![Sample our Education journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5932/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Education.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The changing nature of doctoral education over the past three decades has taken on a triadic relationship constructed around expectations-process-purposes and has generated much commentary and critique. The intention of this paper is to focus on the notion of ‘purpose’ from the perspective of doctoral supervisors which we have collated into four themes labelled knowledge generation, recognition, positionality and instrumentalism. The themes were generated via the analysis of semi-structured interviews undertaken with 50 doctoral supervisors as part of the SuperProfDoc project investigating their practice.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 The ‘SuperProfDoc’ project ran from 1 October 2014 to 30 September 2017 and was funded through the Erasmus + programme RA2 and our project number: 2014-1-UK01-KA203-001629.
2 We discuss the findings in relation to the supervision process elsewhere (Loxley and Fillery-Travis, Citationforthcoming).
3 As part of the systematic literature review for the project, we complied and categorised 572 separate pieces of literature regarding supervision (Fillery-Travis et al. Citation2017).
4 Vitae set out the following areas which they suggest should form part of a doctoral education programme: Knowledge & Intellectual Abilities; Research Governance & Organisation; Engagement, Influence & Impact; Personal Effectiveness.