(S2E6) Supervision practice: changing research culture in doctoral research.

Intro: 00:00:00

Welcome to the Research Culture Uncovered podcast, where in every episode we explore what is research culture and what should it be? You'll hear thoughts and opinions from a range of contributors to help you change research culture into what you want it to be.

Tony: 00:00:23

Hello, I'm Tony Bromley and welcome to Research Culture Uncovered podcast.

ent Scholarship Conference of: 2022

'PhD training, research culture and talent retention; how the student supervisor relationship affects your future career'. Hello to you, Annamaria.

Annamaria: 00:01:00

Hello, Tony, thank you very much for inviting me to this podcast.

Tony: 00:01:04

That's no problem at all. And I know you, there was, uh, just to say there was three presenters. So there was your colleagues, Nazia, Nazia Nazir, Rebecca Martin, as well as as your colleagues who presented.

Annamaria: 00:01:15

That's right. They are my two, uh, research assistants on this, uh, on this on project, um, Nazia Nazir and Rebecca Martin. Without whom, I wouldn't have been able to do the research or the writing. No .

Tony: 00:01:29

Yeah, writing up was always one of my worst bits. Um, I also, I just thought it might be interesting if you introduced, uh, who you were in terms of, uh, a charity or a company, because quite often, of course, at conferences we have people from, uh, universities.

Um, but you are part of interchange research. I just wondered who, if you could say a little bit about what interchange research was.

Annamaria: 00:01:50

Interchange Research is a consultancy that I set up in 2019. Um, it basically uses, um, principles, I suppose from my own background, which is in philosophy of science and, um, medical humanities, uh, various ways of applying the humanities to the sciences. It uses those principles to, um, more directly in an applied way in science contexts, helping scientists to collaborate, to exchange ideas, to produce robust knowledge.

Tony: 00:02:25

Okay. And if people did wanna look that up, the website is inter-changeresearch.com. Yes. Um, so if you wanna have a look, so thank, thank you for that.

Um, I thought we'd just dive in actually. I mean the, in terms of research culture, um, The whole, you know, the student supervisor relationship, particularly respect to postgraduate research is a major part of the culture that researchers postgraduate researchers, uh, certainly experience. Um, so I just wondered, you, you mentioned the Emerging Research Cultures project and 23 Wellcome funded PhD training programs and for anybody outside the UK they may not know about Wellcome, it's one of the major funders in the UK charity funder, if you're wondering who Wellcome are.

So I just wonder, could you explain a little bit more about what the Emerging Research Cultures project was all about, how it came to be?

Annamaria: 00:03:15

In, um, 2019 the Wellcome fund, well issued a call for PhD training centres. And, um, part of that call they included a criterion of success, which was quite unusual at the time, uh, in that, It was an positive research culture alongside scientific excellence.

Now, it wasn't unusual to include some things about positive research culture, but it was unusual to make it equally as important as scientific excellence. And so they were really serious about, uh, making sure that the research culture that students were going to be trained in was in some way improved from, um, previous or existing research culture.

And, um, and all of the programs, um, that were successful made undertakings as to how they would achieve this. Emerging research cultures was, uh, funded um, shortly after those, uh, those, uh, the 23 programs got started and, um, it got funded as a strategic pro, uh, project by the Wellcome Trust. Um, and what the project does is just sit alongside these programs.

Um, because of the, you know, improving research culture is something, it's very easy to say. It's, um, yeah, very difficult to actually do. And, uh, it was a matter of trying to make sure that there was some way of understanding what are the different practices that the different programs are trying out. And what is working well and what is working not so well, and, and to ensure that the programs can all learn from each other.

And also that this, this kind of, at least, if not best practice, because we don't know what a best practice is really, but you know, better, more effective practices could also be disseminated more widely.

Tony: 00:05:14

I just, just wondered, in terms of the 23 funded projects, what sort of disciplines, was it a wide range of disciplines or was it sort of in a, well, not a narrow range, but what sort of disciplines was it?

Annamaria: 00:05:26

They're all in the biosciences. Well, they're all sort of biosciences very broadly. Mm-hmm. , um, Wellcome Trust, um, funds, uh, mostly biomedical, research either in sciences or in social science or in humanities. Okay.

Tony: 00:05:47

Now I just wondered, just so you know, just interest, see which discipline it was. Um, you, you also talk about toxic research culture and was there any particular areas of what we might term toxic research culture?

