rather than beating metaphoric bushes–for example, the thickets of theory that might harbour other possible writing directions. Yet she suspected that supervisors saw it as good teaching to beat those bushes and send students chasing after the ideas that might emerge.

Her comments, her satisfaction with my focus on her writing, and our talk together about supervisors and how they work made me think about the differences between supervisory feedback on writing and feedback from others outside the supervision team. I’m proofing a book on generic doctoral support (i.e., not supervision) that has two chapters on support with writing.

Are there clear delineations between the levels (content, clarity, grammar, punctuation, style, structure etc.) on which supervisors give writing feedback compared to that from learning advisors? Or is it just a matter of the serendipity of who the supervisor and learning advisor are, how much time and interest they have in writing per se? And should we avoid interference in the happenstance of where support comes from?

Supervisors vary in their availability, and some very diligent supervisors simply lack the skills to talk clearly and constructively about writing (Paré, 2011). Learning advisors on the other hand are experts in writing at almost all levels, and talk that talk really well, but they may lack the discipline expertise that would let them work efficiently (Strauss, forthcoming), although it can be a great advantage too, in prompting students to explain things more clearly (Laurs, forthcoming).

My hunch is that you will have a stack of anecdotal evidence around this complex topic. Learning advisor support may be available but ignored by students who link using it with identifying themselves as not good enough, with generic learning support based on the deficit model.

That is a pity, because learning advisor support has much to offer that supplements supervisory support. Different learning cultures will mean different expectations (Wu, 2013), sometimes troublingly so (Fovotation, 2013)–a unsettlement that insiders often are unable to see, which makes it also isolating. Clusters of doctoral students who find structure or style problematic, or who happen to be grappling with the literature review, will benefit from working with others at the same point in the writing process. For that reason, support outside of supervision becomes an important scaffolding to student learning.

Sometimes learning support might provide encouragement and advice on the surface level with writing before it goes to the supervisor to doctoral students whose first language is not English, so that supervisors may then be able to view the content more clearly and comment more usefully (Carter, 2009). But sometimes it will be the supervisor who despairingly sends the student to a learning advisor after considerable frustrations. Supervisor frustration also leads to comments that demoralise students and cause them to lose confidence—and I believe that loss of confidence is a huge handicap. I find self-confidence to be important for my own writing (and actually almost everything else). It’s definitely a bad brain day when I lose it.

So often the borderlands between supervisory and learning advisorly feedback on writing are traversed by people who are having difficult times with writing. Yet some institutions don’t allow learning advisors to work closely with research students, and their limited availability bodes ill for those students who need more than a supervisor’s advice. In other instances, learning advisor engagement with doctoral writing means that they influence the thesis significantly, usually with resulting improvement in clarity.

Having worked as both supervisor and learning advisor, and having heard many anecdotes, I have my own ideas about this, but wonder what yours are. And the student who launched this conversation also asked whether discipline affected feedback on writing: I wonder if what I have to say is situated very squarely in learning to research under the qualitative banner?? Q.  Do the hierarchies that exist within science/ medicine paradigms expose differences of other kinds?

Carter, S. (2009). ‘Volunteer support of English as an additional language (EAL) doctoral students,’ International Journal of Doctoral Studies 4: 13–25.

Fotovatian, S. (2013). ‘Three constructs of institutional identity amongst international students in Australia,’ Teaching in Higher Education 17(5): 577–588.

Laurs, D. (forthcoming). ‘One-to-one generic support, in Developing Generic Support for Doctoral Students, pp 29-33eds. Carter, S. and Laurs, D. Oxon: Routledge.

Pare, A. (2011).‘Speaking of writing: supervisory feedback and the dissertation’ in L. McAlpine and C. Amundsen (eds) Doctoral Education: Research-Based Strategies for Doctoral Students, Supervisors and Administrators, Dordrecht: Springer, 59–74.

Strauss, P. (in press). ‘”I don’t think we’re seen as a nuisance” – the positioning of postgraduate Learning Advisors in New Zealand universities.’ TEXT Journal of Writing and Writing Courses.

Wu, S. (2013). ‘Filling the pot or lighting the fire: cultural variations in conceptions of pedagogy,’ Teaching in Higher Education 7(4): 387–895.

