Today I’ve been working on a new module which we hope to pilot in the 2018-19 academic year on postgraduate research supervision. Many colleagues know that I already contribute to our regular postgraduate research supervisor training sessions, but we felt that more space was needed for pedagogy. To date, most training sessions cover the University policy and are built around problem-based scenarios that consider the challenges that many research students face during their studies. On the whole, these sessions are useful for encouraging discussion and sharing possible solutions to difficult situations. Unfortunately, they do not provide the time for expanding the discussion, and, crucially, for thinking about supervision as a form of teaching, as Bruce and Stoodley (2013) have noted.
So, we have an opportunity to develop a module that looks at supervision and assessment processes during a research degree, and incorporates some of the growing body of material on supervision and doctoral candidate learning that has emerged over the last 10-15 years. Having just compiled my first complete online reading list, the real challenge is deciding what to keep in and what to leave out. There are many texts that could be rightly considered as ‘core texts’, such as the second edition of Taylor, Kiley and Humphrey’s (2018) handbook, but as journal publications are increasingly critiquing the trend for handbooks and ‘guides’ to doctoral supervision (and being a research student), we are left to wonder if there may be a need for a wider range of resources in modules such as this.