E-QUALITY, POSTGRADUATE SUPERVISION, AND THE EDUCATION DOCTORATE: THE DEAKIN EXPERIENCE

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1 E-QUALITY, POSTGRADUATE SUPERVISION, AND THE EDUCATION DOCTORATE: THE DEAKIN EXPERIENCE Bill Green Deakin Centre for Education and Change Deakin University Geelong, Vic 3217 Introduction: In search of E-Quality In an useful preliminary account of the development of the professional doctorate in Australia, Hager and Deer (1995) provide a good instance of the challenge that the Deakin experience with the Education Doctorate represents, as a distinctive exercise in bringing together postgraduate studies and distance education. As they write: At Deakin University it is possible to complete the doctorate using e- mail, fax, phone, and teletutorials to maintain contact wit the supervisor, together with attendance at an annual conference. We question whether this contact is sufficient replacement for regular face to face contact with the supervisor. It is our experience that this type of contact is sometimes inadequate (Hager and Deer, 1995: 10). There are several issues here. Firstly, it seems to rest upon an unexamined norm ie that regular fact to face contact is the norm, and moreover the most effective way of achieving the aims and ends of postgraduate education and supervision. However, questions such as the following are unavailable: Are the parties to this transaction transparent to each other? Is it as immediate as seems at least implied here? What follows when it is understood as always already mediated? Secondly, it risks the fallacy of transfer that is, simply transferring the experiences and judgements of what might be called proximal education to the situation of the distance education mode, in a way that has been critically scrutinised by now extensive research in this latter area.. The point that must be made, and stressed, is that the pedagogic situation, and hence the practices that characterise it, is very different in the case of distance education, and certainly it should not be assumed that competence in one mode automatically means commensurate competence in the other. Hence it becomes important to inquire into the specificity of postgraduate pedagogy, particularly that associated with higher research degree supervision, and to appreciate that this specificity itself must be understood as thoroughly situated distinctions must therefore be made within that specificity, as it were, and the task initiated of re-theorising the particular circumstance and character of postgraduate pedagogy in the distance education mode. This is precisely the work underway in those institutions providing for postgraduate research studies at a distance, such as Deakin, and more specifically in the EdD programme at Deakin. Elsewhere we have used the metaphor of dancing at a distance to evoke something of the complexity of this practice (Evans and Green, 1995), in seeking to ring together work in the context of the education doctorate and the increasing use of digital-electronic technologies as a resource for both curriculum and administration. If indeed supervision is understood as pedagogy, as a distinct pedagogic practice, then conceiving of it as dance-like might well prove both challenging and illuminating when it comes to considerations of quality assurance and the like what is involved in seeking to grasp the quality of a dance, and of dancing more generally? How indeed is it to be assessed and measured. Quality in Postgraduate Research: Is it happening? April 1996, Adelaide Australia 1

2 In this paper I want to explore the concept and practice of supervision, principally as it is being developed in and through the new research-oriented degree of the Education Doctorate at Deakin University. The risk I am very aware of here is that it might be seen as, in this particular instance, a more or less blatant exercise in marketing and public relations, since I shall be drawing on my own experiences, practices and proposals and those of my colleagues, and referring specifically to a higher research degree programme currently available through the institution and the faculty where we all work. I will take that risk nonetheless, since it is a fundamental aspect of the programme in question that it is deliberately organised around and in terms of action and participatory research on the part of both students and academic staff alike. The paper arises then out of ongoing research and development work in the EdD in question here, and is directly related to further lines of inquiry and praxis addressed to postgraduate pedagogy, disciplinarity, and the relatively new phenomenon in Australian higher education of the professional doctorate. Furthermore, I want to frame the account that follows, and indeed the work that is at issue here, within a critical assessment of the quality agenda in current higher educational policy and practice: Quality, quality management and quality assurance have become the catch-cries of the 1990s in higher education in Australia (Barnes and Reid, 1994: 503). As commentators such as Nunan (1994) have indicated, the quality concept itself is both complex and contested in recent educational discourse, and moreover it has particular ramifications and implications within and for the distance education context that is my specific concern in this instance. Importantly it is something that cannot and should not be disengaged from social and political considerations, and in particular from enduring concerns about social inequalities and social justice as they relate specifically to educational provision, practices and outcomes. In that regard it becomes important to take account of the seemingly inexorable move towards new forms of articulation between electronic-digital technologies and higher education, which would seem to provoke new tensions between quality and equality as rival organising principles and rallying points for educational debate and politics in this country, as elsewhere in the Western world. The point might also be made that, ideally at least, quality and equality are best conceived as entirely and necessarily compatible concepts, and as fundamental