Annamaria: 00:06:00

Because we were looking at PhD training. Uh, the main indicator of a toxic culture is when, um, p PhD students are kind of treated like the pawns of, of PIs of supervisors where they are there to carry out the preexisting needs of the supervisor or the PI without proper attention being paid to their own needs and their own career pathways or their own interests.

And, um, sometimes they can be this, this kind of toxic culture can be, uh, it can be felt, can be experienced as a kind of a, a pressure to obtain results or in sometimes a particular kind of result, which, which the, the, um, which given the vicissitude of research, um, the PhD student might not always be able to produce.

And, you know, so that's an extreme of course, um, where the, where PhD students are kind of merely a pawn of the PI or supervisor. And that's, that's, that's an extreme, that rarely, rarely happens. But of course there are different expressions of this. And I would say maybe toxic, um, research culture from a PhD student's point of view is where their own needs and their own careers are not fully taken into account.

Tony: 00:07:32

Yeah. And I just wonder in terms of, you've already mentioned about difficulty and change. Was there, you know, before we move on to what the aims of a particular project were, uh, what did you see as the challenges in trying to make change happen there?

Annamaria: 00:07:44

The biggest challenges to making, um, making change happen is not, um, is really sort of, the, um, the research system, um, structural aspects of the research system that both academics and students, or both academic staff and students are caught in, um, and that it's very difficult even for the academic staff to change.

So academic staff or under pressure. And they're under pressure because of the kind of reward system that they work in, reward system for promotion or for gaining further funding, which we know is very publication driven and is very driven towards a certain type of publication in the so-called high impact journal.

And because there's a kind of a, very much a channeling of a narrowing of what counts as success in, in the, the, the academic research context, everything kind of gets geared towards that goal and that puts an enormous amount of pressure on academic staff and that pressure gets passed on to your students.

And I think that that's the, the biggest issue, the biggest challenge that is faced is really the incentive system and how the incentive system works within, um, academic research institutions.

Tony: 00:09:03

That's interesting. So does this, uh, lead onto the aims of the project? Was it an evaluation project or did you have particular aims that you were trying to achieve?

Annamaria: 00:09:12

No, the project in itself is not an evaluation project. It basically sits alongside the 23 funded programs and, um, it's kind of is like a kind of reflective tool, um, given it's a, space where programs can reflect on what are they doing and how well is that going? And, um, it's, so the aim of the project was to set up a community of practice consisting of the programs together with the Wellcome and ourselves.

Where each learns from the other because, uh, pos the term research culture and positive research culture was, is relatively undefined. It's very, even if you've got a more or less understanding of what it is, different institutions and different people tend to prioritize different aspects of it. And you can get very differing practices around what it is to improve research, uh, culture.

So this, this community of practice that we are working with is, is in a way, is works towards trying to build up an understanding of what are the main and, uh, main experiences of research culture? What are the main priorities around research culture? What are the ideas about how it can be improved? And to gather those, to have a place where those ideas are, are not left implicit, but are articulated, made, explicit, um, so that they can be reflected on by the whole community.

Tony: 00:10:48

I was interested from your abstract, you talked about participant action research, so, and I think you probably have begun to say something about that and what you, you've just said. So I did wonder how, how you've done this, you know, how have you pulled this community together?

Annamaria: 00:11:02

Well, as it so happened, we, when we started, um, just soon after we started, um, the, there was also the lockdown and the pandemic, right?

And like everybody else, we ended up doing things much more electronically than we had hoped for. Um, but, um, in one or other medium, what we have done, we, we really, um, try to create opportunities, for discussion, um, and for proper conversations. So the community consists of everybody involved in delivering the programs and everybody involved in receiving the programs.

So the students are there, but so it's academic staff, and so the professional services staff, we consider everybody equally important in the community and everybody has their say. And we have had a number of workshops and or, and a number of group discussions, kind of sort of mini focused groups. And we've conducted a number of interviews where we basically are simply gathering from people their interactions, their thoughts about, about the programs, about how they're doing, um, and their understandings of how um, how the system operates with respect to particular action areas which the community themselves had identified. So, for example, we had the action area of working, working hours and, um, taking leave. Right. Um, which, which emerged as quite a strong concern after the, the, um, as lockdown eased. And, um, that was identified by the community itself as well as supervisory practices.

