Higher degree research supervision beyond expertise: a Rancièrean and Freirean perspective on HDR supervision

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the function of ‘expertise’ in mediating the student–supervisor relationship in Higher Degree Research (HDR). Prevailing conceptualisations of expertise generally translate as disciplinary acumen and reference the supervisor’s specialist disciplinary and methodological knowledge. Beyond establishing the disciplinary ‘signatures’ of a discipline, this expertise also confers ‘symbolic capital’ within the disciplinary field. This paper asks: ‘What might it mean when supervisors lack such specific disciplinary knowledge in the supervision of HDR projects?' Drawing on theoretical foundations from Jacques Rancière and Paulo Freire, this paper considers how alternative ways of knowing and enacting scholarly inquiry might afford new terrains of practice within the HDR project, with the authors’ recent experiences in supervising beyond their respective disciplinary expertise providing an illustration of this modality of supervision. This case example demonstrates how mutuality and the enactment of a dialogic supervisory approach might widen considerations of what ‘counts’ as expertise within HDR supervision. In setting out this conceptualisation, an ethic of mutual inquiry prefaced by Rancière’s ‘two wills’ provides a means for activating a dynamic HDR candidature, the production of innovative research and the recognition of expertise beyond narrowly defined configurations of disciplinary acumen.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher degree research
• supervision
• pedagogy
• Freire
• Rancière

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 These are perhaps best characterised in terms of what Lee Shulman (2005, 52) refers to as ‘signature pedagogies’, or ‘the types of teaching that organise the fundamental ways in which future practitioners are educated’.

2 This of course has limits, and supervisors must remain cognisant of the requirements inherent to supervision in particular disciplinary fields. In some fields – including ‘technical’ and ‘vocational’ disciplines where industry requirements for specific competencies correspond with the HDR candidature – requirements for particular demonstrations of disciplinary expertise and concomitant credentialing remain core to supervisory capacity. What this paper argues for is a conception of supervision that affords a wider purview of what ‘counts’ as expertise, while recognising that basic competencies continue to define the terrain of supervision in particular fields.

3 Gert Biesta (2015) suggests that the most dynamic pedagogical exchanges are those that embrace such ‘risk’. By transcending the expected and conventional, possibilities for new and innovative work emerge.