Supervision as Apprenticeship-like / Power Relationship
4.3 Category one - supervision as apprenticeship-like/power relationship
4.3.2 Supervisee-supervisor relationship
4.3.2.4 Mismatch/misalignment in participants’ expectations and supervisors’
approaches
Mismatch/misalignment could happen due to a lack of congruence between expectations and the supervision experience. In this research, the participants share similar views with regards to expectations from the supervisors, as exemplified by the quotations below:
An ideal supervisor will attention to his students…He will be willing and ready to…listen to them…give them the required guidance and advice… and ensure that they are making progress… (Endurance, 5a).
He should be somebody that is welcoming and caring …maybe assist me in getting relevant materials… should be giving me feedback that can help me move my work forward…
Somebody that I can work with, that believes in me and encourages me… (Naomi, 14a).
…someone who is accessible, who considers that we are also human beings. …good relationship is very important… because these things affect our morale and of course our study (Isaac, 9b).
Based on the data, the participants expect their supervisors, in any ideal situation, to be good listeners, to provide academic guidance and support, to provide quality feedback, to be cordial, to show caring and consideration for the doctoral students’ personality, to value the doctoral students’
opinions, to trust their sense of judgement, and to be humane in their outlook. These roles and expectations and the supervisor qualities/attributes revealed here not only indicate that the participants want the supervisors to take into consideration both their academic and emotional needs, they also show the parameter/yardstick that the participants use to gauge the effectiveness of their supervisors. Thus, they provide insight into the conception that the participants hold about a positive supervision relationship.
Notably, the data below indicate that sometimes the supervision approach which the supervisors adopt does not align with the participants’ expectations:
All they do is to correct your finished work…, any other thing you are doing you should know it on your own... … that is part of discipline we are getting here (Naomi, 14a).
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…One would expect that they will at least suggest something… (Benjy, 2a).
The data here show that while the supervisors are more concerned with getting their doctoral students to complete the chapters of their particular thesis (task-focussed), the participants expect input from the supervisors in the process of developing the said chapters (process-focussed). This shows that the provided guidance is minimal. This is because the supervisors view participants (doctoral students) as already autonomous researchers and as such they assume that the participants would not require some scaffolding to develop certain research skills. It also means that supervisors do not see it as their duty to look at work-in-progress or they do not have the time to do so. The implication for the doctoral students, particularly at the initial stage of their studies, is that they are not able to limit their studies to a manageable scope and as such they struggle and become exhausted, stressed, frustrated and potentially directionless.
One of the participants revealed how he experienced mismatch in his expectations with regards to contact with the supervisors to negotiate the supervision meeting and feedback times from the supervisors, and remarks thus:
My supervisor is not too accessible. I don’t see him as I would want to… …what I feel should be the best is not what I am getting …I think as a supervisors you should be accessible. …sometimes files get delayed for two months or three months before you get feedback (James, 10a).
The participant here shows dissatisfaction with his supervisor’s inaccessibility, which sometimes results in two to three months’ delay in getting feedback, which shows that the supervision meetings were erratic and there was a lack of sound communication between the student participant and the supervisor. In such a situation, the participant would not be able to get his supervisor to respond to his needs immediately, especially when he encounters problems with his study and, thus, needed to discuss with his supervisor or get feedback to resolve issues, and subsequently move on. Notwithstanding, when feedback is delayed by the supervisors for prolonged periods of time, students stand the slight risk of having their literature and data generated for their studies becoming outdated and/or superseded by fresher studies in the peer-reviewed literature.
108 The participants revealed some of the possible reasons for such misalignments, as reflected in the following excerpts:
There are some days that may not be good days for them, they will not give you attention (Cecelia, 3a).
Sometimes they will ask me to come, and I will actually get to the University, but will realising that they have just left… (Naomi, 14a).
In a situation where you travel all the way from … [a different state]…to come here and they are not attending to you… that is why most of us are suffering running from pillar to post looking for people to assist us (Isaac, 9b).
From the presented data, consultation with the supervisors, at times, depends on the mood and disposition and personal interests of the supervisors. In other words, supervisors sometimes handle supervision as a matter of convenience, rather than a matter of commitment and responsibility. As a result, supervisors could schedule supervision meetings with doctoral students, and suddenly renege from their undertaking, with no prior notice, in informing the doctoral students of the changes and probably without tendering any civilised apology. This shows that there is an absolute disrespect for the doctoral students and this indicates not only the supervisors’ lack of care and attention, but also an indifferent attitude towards the doctoral students. With such a supervision relationship, it would be difficult to build trust, to develop emotional bond and a good working alliance that is necessary for accomplishing the task in the supervision.
A variation can be noticed in the quotation below, with regards to how the supervisors handle the issue of supervision meetings that result in a lack of congruence between the participant’s expectation and their supervision experience:
…sometimes, when we have appointment at nine o’clock, she will only appear at eleven o’clock, and she will be so much in a hurry, that she is having meeting with either the VC or… with one person or the other… whatever... I don’t get her attention... (Oshua, 15b).
As was the case with earlier reports that exposes supervisors’ inattention to supervisees, the data here indicate that the supervisor referred to in this case may not have prioritised or regularised
109 supervision as part of her job. This is evidenced by her busy schedules and lateness for the supervision meeting as shown in the data. Also, it is likely that the university has not officially institutionalised postgraduate supervision, in a way that it is factored into the job description or workload of academics. Because of that, the supervisors may not put in their time and space for postgraduate supervision in the distribution of their time across the weeks. As such, doctoral students may be perceived of as constituting a nuisance and burden in the system, as result of which they then suffer ill-treatment, disrespect and neglect, contrary to their expectations.
Some of the participants revealed some of the implications deriving from the lack of attention from the supervisor, and remarked thus:
I know if I were given the desired attention I should have graduated long ago… The level of inaccessibility almost retarded the work because I’ve been on the programme for seven years which I think is too long a time (Kenneth, 11a).
…when you…don’t get attended to or when you drop your work…after two weeks or after a month…your work is still the way it has been without any sigh of correction or input…
you know it affects the duration of the program (Moses, 13a).
According to these participants, the supervisors’ inaccessibility and inattention contribute to the negative supervision experience as it compromised their ability to complete the doctoral programme on time. Having stayed on the PhD programme for seven years, one of the participants expressed a high-level of dissatisfaction. This could be because of the financial implications of the elongated duration of study and the unnecessary pressure related to reworking and revisiting the study. Usually, when a study is extended for prolonged periods of time, as aforementioned, it has the potential of exposing the work to the state of being obsolete, as the literature becomes outdated, the methodology may have moved on, there might be new ways of doing the research, and data initially used for the study may also have become outdated. As a result, the student is under pressure to constantly rework and revisit the study. Notably, if the study was completed within the stipulated time frame, the student would have worked with a potentially fresh body of literature up to the point of graduation. This points to the need to rethink the rationale for keeping students for unnecessarily prolonged periods of time.
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