Um, especially the issue of giving feedback to supervisors. And to students as well. So what is a good way of giving feedback? Um, to, to supervisors and to students. And we also had, um, the broad area of mental health was also identified as an action area that people felt needed um further action. Again, quite unspecified because mental health is very broad and can mean so many different things.

But we we're trying to understand from the, from the, the, the community participants, what do they mean by it? Um, and um, and lastly, we also had action area of the, kind of the legacies of the pandemic, both positive and negative. What kinds of, of long lasting, effects would there be of the pandemic and what kind of actions could be taken to mitigate against negative effects and to encourage positive effects?

No, I mean, it's some of the things that that, that the participants themselves identified. Yeah.

Tony: 00:13:53

Now it's fascinating things. I mean, you've mentioned so many important areas. Just I think you mentioned five, four or five things there. It's really important areas of, uh, culture. So were, were there particular outcomes?

I mean, were you able to do, would people ultimately be able to do something about their concerns about the hours or taking leave or feedback? So what were the particular outcomes that you achieved? During this process?

Oh, well, the mo the, we have several reports written so that people could go and have a look and see what they, and the reports function as this means of articulation where we have many quotes from the community.

People can, can, can go and have a look and see. Uh, so almost it's a way for this community to reflect in itself. We also have, um, task forces which have been set up by the students themselves to act on, on the, on four areas where they will, will figure out for themselves what it means to act in a particular, um, domain to try to change it.

So we are in the process. The students are in the process of, um, of working through that and we'll have a kind of a report from them. And that is a really important part of the whole process because not only do the students kind of learn about some aspect of research culture and figure out how do they get information about it, but also need to figure out what would it take to act in this domain.

And we also very much stress to students that the research culture is theirs, it's theirs to own. They are the ones who are going to live in this research culture. And so it's theirs to try to to, to bring about changes in. So we have really tried to stress this agency of, um, of the students themselves as they are going to be the ones who are going to form the research culture of the future.

And I just wondered, as we pull things together here, do, do you have an, an answer to the question that you pose in your title? How does the student supervisor relationship affect your future career?

Annamaria: 00:16:01

Well, when we did our discussions and all of the various, um, opportunities that we made, Um, available for conversation.

Um, we asked people to draw maps of agency to figure out who are the actors in a domain and how are they interconnected. And we became very clear that the supervisor student relationship was at the center of all of the different action, uh, areas. And, you know, with it, it, it shapes everything. It's also shaped by, um, so it's, it's both shaped by

the, uh, the, the broader research system, and it is the means through which practices are passed on to students. So there's a lot of role modeling going on in that relationship. And, um, and so it is a very interesting relationship where, um, what has been, um, what has been attempted in the world the, the intervention of the welcome in with these PhD training, um, uh, uh, programs was to

empower students in a way. Um, so that there's a place where there's a kind of, because there's so much emphasis on student centered training, so much emphasis on, on, on, uh, giving students the scope for their own development to find their own parts of development. And that kind of pushes back onto, onto, um, supervisors as well.

Um, and we'll, hopefully what we've shown, because it's such an interconnected node of the whole research system, it can push back and have effects more broadly in the system. So that's what we found about, about the student centre, stu student supervisor relationship. It's so central to so many other things that acting on that relationship has a chance of having a kind of ripple effect, um, in changing supervisory styles across the whole system.

And in pushing back, even changing potentially reward systems, incentive systems.

Tony: 00:18:08

You mentioned reports such as you went through, but is any of the stuff that you've talked about during the discussion, is it gonna be available for other people to take a look at? Um, is through the website perhaps? I don't know.

So can, can people get a hold of this stuff? That's really good.

Annamaria: 00:18:23

Yes. All of our reports are, um, are available. We've made them all, um, openly available on the social sciences archive, and if you come onto our, uh, website, um, you will be able to find them. Um, if you just find, uh, the interchange, uh, research website, there's a project page for emerging research cultures, and on that page you will find links to all of the reports that we've published so far, and we've also got publications coming up in the near future.

We hope

Tony: 00:18:57

That sounds fantastic. So just to reiterate, the website is inter-changeresearch.com as we mentioned earlier. It's been fantastic to talk to you. So thank you again for joining us on this podcast and just to encourage people to listen to other podcasts in the series where we talked to presenters from the Reds conference in 2022.

So, uh, thank you for me and Annamaria. Thank

Annamaria: 00:19:19

you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Tony.

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