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| [ HERDSA ]
[ Proceedings Contents ] |
Michael Booth Eveline
School of Social Sciences, Murdoch University
The process in which a good thesis is shaped and honed requires many bodily processes beyond calm, pure intellect. We use the technique of addressing the student directly, but in a voice which both supervisors and students will recognise. The many life relationships with which the postgraduate student has to contend are examined. The discipline, the argument, the supervisor, family, friends and lovers - these relationships all change and evolve as the thesis proceeds. We discuss the way these changes relate to the thesis writing, and the intellectual and emotional development the student (and her supervisor) have to face. Our focus is on how the thesis grows as a substantial entity becoming accessible to others (and more than an indigestible and self-centred product).
An open letter to all supervisors, written for your students . . .
Do you find yourself living with a thesis? Perhaps one of the greatest difficulties if you do is that 'living with a thesis' involves negotiating not just one dynamic relationship, but at least four. What is often not said aloud, or said enough, is that these changes are 'elaborated' (they are worked through) via an emotional roller-coaster. Changing your intellect means changing your life.
The emotional-cum-intellectual experience in which you are involved inevitably affects your supervisor too. Yet your supervisor doesn't want or need to be bothered at every meeting with the minutiae of your living-with-a-thesis problems. It is tempting for a supervisor to keep any involvement purely on an intellectual plane. Yet your supervisor's 'direction' or 'advice' has at all times to be sensitive to your transitions as the thesis develops.
Some people claim that a thesis is a methodical and focused product of slowly generating expertise, and then add that supervisors nurture the expert skills. It is this, and they do, but the relationship with your supervisor has to take account of far more. Irrespective of whether 'personal' problems are categorised as 'administrative', 'family', 'indecisiveness' (over choice of topic), 'conventionality' or 'rebellion' (to the approach taken), 'lack of discipline', etc. they impact upon and either impede or inspire your work. Your productivity reflects how you negotiate a number of relationships. We shall explore four of these in detail:
You and the Fields or Disciplines of your study
Doing a thesis is an exercise in heuristic learning - you learn about research by doing it. If it's a Ph.D. you are also learning the craft of academic life. Many comment on the likeness of living with a thesis to undergoing an apprenticeship. For the Ph.D. student this ultimate degree is a sign that you are now fit to teach in your area of study or discipline, and to take on research students yourself.
Any thesis is a contribution to knowledge. This means it has to add to the existing traditions, but also break with these enough to be seen as a contribution. Whether you incorporate new material from reflecting on your reading, or from empirical research, there is a golden rule to follow: do not attempt too much at once. The disciplines or traditions within which you are writing cannot absorb more than a certain amount of new material at one go, nor will you be able to 'sell' this to occupants of those areas if too much is proposed at one go. In this sense your relation to your field of study is like other relationships in life.
You need to get many details right, both in writing and referencing. This is worth building into a matter of habit at an early stage. Do not waste time compiling more and more complex systems for holding information. What is important will stand out in various ways. Yet do keep a journal of what you are reading and maybe some annotations of what in your reading is interesting you. This can make it much easier later to find an elusive influence which you recollect but cannot place definitively.
Two words come to mind when thinking about examiners for your dissertation: trust and irritation. The first is the reason for the emphasis on details in the last paragraph. Whatever you are claiming - and we shall look shortly at your thesis as argument and contribution to knowledge - you will be inviting some degree of trust. Grammatical confusions, mixed up headings, mispelt words, references at sixes and sevens and so on will irritate your examiners and undermine the trust you need to generate. In the end the judgement of the examiner will signal to others that you can be trusted to be someone else's supervisor. No-one wants to hand over this responsibility to someone who cannot be trusted to attend to details.
Until your thesis is faced with an examiner, you are your own judge: there will be many moments of doubt and you will reassess and focus what you are attempting. Some of what was frustrating earlier will come to seem easy, even pleasant. Interestingly, routineness can become part of this enjoyment, as a routine skill which you value is in itself an achievement on which you can rely.
The comfort zones of the routines you build are important counterspaces to the ups and down you will experience as you work to form a good relationship with your own argument.
You and the Argument/Insight/Revision
Be satisfied once you have 'found' one major insight or revision of your tradition. It can be a mistake to think you must do more than that. Working with this amendment will embody your critical stance. Even with a small amendment it will come probably as some surprise how much needs revising and casting anew before you feel that you have done justice both to the existing adjacent fields and to the consequences of what you seek to change.
As you develop your one key insight through thorough scholarship in related aspects of prior intellectual work the immediate question will be one of order. What should come first, and how to follow that and then put in each of many further points. Sometimes the work may seemingly grow of its own accord. Being systematic will tend to make you present your insight at the beginning and then repeat it over and over again; or in defense against this you may spend chapters writing introductory material only to put your insight at the end. Either form of writing can be boring and frustrating for readers.