especially in their linkage to any truly progressive post-modern educational praxis. In that spirit, this form of articulation is perhaps usefully and appropriately proclaimed as and subsumed within a new social project of e-quality, with fundamental implications and challenges for higher education in complex new times. Rethinking Postgraduate Supervision There is general consensus in the literature that supervision, as it si most commonly and generically called, is a critical factor in providing for quality in postgraduate education and research development and training. Moses (1994) for instance asserts that supervision is among the key elements in graduate study, having previously outlined a model within which she calls input, process and outcomes considerations that are all crucial in and for postgraduate research education. Supervision in her account falls within the input and process dimensions of the model, although more particularly relates to the former. This involves a framework within which supervisors, students and the education process, in her terms, are understood as working together. As she indicates, [a]cademic staff as supervisors significantly contribute to maintaining quality in postgraduate research education, with her reference point here being more specifically PhD work: Quality in Postgraduate Research: Is it happening? April 1996, Adelaide Australia 2

3 Their formal qualifications which signify subject competence and research training, their active involvement in research and publication, as well as their knowledge of the research process, constitute competence as supervisors which is important to the success of graduate students. Their attitudes, their own philosophy of higher education and of PhD education in particular, contribute to the quality; their attitudes, often based on their own past experience, shape the interaction with students the amount of direction and control, of guidance and structure, and of freedom and autonomy their students experience (Moses, 1994: 5). Historically and traditionally, this had been as Clark (1994) argues a matter of the tight nexus of research, teaching and study, a practice which originated in the great German universities of the nineteenth century. This involved the binding together of teaching and learning by means of research (Clark, 1994: 11), with research being understood as both the organising principle for and the raison d etre of the modern university. It was thus very much based on notions of proximity and enclosure, and on being a relatively restricted, elite activity. Importantly, however, Clark draws attention to the fact that the overall context is now very different from what it was, as a result of the massificaton of the higher education system generally, across the international scene (Clark, 1994: 12). Moses concurs with this analysis but also observes more particularly the collapse of the binary system in Australia, post As she writes: We are no longer talking about a small number of scholars working with a small number of research students. We are now talking about many thousands of students engaged in various research degrees, and about several thousand supervisors who are influenced in their work by the context in which they teach and research (Moses, 1994: 9). The situation is further compounded in its difficulty and its complexity by the fact that in Australia two quite distinct higher education institutional cultures were brought together within the terms of reference and realisation of such policy-driven amalgamations, one oriented towards research and the other towards teaching. This in itself has meant particular challenges vis-a-vis maintaining and developing research orientations and initiatives since many of those now involved in supervision, or increasingly expected to be, have little experience in this regard. But what is very clear is that there is considerable confusion surrounding the very notion of supervision, and much contention accordingly. Why this term, anyway? What is its history? Where did it come from, and how and when did it enter into the discourse and practice of postgraduate education? Further, what is its relation to another term arguably pertinent pedagogy? In that regards, it si useful to remember that education itself is something of a curious reference here, since the more usual formulation is postgraduate studies or postgraduate research, or perhaps postgraduate research and training, and not so much postgraduate education. Bob Connell (1985a) has suggested that [s]upervising a research higher degree is the most advanced form of teaching in our education system, but as I have argued elsewhere, this is not a common stance in university circles or in postgraduate contexts (Green and Lee, 1995). Rather, teaching is seen as the devalued other to research within the symbolic economy of the academy. This remains the case even though various forms of attention and even lipservice have been increasingly given to the importance of teaching, a major reason for this being that often it underpins the funding of universities and like institutions. Acknowledging supervision as teaching, or more formally as Quality in Postgraduate Research: Is it happening? April 1996, Adelaide Australia 3

4 pedagogy, still seems somehow to go against the very grain of the university, and this bears further examination. Cullen and his colleagues, in their study of ANU, suggest that there is a need to, in their term, deconstruct the received or taken-for-granted model of postgraduate research supervision (Cullen et al, 1994). This they see as, in essence, organised and conceived as a one-to-one interaction between an academic supervisor and a doctoral student. This might be usefully described as an ideologically-charged individualism, with the relationship itself being extremely privatised and characteristically intense. Again this is something I have been working on elsewhere (Evans and Green, 1995; Green and Lee, 1995), in trying to explore difference ways of thinking about and understanding how postgraduate studies as a pedagogic practice might be conceptualised, as well as the way things are in this regard currently and have been