‘A sort of collaboration’: challenged conceptions and negotiated temporalities in supervision practice at a reform university

ABSTRACT

This paper examines supervisors at a reform university where most supervision concerns undergraduate and Master's project work. Drawing on Grant's ([2018]. ‘Assembling Ourselves Differently? Contesting the Dominant Imaginary of Doctoral Supervision’. Parallax 24 (3): 356–370) understanding of being a supervisor as an ongoing process of assembling oneself, it focuses on the role of this institutional framework as an ‘outside’ element in this assembling process. I argue that it shapes the conditions of that assembling through the changing conceptions and temporalities of supervision . While supervisors continue to aspire to the original conception of supervision as a distinct pedagogical mode that is – even for undergraduates – akin to apprenticeship, palpable quickening and demands for instruction-like supervision endanger this conception. This temporal compression, together with the prevalence of short-term cyclicality of projects and co-negotiation of multiple longer-term temporal frames of becoming a supervisor, makes for a temporally multi-layered and particularly intense supervisory practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Supervision
• project work
• practice
• temporality
• reform university

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all the interviewees for taking time to share their experiences with me. Likewise, I would like to thank my research group at RUC, Space, Place, Mobility and Urban Studies (MOSPUS) for providing funding for the transcription of interviews. And finally, I would like to thank for Eva Bendix Petersen as well as two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Reform university is a term used by a number of post-1968 European universities founded in response to the popular critiques of traditional academia in the late 1960s. They share the goal of challenging academic traditions, especially the traditional forms of learning. Instead their pedagogy promoted experimental and student-centred and -led learning through project learning, seminars or tutorials rather than lectures. Focus on interdisciplinarity, critical thinking and social engagement are also often very strongly present. The concept of reform university was acknowledged institutionally in 2020 at the EU level with the decision of the European Commission to include amongst the newly funded university networks also the European Reform University Alliance.

2 The university structure is complex in that there are no traditional departments, only institutes of hundreds of academics. An academic staff is a member of (at least one) interdisciplinary research group and at the same assigned to several, (usually) partially overlapping different educations/"disciplines".

3 Seven of them were conducted completely in English, with the remaining one conducted bilingually wherein the author spoke English and the respondent in Danish. All the translations from Danish to English are author’s. Use of italics reflects interviewee's emphasis unless noted otherwise.

4 These are pseudonymes.

5 Institutional complexity at RUC enhances namely potential for students' diversity of study experiences, and for example resulting in a student coming to a social science for the first time in their fifth semester while only having been exposed to humanistic-technological studies in the first two years, where they tend not to get trained in theory or state of the art components of project work.