Developing a distance-based doctoral supervisory model: Inquiry over disrupted trajectories

Abstract

This paper proposes a distance-based doctoral supervisory model to support students in the process of navigating self, agency, and emotions over their doctoral journey. The model emerged through our examination of the lived experiences of three Chinese female doctoral students who, though enrolled as internal students in our New Zealand university, were prevented by the pandemic from returning from their Spring Festival sojourn to China, and continued their study by distance. We employed narrative analysis to deeply engage with their stories shared in diaries and one-on-one interviews, alongside social media interactions. These revealed a strong commitment to study emanating from answerability toward their research projects, already underway, and agentive actions to maintain peer-to-peer academic and emotional support, enabling resilience and reflexivity about personal values and needs. Learning from this experience, we emphasize in our model the need to nurture important bonds between students, their peers and their supervisors in online environments.

Keywords:

• agency
• emotions
• international students
• doctoral supervision
• narrative analysis

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to the three participant students who willingly shared their stories to help us understand their disrupted trajectories in the ever-challenging time. We wish them all the best in their future academic and life endeavors. We are also appreciative of the special issue editors' and two anonymous reviewers’ constructive and helpful feedback and suggestions in support of strengthening this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was declared by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Grace Yue Qi

Grace Yue Qi is a senior lecturer and researcher at Massey University. Her research interests lie in the epistemological and ontological intersections of language, culture, and technology. She is particularly interested in plurilingual education, and language teachers’ and leaners’ development of agency, identity, and interculturality in online multimodal environments.

Gillian Skyrme

Gillian Skyrme is a senior lecturer in linguistics at Massey University. She has supervised more than 15 PhD students. She has a particular interest, both as a researcher and as a teacher and supervisor, in the experiences of international students in New Zealand universities.

Cynthia J. White

Cynthia J. White is professor of applied linguistics and pro vice-chancellor of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Massey University. She has published two books (Cambridge University Press, Multilingual Matters) and over 80 articles and chapters on distance and online language learning and on language issues in migration and settlement.