historically. It is worth noting here, too, that this model of a one-to-one relationship between teacher and learner is arguably still central to normative accounts of education and psychology, which suggests that in this respect as in others the distinction in kind that is often made between postgraduate and other university educational contexts and the contexts of schooling in the more usual sense isn t as marked as it is commonly made out to be. One of the key assumptions it seems to me is proximity, which in turn maps very readily onto notions of presence. Clark (1994: 11) for instance refers to the (ideal?) situation where research, teaching and study in his terms are so tightly interfused that they can hardly be distinguished at all: When teachers and students engage in research in close cognitive and physical proximity, the teachers teach and the students learn as they are joined together by virtue of this common activity. There is very little accounting for difference in such a situation, if any; it is very much a matter of the meeting of (like?) minds, in that complex, contradictory sense that feminist work draws attention to, as effectively subsuming bodies and as a profoundly masculinist way of being in the world. Language is also therefore denied or glossed over in its specificity and its difference-ing. Exchange happens more or less silently, and the learner (the student, as novice or neophyte) is formed in the image of the teacher (the researcher), or not as the case may be. This line of thinking and argument is to enter into the territory of deconstruction proper, and to draw more specifically on the work of the French poststructuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida a move that is, in my view, particularly generative in seeking to understand the complexity of postgraduate pedagogy. I shall not pursue this matter her; suffice it to have noted some of the necessary intellectual context for this kind of discussion. What happens, then, when we take into account the manner in which postgraduate studies is further complicated by being conducted in the distance education mode? That is, when proximity as an organising principle is replaced by distance? The point I want to focus on here is that a significant element of risk enters into the calculation at this point, particularly with regard to notions such as quality assurance. There are two aspects to this. One is the assumption that when supervisors and their students are at hand, as it were, ie on-campus or on-site, one can feel assured somehow that they are indeed being supervised. Presence and proximity in and of themselves are necessarily reassuring, in this and other respects. That is at least questionable, I suggest. The other is that because the pedagogic relations and practices are sustained at a distance, it is harder to check them out and to see if they are indeed working, or if misunderstandings or problems have occurred in terms of learning or any other aspect of the relationship. That is, because of the very fact that it is conducted at a distance, there is greater risk Quality in Postgraduate Research: Is it happening? April 1996, Adelaide Australia 4

5 involved in terms of securing successful learning and study. At the same time, it needs to be acknowledged that this is an entirely familiar, symptomatic position to work from, and on which is quite fundamental to the rationalist, logocentric worldview that philosophers such as Derrida seek to draw attention to, as the dominant metaphysical context of Western culture and education. At this point I want to turn more directly to the question of supervision in the EdD programme. The account that follows builds on from that provided elsewhere (Evans and Green, 1994; Brennan and Walker, 1994), as well as from ongoing curriculum and staff development in the programme itself. My starting point is the proposition that good supervision means, or makes for, quality (postgraduate research) education. This is akin to saying that effective pedagogy is a necessary precondition for successful educational experience and achievement, or that good teaching maps readily onto effective schooling, at whatever level. There is here a huge debate simply glossed over in making such points as these as starkly as I have, but I trust that I will be forgiven in this instance. What I want to get to is this: What makes for good supervision? At issue here is the vexed and contentious question of research versus teaching, or rather, the tension evident throughout the academy but arguably more marked in postgraduate contexts between research and teaching as principles of academic value and work. The overwhelming tendency is to privilege research over teaching, whether it be in terms of promotion, reputation, material rewards, etc. But what seems clear is that a good researcher does not necessarily function as a good supervisor. As Elton (1994: 26) put it in his account of academic staff development in relation to research, although substantive research expertise and experience is certainly crucial, nonetheless the possession of such knowledge and skills on the part of staff is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for being able to impart them to others. More is involved, then, than research competence as such. For Lewis, this includes those aspects of supervision and they are the most important ones that have a strong interpersonal component. Rather than simply interpersonal, however, I would suggest that this side of supervision be understood as more specifically pedagogic in nature and orientation, and hence as integrating and articulating the disciplinary and developmental dimensions of academic teachers work (Connell, 1985b). Yet, curiously, little attention seems to be given to systematic reflection on pedagogy in university contexts including Education faculties -, or on encouraging innovative forms of academic staff development in this regard. Deakin has certainly been no exception to this. The EdD has provided both opportunity and a way to address this problem, however. From the very outset, it has been clear to us that the success of the programme rests heavily on the involvement and