Excellence in teaching

Jane Long teaches in the Centre for Women's Studies, within English, Communication and Cultural Studies, and supervises research students from Women's Studies, English and History. The winner of the 2002 Excellence in Postgraduate Supervision Award, she has also been active in the development of online teaching approaches in her field since 1997, and in the establishment of collaborative syndicate work among her students. Jane received an Excellence in Teaching Award in 2002.

Teaching and learning is ideally collaborative and for me, nowhere is this collaboration and dialogue more challenging and rewarding than in postgraduate research supervision. My own research and teaching in Women's Studies, with strong links into History and Communication Studies, means that the students I supervise in turn are drawn from different disciplinary areas: no single approach or pattern of supervision suits all students. Success comes from treating the supervisory relationship, as much as the research project itself, as a topic for discussion and development with each student. Recognition of variation among students is important in ensuring that progress is tailored most neatly and sensibly to their requirements and priorities. Establishing and discussing expectations is important, and in this I have found SPORS a very useful starting point. I aim for an integrated approach to supervision, one that contributes to a successful doctoral outcome while remaining alert to the individual needs of students and their diversity, and which values the considerable skills and insight they usually bring to their work from the outset.

As well as flexibility and openness to individual interests, however, there are those crucial, practical duties that come with any supervision. Providing support towards students completing their studies successfully, in a timely fashion, is a central part of the process for me - attending to the practicalities of planning, time management, research directions, and the fulfillment of important intellectual requirements of advanced research. To achieve success, students invest enormous time, energy and emotion, and often make personal sacrifices, so supervision entails an important responsibility to ensure that the path towards completion is as clear and well organized as possible.

One of the key returns on the time and intellectual effort made by students is the chance for possible further success in research or other academic employment, as well as appropriate recognition from peers. I try to envisage my research students as future academics and encourage them to do the same, while not diverting them from an already tight research schedule. Both during and after their time as students, advice about developing a curriculum vitae, opportunities to publish research and participate in conferences, career planning, and some mentoring in relation to teaching roles that are invariably now part of a research student's experience at UWA, all figure as part of my supervision practice.

I was privileged to have two wonderful doctoral supervisors when I was a postgraduate at UWA. I gained tremendously from them and from that experience. Then as now, I value discussions about supervision standards, approaches and strategies, sharing ideas about ways to secure the most successful outcomes for all involved. Most broadly, the experience of research students is about the fruitful exploration of connections: between research and the researcher, between research and teaching, and between the central research task and its intellectual context. For me, then, supervision is about offering sustained and informed guidance to help equip students in the successful exploration of those connections, for themselves.