Last week was the 2024 National Astronomy Meeting. The first half of the week was rather astronomy focused, but also included several community interest sessions.
PhD Supervision: Early Career Workshop
Following from a day-long workshop Professor Tom Stallard ran in Newcastle last year, Tom and I ran a lunchtime session on PhD supervision to get people to start thinking about what this entails and how to develop supervision skills, as this is often an undertrained area. Our main goal was simply to get people to start reflecting on their practice. As there is no one-size-fits-all supervision style, reflecting on how we can each achieve “good” supervision and discovering the value of shared expertise is the most important component of developing this skill.
To get people started, we began by asking what makes an ideal supervisor – a question that can easily take a whole day to discuss! Then we discussed the ten areas of supervision listed in the UKCGE Research Supervision Recognition Programme. There was a general agreement that #6 (”Keeping the Research on Track and Monitoring Progress”) would probably be hardest. People also thought #5 (giving appropriate feedback) might be difficult, whereas in our previous workshop it was #2 (”Supervisory Relationships with Candidates”) that we thought would be hard, because the supervisor has some responsibility for pastoral care too – we eventually summed up the ideal relationship as “colleague, not a friend”.
Finally, we introduced attendees to the AdvanceHE Professional Standard Framework. This isn’t necessarily the easiest lens to apply to supervision, but is part of the qualification process most academics in the UK must go through to teach in higher education, so linking the skills you learn through supervision to this qualification is useful.
Workshop attendees ranged from PhD level to Heads of Department, so we got a really good range of thoughts and experiences to share. From this session, I learnt about the idea of assigning essays to develop student understanding on a given topic (my current student will probably be glad I only discovered this after their first year and a half) and I realised that our frameworks we discussed don’t actually include listing the skills we think a PhD student would develop – which I think would be a really useful way of discussing this. Next time I may also play the role of dictator and move people around to mix up career stages in the small groups 🤔
Overall, this is not how I would have run it if I’d organised this my myself – I would have focused more on the discussions about supervision rather than the two frameworks we used – but actually supervision is REALLY valuable for Advance HE Fellowship and is some of the most impactful teaching you can do, so this is probably more practical. I like to think of supervision in terms of scaffolding independence (e.g. encouraging a student’s ability to develop suggestions and research directions, perhaps by initially giving the student options and gradually moving towards them presenting you with the future work options), and teaching through questions (diverging questions to find the extent of their knowledge, then convergent questions to lead them to a specific topic or the next task in a project). You can start practicing these skills in summer or undergraduate research projects – although these need much more project management due to the time limit, a valuable skill I only learnt once students relied on me to finish at a nice easy point to write up!
Although I mostly wanted to talk about the supervision workshop, the EDI session also had some interesting nuggets:
Designing for diversity in astronomy and geophysics
This started with the introduction of the RAS inclusion booklet. It’s not quite out yet, but is intended to be a guide to inclusion best practices. I am looking forward to this – a group of us got together last year to discuss what best practice might look like for conference organisation in the UK Space Weather community. We held off doing this fully because it would be a lot of work to do well, while at the same time we know this was in process at the Royal Astronomy Society. Future versions of the booklet will be a living document, so we can adapt it in time. A great idea. I also encountered these new resources:
A careers booklet produced by RAS demonstrating the skills and career opportunities from studying astronomy and geophysics, aimed at encouraging underrepresented groups to choose to study in this area.
Another booklet from RAS, this time on autism, working with the National Autistic Society. This is mainly designed for outreach but includes explanations, experiences and recommendations. Small changes you would not notice could be the difference between an accessible or inaccessible event, including for autistic university students, research and academic staff.
Links to help identify parts of the world which are unsafe for LGBTQIA+ colleagues, often because their existence is criminalised. Maybe spend your research money on conferences elsewhere.
and of course, the depressing but sorely needed RAS Bullying and Harassment Report.
which fortunately many people seem motivated to change. Other talks included a planetarium that catered for those with visual impairments and reverse tutorials to teach senior staff about the experiences of junior or marginalised staff. I am pleased to hear of the Institute of Physics’ new Physics Inclusion Award to demonstrate and encourage an inclusive physics culture. I hope that our department may consider this.
Image by Vectorportal.com, CC BY