Studying the supervision of PhD writing at a STEAM university – what’s its WAC potential? 

Other conference contribution, 2023

We report on and invite discussion about a project focused on the training of PhD supervisors and their perceived challenges and ways of addressing supervision in changing times regarding publication practices, PhD cohort profiles, and supervision across languages and disciplines in English-medium Education settings with STEAM education. From different supervision training contexts, we collect survey data, self-assessment data, and reflection pieces. From PhD writing courses, we collect observations about publication processes as well as self-assessment plans. We analyze supervisors’ self-assessment plans and reflections from supervision courses both in terms of how existing supervision models fare in terms of applicability and transfer and in terms of the tensions and challenges they perceive in view of their assumptions. The data from the PhD students is used against the same model and tensions to begin to analyze how PhD students experience the kinds of challenges supervisors see. Findings suggest that supervision training hand-in-hand with re-designed PhD writing courses is an increasingly important development area for WAC.