Let’s start with a couple of questions: 1) When you supervise your doctoral students, are you teaching them? And 2) Are they learning? We think you probably answered ‘yes’ to question 1, and ‘hopefully’ to question 2.
So, why is it that in many universities, doctoral supervision is positioned as a ‘research’ duty and not a ‘teaching’ duty when it comes to work allocations, performance management and promotions? Even though the supervisory conversation undoubtedly has a pedagogical intent, supervision isn’t scrutinised in the same way as other teaching and learning duties are; there is no curriculum or syllabus as such; and supervisory practices are often shaped by the supervisors’ own beliefs and experiences of supervision as a doctoral student themselves – happy or otherwise – rather than any underpinning pedagogical approach or theory. Allocations on workplans for doctoral supervision are often paltry, inadequate and even non-existent in some universities – something we squeeze in while trying to conduct our own research and write up papers.
But the concept of doctoral pedagogy problematises all this by explicitly reframing doctoral supervision so that it is understood as a teaching and learning activity. It’s a way for doctoral students and their supervisors to work together in a planned, purposeful, structured, and scaffolded way, which ideally results in happy, less stressed and better prepared doctoral students.
We are passionate about creating a pedagogical mindset when it comes to working with our doctoral students and we know supervision time is lacking. To this end, we have co-created a toolkit with a small group of doctoral students. The toolkit comprises a series of tasks designed to scaffold different facets of the doctoral journey – irrespective of discipline – such as developing a researcher identity, dealing with feedback, communicating with academic and non-academic audiences and so on. In designing these tasks, we drew on our own research and supervisory experience, as well as the knowledge and experience of our doctoral student co-creators. The result is a set of tasks for supervisors and students to use independently or collaboratively, in supervision sessions, tutorials, research groups or as self-study.
We really hope you find the tasks useful. There is a QR code on the website that you can use to feedback to us. We look forward to hearing about your experiences of using the tasks and your ideas.
Dr Marion Heron is an associate professor at the University of Surrey, Dr Lisa McGrath and Dr Gill Adams are associate professors at the Sheffield Institute of Education, and Dr Helen Donaghue is a senior lecturer at St Margaret’s University.
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