ABSTRACT
Good supervision is central to successful graduate research, yet it is a pedagogy that is poorly understood. This may be because of the assumed privacy and ‘uniqueness’ of each supervision (Bartlett and Mercer 2000), but also, in the literature, it is under theorised (Green and Lee 1995; McWilliam and Palmer 1995). In my view, supervision differs from other forms of teaching and learning in higher
education in its peculiarly intense and negotiated character, as well as in its requirements for a blend of pedagogical and personal relationship skills.1 These differences arise because supervision is not only concerned with the production of a good thesis, but also with the transformation of the student into an independent researcher. This transformation is effected through an individualised working relationship between the student and an ‘expert’ researcher (or two), a relationship that engages student and supervisor/s in productive power relations. This view sees supervision as an ethical practice through which student and supervisor are constituted as certain kinds of human beings ( Johnson et al. 2000). Perhaps in part because of this ethical dimension, supervision is often problematic in
practice. When working with supervisors in supervision skills workshops, I usually ask them to recall their own experiences of supervision. Frequently their memories are painful, like these:
Both experiences … were both quite negative experiences really. Where I was basically just thrown into the deep end … I had to teach myself, had to give myself my own kind of emotional and intellectual support, and generally they were quite aversive experiences where I was basically left alone.
