3.2 Confessions of a doctoral supervisor: valuing interdependence  (Page 11/12)

The WITs also need support with fairly mechanistic tasks, such as writing grammatically correct sentences and consistently applying the American Psychological Association (APA) format. Indeed, my students have problems documenting sources properly, despite the hand-on attention given to this task. One WIT explained that he had simply“never learned this stuff before.”But the student followed up after receiving help from the cohort:“I’m starting to work it out. I don’t feel so dumb, because all of us are working together.”The APA manual covers not only proper reference citation but also many other crucial research elements, which the students are exposed to at all sessions. As one professor aptly stated in a study of mine that incorporated an analysis of assisted learning in doctoral education and reform,“doctoral students need to learn how to write effectively within the field’s protocols”(Mullen, 2006, p. 105).

In addition to writing and reporting, appropriate research practices also proved to be troublesome for many WITs. Indeed, even though the cohort spends many hours discussing approaches to collecting and analyzing data, ethical problems nonetheless arise. A student who had been programmatically inactive for over a year had inadvertently collected data without the university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) human subjects’approval. As this move was clearly unacceptable, this person needed guidance and options before proceeding.

Implications for Doctoral Education

The doctoral situations previously described have at least four implications: (1) ground rules that arise out of social participation should not be discarded without negotiation; (2) doctoral learning is fundamentally socially based and action oriented; (3) independence without interdependence is an illusion, especially for those graduate students for whom the academy and its practices and procedures are unfamiliar, and (4) synergy experienced at the level of the group gives buoyancy to mentoring/supervisory creeds (or contracts). Regarding the latter point, the potency of Iranian scholar/cohort leader Nafisi’s (2004) words is worth highlighting,

That room, for all of us, became a place of transgression.…Sitting around the large coffee table…, we moved in and out of the [texts] we read. Looking back, I am amazed at how much we learned without even noticing it. (p. 8)

Becoming absorbed in learning with others seems to be an outgrowth of groups that offer a safe haven in which to co-mentor and take intellectual risks (Mullen, 2005; Mullen, in press).

Because students are not privy to what faculty know, how we work, and the nuances that shape our life worlds, we need to render transparent the expectations of performance, behavior, and interaction we take for granted. In my experience, transparency of values combined with documentation of expectations, especially where these change strategies are cooperatively enacted sets the conditions for learning—doctoral students should not have to resort to inferring norms, structures, and processes based on faculty behavior and innuendo. I think that Fullan’s (2006) perspective on“cultural change”as pertains to the culture of schools can be applied to doctoral education, as this process“depends fundamentally on modeling the new values and behavior that you expect to displace the existing ones”(p. 57), as well as“carrying out important work jointly”(p. 54).