A Personal Reflective Account on the Supervisory Role (2)
Hammadi Nait-Charif
- Introduction
In many university departments it is the PhD students who do much of the research and scientific publications. It is also the PhD students who bring a youthful, challenging stimulus to departments (Fery et al. 2006). The National Centre for Computer Animation is not really that different as demonstrated by our RAE submission. The majority of academic staff who were included in the submission have supervised PhD students or research fellows. Therefore successful supervision does benefit not only the student, but the supervisor and the university as well.
In many research areas, research is intrinsically multi, cross, or inter-disciplinary and the presence of a more diverse supervisory team is sometimes not only desirable, but necessary.
However, having larger supervisory team is challenging for all parties, students, supervisors and universities. In this document I will reflect on the advantages and challenges associated with such joint supervisory scheme.
- Joint Supervision
In multidisciplinary disciplines such as computer animation, supervisors are in many times constrained to become multidisciplinary themselves. I joined the NCCA from an Engineering background, and I hardly new any thing about the art side of computer animation. And during the last couple of years, I have learnt a lot, and I have acquired some artistic knowledge that is involved in computer animation. This has enabled me to have meaningful meetings with research students who are working on computer animation projects. However I am convinced that the presence of a member of staff with artistic background is necessary of better student-supervisor meetings.
As supervisor, I would prefer to be part of supervisory team comprising artist, computer scientists and mathematicians. This joint supervisory scheme would very beneficial for students as well as supervisors.
- Students & Joint Supervision
As I mentioned in the previous section, the students would very much benefit from joint supervision. The can have experts in different field of knowledge to interact with. However, if the scheme is not managed well or not understood by the student he may find himself distract but different approach by different members of the supervisory team. Student should be very careful when taking on suggestions/advices form different people who do not necessary have the same supervision style.
- Supervisors in Joint Supervision scheme.
Computer animation brings together scientist and artists and the majority of our PhD students should have good scientific and artistic background. As far as supervision is concerned, the ideal situation would be to have a wider supervisory team which is not limited to the first and second supervisors. More people with diverse background would be involved. However, having many academic staff involved in the supervision of the same project needs to be managed properly. Each member has his own supervision style but they should not give contradicting suggestion to students. It is natural to have different point of views, especially during supervision meeting where the research topic is debated, however care should be taken not to confuse the student. Also problems between the team members should be dealt with away from the student. I have witnessed a case were the problems between first and second supervisors are passed on to the student; and each supervisor tried to make the student sidelines with him. It is very depressing, especially for international students who have a different cultural/religious background where supervisors are held as models.
The is always an assumption that we the academics “know it all”. The majority if not all the academics in universities are employed to teach and supervise students without ever having any training on the best teaching and supervising methods. If “joint supervision scheme” is to be adopted, supervisors should go through some sort of training and awareness on the advantages and challenges of such scheme. The seminar given by Dr Eloise Carr and Dr Jerry Carr would be very beneficial to all supervisors.
- University & Joint Supervision
Many academic staff are willing to be involved in the supervision even without time remission as many of them have not yet supervised to completion any PhD student. This “willing” is only temporary, but once they are able to supervise PhD students themselves, it will not be easy to get them in a team without considering some time remission. And the question here is how much support the university is prepared to give to such scheme. Having more academics involved in supervision of a single students does necessary drain the available time form the supervisors. And even in the actual 1st and 2nd supervisors scheme, the second supervisor doe not get any time remission.
- Conclusion
I think that joined supervision is the way forward in the computer animation discipline. But in the same time I will be very careful when choosing the team or accepting to part of a team. The time load is a very important factor in defining proper supervision. Supervision should be done properly or declined.
Also I’ll be looking very closely the academic and cultural background of all my student and try to find the best way to provide them with the best supervision I can.
References
G. Fry, B Tress and G. Tress, 2006. PhD Student and Integrative Research. In From Landscape Research to Landscape planning, Aspect of Integration, Published by Springer, 2006, p. 193-205.