Minding the gap in doctoral supervision for a contemporary world: a case from Italy

ABSTRACT

Doctoral supervision has attracted significant attention from higher education bodies over the last 15 years, stimulated by shifts in educational and socio-political contexts including what supports the knowledge economy and the stakeholdership of students. This paper conceptualises work worlds through Heideggerian discourse and presents exploratory findings from interviews with workplace supervisors analysed within the framework of the SuperProfDoc research project. It then draws on these findings and the mentoring and coaching literature to contribute to integrating supervision practices between the academy and the workplace.

KEYWORDS:

• Doctoral supervision
• workplace
• praxis
• collaboration
• work world
• community of practice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The term ‘work world’ is used as in the Heideggerian notion of any place of work including the academy. The terms ‘world of work’ and ‘workplace’ are used to mean organisations/business entities outside of the academy.

2 Academy is used as a collective term for HEIs.

3 SuperProfDoc is a research project co-funded by Erasmus+- KA2-Cooperation and Innovation for Good Practices (http://superprofdoc.eu/?page_id=37). It is coordinated by Middlesex University in collaboration with Trinity College Dublin (IR), Fondazione ADAPT (IT), Maastricht School of Management (NL), Eurodoc (BE) and the University of Southern Florida (US).

4 Vitae is a major UK, not for profit, organisation dedicated to professional development of researchers https://www.vitae.ac.uk/.