With your supervisor as well as other friends you should try out more innovative orderings. What aspects have generated interest from others? Try putting this first. What seemed clear as you first wrote, but then caused doubt and became puzzling? This will perhaps prompt you to distinguish where the work of others differs from yours, and how your work manages its move into new terrain. Maybe tell your reader some of this history.
Work through with your supervisor what seems to you to express just what you think you want (and have!) to say, however briefly put. Questions she asks and your finding a response can generate chapter after chapter. You will be making sense of your own insight by elaborating its interconnections.
Much will depend on how able you are to persistently review and revise both what you write, and how you are writing it. Editing is your key tool. Notice how much the message improves as you loosen your own grip on your words, so that they are not too precious to you anymore, and so that you can with ease reject and reform them. This is perhaps the essence of the editing experience which you will need at this stage.
Editing is particularly the process of taking long sentences with several clauses and creating from each one of these several shorter sentences. Yet you will also need at times the complementary development of adding in what had not quite formed in your writing, although clearly there in your thoughts. This includes giving the reader pointers at key junctures to the sense that you hope make: i.e. brief summaries of what you have established and where you are going. Don't underestimate the need for this, nor the gain in your own clarity that comes from accommodating the need early.
As you edit your text this becomes in time not a bundle of past labours still requiring effort, but an intimate whose forming has been worth the past that you have shared with it. As you smooth over the infelicities, your text becomes like a familiar shoe, your means to travel on in fair comfort.
You and your Supervisor
You may be lucky enough to score a supervisor who is constantly everything you could wish for, but if you do you are certainly the exception. She's every bit as human as you are, even though she has certain skills which she is going to pass onto you, often by a process of modelling.
One of the reasons why a supervisor cannot be all things to you all the time is that you are supposed to go beyond what she can do for you in your own specific little area of scholarship. How well your relationship is working is a joint responsibility. Your supervisor will have certain ideas as to how the relationship will proceed, and it's a good idea to check this out with her from the beginning. You may not quite know what you want at this stage, yet you soon will, and it's important to find ways to tell her this. We are saying here that to some extent it is up to you to educate your supervisor to be well tuned in to your needs. And you will have from time to time to give her an update on those needs.
From being guided and to some extent controlled by your supervisor you will need to move to directing for yourself what you include and how you analyse it. This transition will make your supervisor a sounding board for your work rather than a teacher. Shifting easily from an asymmetrical relationship to a more symmetrical one is sometimes difficult to manage. If you are going to educate your supervisor it's as well to think, firstly, about what she expects to receive from you. She gets to practice one of the most important aspects of her craft: passing on her best knowledges about the process of research. This all means, however, that she expects certain things of you, and it's as well to know what they are.
In practical terms, your supervisor will expect regular meetings with you, a certain honesty in reporting on what you have or haven't achieved, and legible work to read and comment upon. By way of progression, she will expect you to be increasingly independent. She might start out spoonfeeding you a little, if she really has to, but she doesn't especially want to do that. She knows that the process is training you to think and act independently, so that by the time you're finished, you are as well able to assess academic work, including your own, as she is.
Moreover, she will expect you to be excited about your work (if you're not enthusiastic who else should be?). This can sometimes be exceedingly difficult as time goes by, particularly if you're going through one of your depressed phases. It's quite OK to disappoint her in this sometimes, but it's also a good idea to keep a few little 'goodies' in store, for those days when you have to go and see her and you really don't want to. Perhaps you've spent a week reworking and reshaping a few paragraphs, and you just can't be bothered talking about it. Don't ring and say you can't keep your appointment - pull out that little article you found a couple of years ago, or that nice juicy piece of interview data that you transcribed a couple of weeks ago, and produce it with an excited flourish. She will respond in enthusiastic kind and before you know it you really will be excited again
Another thing your supervisor will expect is that you will seek information and comments from other academics. Its valuable for you to make contact with interstate people in your field as well as local academics, and if possible ones overseas, whose special interest comes close to your own. Ask them about conferences or seminars at which you might present your work. This means setting yourself the goal of giving papers at national and international conferences. Conferencing is an excellent way to get feedback on your writing from people whose work will often be closer to yours than is your supervisor's. Nowadays, with such a lively Internet system, you can develop your national and international contacts without having to leave your computer.
You and Your Family/Friends/Lover/s
One of the most common complaints made by students involved in research is about the isolation they face. "No one around me understands what I'm doing," they say. "When I try to talk to my friends about my work, I see their eyes glaze over . . " "My supervisor understands me to a degree, but she's the only one who does." "As soon as I begin talking about my thesis my husband falls asleep." "My lover is totally turned off by my topic. Yet if it was about pop art (or football) . . ." "The kids think it's pretty good to have a mum who's doing a Ph.D., but that doesn't stop them from getting upset when we can't do the things we've always done together." As a research student you will be working alone continually. Since the people you are closest to may also expect that you will go on being like you used to be, these relationships are certainly destined for a shake-up.
