MA Research Preparation - session 1

Today, I had the first proper MA Research Preparation co-supervision session. Student B prepared a rehearsal of the presentation she will be delivering as part of her diploma assessment.

Co-supervising with the right person can be a very enriching experience (like my mentoring is) but I got into this particular project not having previously worked with my co-supervisor and not being entirely sure of what my role could be. B is the first Research preparation student we have and guidelines are adapted and modified as we go along.

As I mentioned in a previous entry, I know the student from the generic research training programme. However, I don’t know her work as well as I know the topics of the research students. My anxiety came from the fact that, whereas my co-supervisor had worked closely with B from the beginning of her Masters degree, I was actively coming on board during the third term. B was aware of these and made me a copy of her previous proposals and learning agreements, which prepared me for today’s session.

B’s presentation was very interesting and different from that of the research students. It instantly made me aware of 2 important things:

1. I had to be very mindful of levels and not try to lead her into a PhD-type proposal/text/presentation, but let this new process be also a learning one (in terms of pedagogy and teaching) for me.

2. Being Research Degrees Coordinator, I could prepare B for research (…Research preparation…) not in the sense of steering her towards producing research, but rather having research awareness, through a question rooted in a context.

As my co-supervisor asked me to speak first, I articulated what I thought could be my role in the process and tried to feed back at B what I thought were her research question and context and how she could make them more explicit to her audience. Fortunately, it seemed to work well with what the co-supervisor wanted to say, which was related to the actual practice, the documentation and the references.

I was very pleased that our feedback was a single voice with different layers but essentially drawing the same conclusions. I did fear either having to be forceful of the research quality or providing the student with conflicting feedback. It happened to me when I was a student and it was not always easy to deal with. I felt that doing this to B so close to the actual presentation could be more harmful than helpful. But it did not happen and she seemed pleased with what we both told her. I tried to follow the lead of my co-supervisor in terms of the requirements for the presentations and my points were more about the content rather than the process.

Questions raised at my tutorial meeting with Liz came back and I think the experience of working a) with an MA student and b) with another supervisor will contribute to help to ‘let go’ as I was mentioning in my profile 2 statement and make me more aware of different levels of Higher Education.