3.2 Confessions of a doctoral supervisor: valuing interdependence

I believe that the individual who is to be educated is a social individual, and that society is an organic union of individuals. (John Dewey,“My Pedagogic Creed,”as cited in Flinders&Thornton, 1929/2004, p. 18)

Situating the Supervisory Self

Doctoral students are by their very nature social creatures, and those who experience an“organic union”with others have a far better chance of becoming productive, skilled researchers and lifelong learners. Many studies have found that“cooperative efforts produce higher achievement than do competitive or individualistic efforts”(Johnson&Johnson, 1998, p. 9; see also Johnson, 2003; Winston, 2006). In this confessional essay, I situate myself as a doctoral supervisor reflecting on the value of positive interdependent learning and, as a vehicle for this, research support groups. I have come to realize that my core values are situated, biased, and not generally representative of all of my students, a story I share in this essay. The personal–confessional genre is one in which“confessors”reveal their subjectivities and engage in reflective thinking in ways that potentially shape educational discourse (Bleakley, 2000; see also Bullough&Pinnegar, 2001). In keeping with social theorist C. Wright Mills’s conception of research (1959), I believe that“personal troubles”should not be presented merely as troubles but rather“understood in terms of public issues”(p. 226).

My personal philosophy as a supervisor of doctoral students is that their ability to function interdependently facilitates positive relationships, critical skills development, and academic success. This belief guides my actions and practices, writing and scholarship. No matter how unconscious, tensions among independence, interdependence, and dependence are probably felt by all doctoral students and their faculty supervisors within the everyday world of graduate school. Herein I focus on social interdependence as the linchpin of student growth and faculty efficacy; it is founded on the premise—long established in the psychological literature—that“knowledge is social, constructed from cooperative efforts to learn, understand, and solve problems”and that it“exists when individuals share common goals and each other’s outcomes are affected by the actions of the others”(Johnson&Johnson, 1998, p. 3). Moreover, interdependence can even be thought of as indispensable to educational reform, as Fullan (2006) has argued in Turnaround Leadership that“all successful strategies are socially based and action oriented”(p. 44).