Using co-creation to facilitate PhD supervisory relationships

ABSTRACT

The supervisory relationship is widely understood as central to the experience, success and wellbeing of PhD students. However, complex issues and struggles are frequently reported as associated with it. Although an extensive literature recommends useful, practical changes to improve supervisory relationships, current approaches generally focus on ameliorating difficulties within existing supervisory paradigms, rather than challenging or offering fresh perspectives on them. The co-creative approach has been successful in higher education, mostly at undergraduate level and in small-scale settings, providing opportunities for collaborative exploration of issues and development of solutions. Building on this, we explore the use of co-creation within the post-graduate research setting, bringing together stakeholders to unpack and address common issues experienced within the supervisory relationship. In order to assess the value of co-creation in tackling supervisory issues, we conducted a three-staged study involving PhD students and supervisors. Through qualitative and quantitative data (interviews and surveys), we identified specific issues linked to the supervisory experience. We subsequently hosted small- and large-scale co-creative workshops to encourage PhD students and supervisors to collaborate for addressing these identified issues. As a result, this paper argues that co-creation is an effective tool for enhancing the supervisory relationship and for co-solving problems associated with it. In addition, we present qualitative evidence supporting our novel use of the methodology and of the process of co-creation itself in addressing key identified issues within the supervisory relationship including isolation, a desire for community and improving communication skills.

KEYWORDS:

• Co-creation
• supervisory relationship
• doctoral experience
• doctoral supervision
• postgraduate research students

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Office for Students and Research England for their financial support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Office for Students and Research Englandesearch England and Office for Students.

Notes on contributors

Elena Riva

Elena Riva is an Associate Professor and Director of Studies at the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL) – University of Warwick (UK), WIHEA Fellow, and Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Elena’s main pedagogic research efforts are dedicated to the exploration of the impact of the teaching and learning experiences (from the teaching and learning environment to the curriculum) on students’ and staff wellbeing in Universities. Elena has been recently awarded funding by several UK based funding bodies for developing her research project ‘Improving students’ wellbeing in the teaching and learning environment’ and for supporting her pedagogic research in the Wellbeing Pedagogies. Elena together with Prof. Louise Gracia has co-developed and delivered the research project ‘Potential Advantage’ aimed at supporting mental health and wellbeing for postgraduate research and funded by Office for Students/Research England.

She was the recipient of the 2018 Warwick Teaching Excellence Award and she was also awarded the honour of the Butterworth Award, which recognises individuals with six or fewer years of experience teaching in higher education. She received the Warwick Teaching Excellence Award also in 2020 in recognition to her work in the field of wellbeing in the teaching and learning environment.

Prior joining IATL, Elena held a Research Associate position in the Chemistry Department at the University of Cambridge (2011), became a Research Fellow in the Chemistry Department at the University of Warwick (2012) and was subsequently awarded an IAS Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Louise Gracia

Louise Gracia is a Professorial Teaching Fellow at WBS publishing her research in top accounting and education journals and presenting at key education conferences including the SRHE Annual Conference.

She is a winner of The Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence (WATE, 2013) and was formerly the Director of the highly ranked BSc Accounting & Finance degree at WBS. Louise teaches on the Uundergraduate Programme and is the internal examiner for ‘Business Taxation’ and the highly innovative ‘Accounting Inquiry’ modules. Louise has won an award for her outstanding contribution to UG teaching each year since 2009 and is consistently ranked by student evaluations as one of the top performing lecturers within WBS.

Prior to joining WBS she held the position of Senior Lecturer and Senior Tutor at the University of South Wales for eleven years. She also spent a number of years at Touche Ross & Co (now Deloitte) within the Audit and Forensic Accounting departments. She is a member of examination team for CIPFA and ACCA; an External Examiner for the University of London and a Fellow of Higher Education Academy.

Rebecca Limb

Rebecca Limb has a LLB (Warwick, 2016) and a PhD (Warwick, 2019/20). Rebecca’s PhD investigated the extent to which children participate in their health care and the practical and legal barriers that children experience when seeking to meaningfully participate in decisions about their health care. This research led to the design of initiatives to facilitate children’s meaningful participation in their health care.

In 2019, Rebecca was awarded a competitive IAS/IATL Early Career Teaching Fellowship where she produced publications out of her PhD work, strengthened her interdisciplinary research interests, taught law to an interdisciplinary audience and developed the research ‘lived experiences’ methodology into a teaching pedagogy from which she is creating teaching and learning materials for higher education tutors. Rebecca’s research interests include children’s consent to and refusals of medical treatment, child organ donation, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on vulnerable people, compulsory child vaccination and children’s participation in their health care.