engagement of supervisors, and increasingly so as different cohorts move through the programme, firstly into the Colloquium stage and then into and towards Examination. Early on, there was some confusion and misunderstanding in this regard, and a certain measure of disaffection among those who were called upon to be supervisors, in what was claimed to be a very different kind of postgraduate research context. For some, this meant that they simply applied their supervisory knowledge and skills from their work with PhD students, while for others it meant drawing on their own experience as research students, again mainly in the PhD mode. Neither was appropriate, or effective, as it happened, since the requirements of the EdD and the sort of students attracted to the new programme are often very different from those associated from the PhD, or from coursework at the masters and possibly even the doctoral level. Part of the difficulty was in moving away from received mindsets, or ingrained habits. What we have come to see is that this calls for careful Quality in Postgraduate Research: Is it happening? April 1996, Adelaide Australia 5

6 and sensitive staff development work, and more effective communication and collaboration among academic staff than tends to be the case, expressly with regard to issues of supervision and pedagogy. It has also meant, of course, getting abetter sense of the programme itself, as it evolved, on our part as much as that of our colleagues. The point I want to stress here, though, is that the EdD has proved to be a catalyst for professional dialogue and academic staff development, and also in highlighting the complex relations between research and teaching in university contexts (and hence the idea of the university itself). A major problem in this regard has been the persistence of the normal model of supervision ie a one-to-one relationship and exchange. Rather than individualised and privatised, then, which such a model arguably encourages and underwrites, there is a need to move towards more social and collaborative models, and to emphasise the manner in which supervision is best reconceptualized accordingly. This requires an expanded and more inclusive view that attends more formally and systematically to the relational and institutional dimensions of supervision. As Cullen and his colleagues write, concentration on the individual relationships which obtain between supervisors and students is misplaced. Rather: Supervision should be seen as the total oversight by the institution of a students progress and broad academic development. Many people are involved: academics other that supervisors, Heads of Department, fellow students, support services, technical staff, and administrative staff. Students get assistance and stimulation from seminars, conferences and talking to visitors. Their concerns can range from theoretical to housing (Cullen et al, 1994: ). Attention to administrative contexts is quite critical, therefore, in developing a quality programme in postgraduate research education, with regard to both supervisors and students and directly related to the nature and quality of the exchange between them. But as critical are the curriculum contexts: the opportunity for productive transactions among teachers, learners and academic and professional knowledges. This includes setting up situations and requirements whereby academic staff interact and collaborate professionally around issues of supervision and pedagogy, and students similarly interact among themselves expressly as researchers-in information. The latter is particularly difficult in the distance education mode, of course, and it is here that the Interchange system is likely to prove particularly significant, in allowing for extended, virtual forms of on-line exchange and community among EdD (and other postgraduate) students. The structured nature of the EdD as a distinctive research degree is also apposite in this regard. Phase 1 of the programme is coordinated and overseen, and also taught, by a course team made up of experienced supervisors and active researchers who are, moreover, responsible for development of the programme as an outcome of their ongoing action research. Importantly the tea is involved in both curriculum and staff development, and supervision has emerged accordingly as a matter of research concern in itself. The team works closely and increasingly with supervisors in Phase 1, leading up the Colloquium. This is effectively a three-way relationship, formally negotiated at the site of the progress report which is required twice a year. The aim is to shift the locus of control from the course team to the supervisor as the main reference-point for both the student and the project, in what might be usefully conceived as a scaffolding effect. The work of the course team here is therefore intended as educative for the supervisor as well as for the student. But it is also a matter of quality control and quality Quality in Postgraduate Research: Is it happening? April 1996, Adelaide Australia 6

7 assurance, in the sense that the team (presumably appropriately authorised and authoritative) undertakes t provide a sound basis for both effective supervision and student academic development. Post-Colloquium, it is the supervisor who takes on the latter responsibility, although this is always within the framework of the programme itself; at this point, the course team as such recedes in visibility and importance (although it might still operate in an advisory capacity, when and as required). Importantly, however, this is not conceived as a resumption of the normal one-to-one model of supervision, partly because of the administrative and curriculum context of the programme as a whole, within the overarching framework of the Research Office. Rather, the principal supervisor operates globally, with regard to the project in question, leading up the production of a Folio as a distinctive doctoral research genre. Part of the job is to manage the project, always in association with the student, and to serve as a broker with regard to helping the student to commission local supervisors as deemed appropriate for different aspects of