Supervisory Feedback: Revising the writer and the writing

Tags

Becoming a disciplinary writer, Reading audience, Supervisory feedback

This post comes from Prof Anthony Paré of McGill University, Canada, where he studies academic and professional writing. His recent research has focussed on doctoral writing, in particular the role of supervision in the writing process. 

When supervisors provide feedback to doctoral students on their writing, what are they doing? In what voice do they speak, and for what purpose? Do they speak as teachers? Editors? External examiners? The generic reader? As Claire Aitchison noted in an earlier blog on this topic, writers can ask for a certain type of reading, and thus a certain type of reader. She also pointed out that there are prescribed reading roles, such as PhD examiner, that lead to particular kinds of reading and feedback. But what role do supervisors play as they read and respond to doctoral student writing, and what do they hope to achieve with their feedback?

What has become obvious in my studies of supervision is the central role that the advisor’s feedback plays in the development of the thesis. Moreover, it’s clear that supervisors are as intent on revising the writer as they are on revising the text (Paré, Starke-Meyerring, & McAlpine, 2009 and 2011). That is, supervisory feedback is designed to locate the doctoral student in the disciplinary community, and thus to shape a “rhetorical subject”: a person capable of joining the discipline’s ongoing conversation. When supervisors tell students to soften claims, cite sources, provide examples, or otherwise alter texts, their intention isn’t merely to change what’s on the page, it’s also to change the writer.

Although this formation of the rhetorical subject is not necessarily sinister, it does deserve careful reflection. The text is not some sort of disembodied, independent utterance; it’s an extension or expression of the writer. We are what we think, and our texts are the visible trace of our views on the world. Feedback that recommends new ways of expressing something, alternative perspectives on topics, or expanded explanations of theory are not mere surface or cosmetic suggestions; they are invitations to think differently, to look at the world with new eyes. Even copyediting directives are instructions on how to be a particular kind of person: a person who punctuates, formats, spells, cites, and expresses themselves in a certain, approved style. As Janet Giltrow (2003) puts it, “Style constitutes a position in the world, and shared methods for thinking about it. Without access to scholarly ways of speaking, student writers cannot occupy scholarly positions, or use scholarly methods for producing statements, or speak to academic interests” (10).

Much of what supervisors are saying to doctoral students in the data I have collected consists of feedback that helps students position themselves within their disciplinary communities. From those positions, students acknowledge, challenge, confirm, agree with, and otherwise locate themselves, or—and this is the point—create themselves as participants in their communities. This dynamic confirms Kamler and Thomson’s (2006) claim that “the supervisor embodies and mediates institutional and disciplinary cultures, conditions and conventions” (144). By reading and responding as an insider—as a member of the disciplinary community to which the student aspires—the supervisor acts as a culture broker by easing the student’s transition into the particularities of their shared scholarly world.

Clearly, the supervisor is well-positioned to act as a surrogate for the community itself. But other readers can speak from a similar perspective. The trick is to help students see that critical feedback isn’t just about adherence to style guides or compliance with superficial forms of discursive etiquette; it’s about the position of the writer in a living dialogue. When we suggest changes to a text, we aren’t just asking students to say things differently, we’re asking them to be different. We’re asking them to take a stance, to speak their minds, to side with and against others, to claim an identity as a participating member of their community. Comments thus framed—as insights into a disciplinary conversation rather than as adherence to regulations—are likely to have far greater purchase. They are more likely to help students understand how their voice can contribute to the discipline’s ongoing debate.

Giltrow, J. (2002). Academic writing: Writing and reading across the disciplines. 3^rd ed. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.

Kamler, B. & Thomson, P. (2006). Helping doctoral students write: Pedagogies for supervision. London: Routledge.

Paré, A., Starke-Meyerring, D., & McAlpine, L. (2011). Knowledge and identity work in the supervision of doctoral student writing: Shaping rhetorical subjects. In Writing in knowledge societies. D. Starke-Meyerring, A. Paré, M. Horne, N. Artemeva, & L. Yousoubova (Eds.). Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press. Available at http://wac.colostate.edu/books/winks/

Paré, A., Starke-Meyerring, D., & McAlpine, L. (2009). The dissertation as multi-genre: Many readers, many readings. In Genre in a changing world. C. Bazerman, A. Bonini, and D. Figueiredo (Eds.). Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press. Available at http://wac.colostate.edu/books/genre/