When you're living with a thesis, the ideal is to have family, lovers and/or friends who actively support you, who will take on most of your responsibilities to others and provide you with the physical, intellectual and emotional sustenance you need to see you through. Few postgraduate women are in this fortunate position, athough men still are quite often. For most women, and some men, the terms of your established personal relationships will need to alter if your developing relationship with the thesis is to succeed. If this proposed change is looked upon with suspicion and disfavour by a friend, a relative or a lover, you will need to negotiate some ground rules. Allowed to drift, the changing relationship will founder or stultify, and the old one become impossible to return to.
Close friends will usually expect less time spent together, and families and lovers will accept your continual demeanour of absorption and the curtailing of time spent with them. As you become more and more absorbed in your research work, however, further compromises will need to be reached. Like the relationships with your thesis and your supervisor, interpersonal relationships will have to be many times renegotiated or you could become hampered by patching them up under conditions of stress.
When you are forced to choose between time for your relationship to your thesis and time for your relationship to an important other, it will help you to be able to place the choice as an interim measure against a negotiated background pattern. When you can't work it out directly with the other now doesn't mean you won't be able to work it out when you have more time.
It is healthier to keep the door on demanding relationships open, but even when they get shut for a time the promise of future communication can still be there. As with your supervisor, however, setting aside a little time for communicating what you need can make the whole thing more adjustable. And again, coming to terms with what your family/friends and lovers expect of you can help in learning to educate them to your needs.
One answer is probably the tried and true principle of "quality" time, as a replacement for quantity of time. If guilt is your trip, find ways to debunk it; once you are engaged with those important to you don't let feeling guilty about thesis time spoil what is important to all of you in your relating - your ability for enjoyment.
And then there is the other expectation your loved ones may have of you - that you will change as you get absorbed in your thesis. They may be afraid that you will change towards them or change to being a person they can no longer relate to. If you try to deny that you will certainly change you're going to make it more difficult for all of you. However, as long as you all know that these changes always involve negotiation, then the way is open for them to have a say in how your relating proceeds.
Remember, the strength you gain from a relationship follows from the process of emergent understanding between you and the other. Both of you are responsible for where this leads and how satisfying it will be. No project has to be exclusive, and if it is it is because you have both chosen that or allowed it. A thesis can, through its accompanying connections and possibilities, and through the skills it makes available for you, be an extra and valuable element in any relationship.
Finally
All four of these relationships place you in a position which does not stay fixed. They are, all four, open to moving on and changing. If this is denied or the process hampered it will be all the more difficult to accomplish successful work. Here finally is the message for supervisors as well as their students. Each one of these relationships affects the others and that between supervisor and student sets the pattern for the others. For the supervisor to move from critic, to confidante and back again to supporter, ending in a peer's role with a well-developed colleague, is the key achievement of a successful supervisory relationship. Let's review what this has involved.
Firstly the transition requires conceiving supervising in terms which enable the development of several tacit areas of skill and control. As the work is considered and rephrased, recast or even rejected there has to be a recognition of the labour and embodied nature of this development. Only then can the supervisor prompt the openness and sharing of understanding which will give you a chance to grow in the sessions you have together.
Secondly, you are dealing not primarily with your supervisor's authority, but with the judgments of others within a discipline or set of disciplines. This requires both honest (and vigorous) critiques of your writing, and your learning about other writers both as practitioners and as critics. Ideally this includes your gaining experience at conferences, submitting work to journals, and sharing all of this freely with your supervisor.
Thirdly you have several significant others. We have only briefly suggested a few of the trials involved, but enough perhaps to make one key point. Although the thesis has to be nurtured and accommodated, it is not the only thing in your life. Exceptional obsessive interludes are negotiable once they are recognised for what they are.
Lastly, do discuss the elements of depression preceding each new achievement. It is too easy for the relation of supervisor and postgraduate-becoming-colleague to hide this away. Your emotional process is never divorced from the resulting ordering and argument. Managing and understanding that is the crux of professional competence. We cannot pretend there are only papers and no crucible.
| Authors: Joan Eveline, Research Fellow, History Department, University of Western Australia.
Michael Booth Eveline, Lecturer, Institute for Science and Technology Policy, School of Social Sciences, Murdoch University Please cite as: Eveline, J. and Booth Eveline, M. (1996). Living with a thesis. Different Approaches: Theory and Practice in Higher Education. Proceedings HERDSA Conference 1996. Perth, Western Australia, 8-12 July. http://www.herdsa.org.au/confs/1996/eveline.html |