Problems in the Research Problem: Critical Feedback and Resistance in Academic Supervision

Abstract

The paper focuses on a routine activity of academic supervision: Giving and receiving feedback based on the student's master's thesis manuscript. Two case analyses are presented on fundamentally critical feedback. Such feedback constitutes a recommendation to the student to seriously rethink the thesis, but there are various interactional possibilities available for the student not to accept this recommendation. The analysis shows how persistent, albeit subdued, resistance to feedback occurs in two different sequential environments, and how cumulative misalignment results from this development. Pedagogical implications of the analysis are discussed, and it is suggested that the supervision should be viewed and explicitly addressed as a meeting point for two agendas.

Keywords:

• feedback
• academic supervision
• student resistance
• misalignment

Notes

1. Of course, this is also a matter of pedagogical and curricular choice: to emphasize the quality of the thesis as the indicator of learning, or the learning process.

2. For anonymization purposes, I have systematically used the masculine pronoun for the student and the feminine for the teacher. Also, names of people, places and some other details have been altered.

3. The analyses were carried out on the original recordings and transcripts. The translations are an attempt to make the original Finnish talk and some of its relevant features accessible. The originals can be obtained from the author.

4. In the Finnish original, the absence of the verb is more marked: ehkä sulta nyt semmosta o’sin et mikä on.

5. The self‐repair is quite exposed as the teacher replaces the word “problem” with a set of more neutral formulations (16–17).

6. The teacher’s turn in line 21 particularly allows the student to maintain this track.

7. This is how teachers generally shape their responses to polar question formatted advice requests that they treat as irrelevant (Vehvilänen, submitted).