I have put supervision in the title of this post in scare-quotes with deliberate caution. I am not implying that supervision during a PhD is not something to be taken seriously, or a questionable part of the process; rather I am signalling that we receive different kinds of help from a range of people during our PhD that I think could count as a kind of supervision – the informal part of the title, and the focus of this post.

Perhaps a good place to start would be to define my own understanding as well as other understandings of research supervision in order to create a reasonable working definition. David Delany, in a very interesting literature review on research supervision, cites many different understandings of how supervision can be understood or defined. Two key themes emerge, though: one is that the field of research supervision is a contested and much-debated discourse; the other is that supervision is definitely about pedagogy, with some writers defining it as a very sophisticated form of teaching, and an excellent space in which to bring teaching or pedagogy and research together. To be sure, research supervision is about building a new generation of young researchers who will push boundaries in their fields and do hopefully excellent research during but most especially beyond their PhDs. But how does a PhD student learn how to be an excellent researcher? And who should/could they be learning from?

Supervision can happen in a range of ways: through written and verbal feedback; through supervisors writing papers with their students; through providing students with illustrative examples of exemplary researchers’ work; through supervisors assisting students to develop conference or seminar presentations at various points of the PhD, showing their students ways in which to talk about their work; through supervisors being tacit examples of ethical and critical research behaviour…. Without going into all the ways in which supervision can work well or not, let’s focus on this working definition, then: research supervision brings together research, teaching and learning through a pedagogic relationship between a student and one or more experienced researchers/teachers who can learn from one another, and where opportunities are created for conversation, guidance,  and growth in especially the student’s capacity for research, writing, thinking and being in their field. I think this probably needs some tweaking, but if we accept that this is a decent-enough way of characterising what supervision could and should be during a PhD, we can see that there are others, apart from our formal and assigned university supervisors, who can offer us forms of informal supervision. My point here is that as PhD students we can draw on a range of these kinds of people and resources, and should, in order to help us progress more successfully and less alone-ly through our studies.

I, for example, was fortunate enough to be part of a research group, and spoke about my research to colleagues abroad and in my PhD programme locally. They were asking similar kinds of questions and using similar conceptual tools, so they were able to be critical friends, and offered me some very helpful advice, pointers and suggestions for ways in which I could think or write differently about parts of my thesis. I spent a lot of time to and from work in the car (about 40 minutes each way) talking to my husband, also an academic, about what I was thinking and writing about, and although he is in a different field entirely, he was able to listen, distill, summarise and feed back to me what I was saying in ways that helped me clarify or further develop and question my thinking. I also chatted a lot to a close friend on Skype during my PhD (also a PhD scholar) who offered both intellectual and emotional support (and eventually proofread my thesis). I read blogs like Patter and The Thesis Whisperer and got a lot of very helpful advice and support from these, especially from Pat Thomson’s posts on Patter. In addition to all of this – which I most definitely characterise as supervision, albeit informal and often ad-hoc – I had a very accessible, helpful formal supervisor, with whom I am hoping to continue working into my post-doc research.

I think I have been both fortunate in the availability and clever in my use of the supervision opportunities I have had. Where you may not have luck on your side in being assigned a good supervisor who understands supervision as a form of pedagogy, you may have to be more clever and resourceful in using other opportunities to get the help, support, guidance that you need. There are so many resources – kinds of informal and ad-hoc ‘supervision’ out there now: blogs by students and supervisors; friends; colleagues; partners; books and journal articles… In the end what I am arguing for you not to confine your definition of supervision to just the relationship, even if very functional and happy, with your formal supervisor/s. Drawing on other valuable, informal kinds of supervision which act as pedagogy and from which you can learn does not undermine that formal relationship; rather, it enhances your whole PhD experience and can make the process less lonely, less fraught and much more about learning, growth and your own scholarly and personal development.

What kinds of informal supervision do you make use of?