Collaboratively pursuing student uptake of feedback through storytelling: a conversation analytic study of interaction in team doctoral supervision

Abstract

Team supervision has become prevalent in worldwide doctoral education programs in the past few decades. Research indicates that one area of challenges involves collaboration between supervisors. However, little is known about how supervisors collaborate in supervision meetings involving multiple supervisors as existing studies mostly draw on participant self-reports. Adopting conversation analysis, this study examines how supervisors can collaborate through storytelling drawing on the corpus of 34 storytelling sequences in 15 triadic supervision meetings. A major finding is that storytelling can be used as a resource for collaboratively pursuing student uptake of feedback. Specifically when a supervisor is providing feedback, and the other supervisor can tell stories in pursuit of student uptake. Another finding involves the production of second storytelling: when students do not show uptake at the completion of the first storytelling produced by one supervisor, the other supervisor may launch a second storytelling to pursue student uptake. In addition, supervisors can collaborate through co-production of storytelling: near the end of a story produced by one supervisor, the other supervisor can add increments, which shape student uptake of the feedback under delivery. These findings are potentially useful for the professional development of supervisors.