‘I’m Not Going to Tell You Cos You Need to Think About This’: a Conversation Analysis Study of Managing Advice Resistance and Supporting Autonomy in Undergraduate Supervision

Abstract

This article, firstly, critically analyses a face-to-face supervision meeting between an undergraduate and a supervisor, exploring how the supervisor handles the twin strategies of fostering autonomy while managing resistance to advice. Conversation analysis is used as both a theory and a method, with a focus on the use of accounts to support or resist advice. The main contribution is the demonstration of how both the supervisor and the student are jointly responsible for the negotiation of advice, which is recycled and calibrated in response to the student’s resistance. The supervisor defuses complaints by normalising them, and moving his student on to practical solutions, often with humour. He lists his student’s achievements as the foundation on which she can assert agency and build the actions he recommends. Supervisor-student relationships are investigated through the lens of the affective dimensions of learning, to explore how caring or empathy may serve to reduce resistance and make advice more palatable. By juxtaposing physically present supervision with digitally mediated encounters, while acknowledging their mutual entanglement, the postdigital debate is furthered. In the context of Covid-19, and rapid decisions by universities to bring in digital platforms to capture student-teacher interactions, the analysis presented is in itself an act of resistance against the technical control systems of the academy and algorithmic capitalism.