the work towards the final product, the Folio. The effect therefore is to constitute, once again, a supervisory team, or panel. In this way, ideally at least, the student s work towards successful completion of the degree is effectively underwritten by various forms of collaborative supervision, which are themselves supervised by the principal supervisor. What this means is that a profound shift has been effected away from what has been described here as the received or normal model of supervision, involving a one-to-one relationship between an academic supervisor and a doctoral student. This is also, of course, a form of one-to-many, in the sense that the common situation is that a supervisor works with several students, separately, especially if he or she is both suitably qualified and acknowledged as experienced in this regard. (Interestingly enough, it thus also echoes the situation in schools.) What a structure such as the EdD provides for, then, is what is effectively a reversal of this normal orientation (ie many-to-one ): several supervisors working in different ways and with differing degrees of intensity with a single student across the course of the project. At the same time, opportunity is provided for students to interact with each other and within their cohort or community ( many-to-many ), using the resource of the on-line educational environment. Conclusion This account raises a number of important issues. One that immediately presents itself related to the costs of the new (postgraduate research) pedagogy. Its apparent labourintensiveness must be reckoned with, first off, since it is clear that this would act against its acceptance and adoption, especially in the current straitened circumstances of university funding. Relatedly, there are particular implications and challenges for conventional practices and policies regarding workload allocation, EFTSU calculations, technical equipment costs, re-training and re-skilling demands, and so on. However desirable such a pedagogy might be ( in theory ), in practice it would need to be adequately resourced and funded the benefits in this instance therefore in terms of quality to be weighed against the costs. Another concerns the potential extension of what I have elsewhere described as a pan-optics of pedagogic power supervision, that is, as a form of panoptic power, to be understood within a Foucauldean poststructuralist perspective. Matters of surveillance and control in such a view are inextricable from questions of productivity and effectiveness, in a highly charged mix of positive and negative implications and effects. The move to a digital-electronic environment is therefore usefully understood in terms of the concept-metaphor of the superpanopticon (Poster, 1990; Bigum and Green, 1995), which in this instance means that the increased visibility and accountability of supervisors and students makes for Quality in Postgraduate Research: Is it happening? April 1996, Adelaide Australia 7

8 particular realisations of the notion of quality control. This is a matter that clearly needs to be debated further, in assessing the educational value and social meaning of new technological imperatives and initiatives in higher education. This applies in particular to those associated with the Education Doctorate at Deakin, in its articulation of postgraduate studies, research development, and distance education, within an explicit open learning framework of rhetoric and ideology. In that regard, the social and educational project of e-quality clearly remains an ongoing professional and intellectual obligation, on the part of institutions and individuals alike. References Barnes, Alan and Reid, Alan (1993). Quality and Computers in Teaching and Learning, in Ted Nunan (ed), Distance Education Futures: Selected papers from the 11 th Biennial Forum of the Australian and South Pacific External Studies Association, July, University of South Australia, pp Bigum, Chris and Green, Bill (1995). Managing Machines: Educational Administration and Information Technology, Geelong: Deakin University Press. Brennan, Marie and Walker, Rob (1994). Educational Research in the Workplace: Developing a Professional Doctorate, in Burgess, R & Schratz, M. (Eds), International Perspectives in Postgraduate Education and Training, Innsbruck: Austrian Academic Press, pp Clark, Burton R. (1994). The Research-Teaching-Study Nexus in Modern Systems of Higher Education, Higher Education Policy, Vol 7, No. 1, pp Connell, Bob (1985a). How to Supervise a PhD, Vestes, No. 2, pp Connell, Bob (9185b). Teachers Work, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Cullen, Dadiv J., Pearson, Margot, Saha, Lawrence J. and Spear, R. H. (1994). Establishing Effective PhD Supervision, Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. Elton, Lewis (1994). Staff Development in Relation to Research, in Ortrun Zuber- Skerrit and Yoni Ryan (Eds), Quality in Postgraduate Education, London: Kogan Page, pp Evans, Terry and Green, Bill (1995). Dancing at a Distance: Postgraduate Studies, Supervision and Distance Education. Paper presented in a symposium Graduate Studies in Education: Innovation in Postgraduate Research and Teaching at the 25 th Annual National Conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education, Hobart, November 26-30, Green, Bill and Lee, Alison (1995). Theorising Postgraduate Pedagogy, Australian Universities Review. Hager, Paul and Deer, Christine (1995). Approaches to the Professional Doctorate in Education, mimeo, Faculty of Education, University of Technology, Sydney. Moses, Ingrid (1994). Planning for Quality in Graduate Education, in Ortrun Zuber- Skerrit and Yoni Ryan (Eds), Quality in Postgraduate Education, London: Kogan Page, pp Nunan, Ted (1993). The Quality of Distance Education: What Does It Mean and How Can It Be Judged?, in Ted Nunan (Ed), Distance Education Futures: Selected Papers from the 11 th Biennial Forum of the Australian and South Pacific External Studies Association, July, University of South Australia, pp Poster, Mark (1990). The Mode of Information, London: Polity Press. Quality in Postgraduate Research: Is it happening? April 1996, Adelaide Australia 8