Mentoring
I have limited formal supervision experience, but extensive experience in mentoring. Most of my mentoring consist of reading, commenting, and discussing drafts, ranging from students at undergraduate levels to papers, MCQs and funding applications from colleagues. For the least experienced writers, my focus is always on basics: what goes into an academic text, how a text is structured, how to reference. For an inexperienced writer, the most important aspect is always to defuse their fear of letting outsiders read their written words, as this will become a handicap in their learning and professional lives. For the more experienced, my emphasis is on structure and content. My feedback depends on the timeframe and level of ambition. At an early stage, identifying and reorganizing main ideas can refocus and bring clarity to an argument. Last minute feedback before submission focuses on strengthening the existing argument and rhetorical techniques used to draw attention to memorable quotes and core concepts.
My teaching philosophy of encouraging reflection, of being a mirror, manifests in how I approach giving feedback on texts. A text is dead until it meets a reader. The goal of feedback is not to tell the author how or what to write, but to assist them in taking a step back and help them see their own work with the eyes of a reader. This can happen through asking questions, rewriting, or restructuring using color-codes, paragraph keywords, and outlines. Distancing and perspectivation is thus at the core of how I view supervision: Learning happens by doing, and my role is to facilitate and encourage reading and writing. With a draft at hand, my role is to guide reflection on possible improvements through making the familiar unfamiliar. The main difference with supervising a PhD candidate is that the responsibility also extends to finding purpose, defining scope, and managing progress and expectations. That the process stretches over a longer timeframe allows for deeper engagement and nurturing a relationship over time, but the underlying principles are the same.
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