Supervisory scratchings: Critical autoethnography complicating “process” in doctoral supervision

ABSTRACT

In this dialogic article of interwoven stories, we employ a critical autoethnographic approach to explore moments of our lives as we worked through the official “research plan” at the heart of the supervision timeline. Lucinda's doctoral thesis in education, supervised by Jo, highlights the way curriculum emerges from the struggles of ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1981) as she and a group of teachers develop curriculum and perform identity, both as co-researchers and as inescapably gendered subjects. Here, instead, we turn to how this might work in relation to the supervisory relationship, linking the personal and political to trouble the research plan developed in the first months of the PhD timeline. We write around a narrative from the original thesis, which troubled both of us, and rework our own stories of the supervised and the supervisor through the competing discourses of our work and lives.

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Contributors

Lucinda McKnight is a Lecturer in Education at Deakin University, Australia. Her thesis titled ‘The glitterbomb: designing curriculum and identity with girls' popular culture’ won the university's Isi and Naomi Leibler prize for the best thesis in the social sciences in 2014. Jo O'Mara was her principal PhD supervisor and Lucinda is currently undertaking a fast track program to become a supervisor herself. She has research interests in the pedagogies of doctoral supervision.

Joanne O'Mara is Associate Professor in the School of Education at Deakin University, Australia. She has successfully supervised a wide range of doctoral theses and received the School of Education's Mid-Career Researcher Award in 2015 in recognition of the successful outcomes of this supervision. Jo has previously held the position of Higher Degree by Research Coordinator at Deakin.