Anticipating doctoral supervision: (Not) bridging the transition from supervisee to supervisor

Building on existing studies that ask doctoral supervisors how they understand their role, and what has influenced this understanding, this article explores invitations that are issued to supervisors to reflect in certain ways about the role of supervisor. The article calls into question the ways in which supervisors are invited to think about and represent supervision, by professional development courses, handbooks on supervision, and the questions that researchers pose about supervision. This discussion is situated in autoethnographic analysis of a valuable moment in the author's academic career for reflecting on these factors: the author is positioned directly between the role of doctoral supervisee and the role of doctoral supervisor. Through autoethnographic engagement with doctoral supervision literature, the article argues that professional development for supervisors would benefit from more critical analysis of the invitations which are issued to supervisors to reflect on the transition from supervisee to supervisor.     

Motives and Meaning amongst PhD Supervisors in the Social Sciences

Effective supervision of research students is acknowledged to be a crucial factor in the latter's successful completion of the social science PhD. How well supervisors supervise is likely to be linked to why they choose to occupy their role. These reasons constitute the supervisor's vocabulary of motives and are examined in some detail from the perspective of interpretative social‐psychology. Three dimensions of the vocabulary are depicted: intellectual, functional and subjective. The vocabulary is then situated within its specific locus, namely the institutional context of higher education. Links are then made between the vocabulary and various aspects of the formal value system of academia, a value system which legitimates the depicted vocabulary of motives and declares others to be illegitimate. The paper concludes with some comments on the relationship between why supervisors supervise and the quality of that supervision, citing a range of factors influencing that relationship.     

Gandhian education in Bali: globalisations and cultural diversity in a time of fundamentalisms

The paper presents findings from a research project undertaken at the Taman Rama Gandhi School in Bali during the first anniversary week of the Bali Bombings in 2003. It explores the school's response to four key components of Gandhi's model of Basic Education (Nai Talim) and shows that the claimed curriculum is framed by two contradictory discourses: a globalisation from above discourse and a Gandhian discourse of tolerance and peace, more consistent with a globalisation from below discourse. The argument is made that the curriculum's commitment to the neo‐liberal capitalist values of the globalisation form above discourse may ultimately thwart the emphasis upon peace and tolerance in the discourse from below.     

The purposes and processes of master's thesis supervision: a comparison of Chinese and Dutch supervisors

The number of international Chinese students enrolled in research programmes in Western universities is growing. To provide effective research supervision to these students, it is helpful to understand the similarities and differences in the supervision process between the host country and their home country. We explored which learning outcomes supervisors of master's theses aim for in two cultures, China and the Netherlands, and how they help their students to achieve these learning outcomes. Semi-structured interviews with 10 Chinese and 10 Dutch supervisors revealed, besides a strong resemblance, some clear differences between the two groups. For example, the Chinese supervisors aim to prepare their students for future jobs and use explicit assessment and regulation to monitor student progress, while the Dutch supervisors aim to enhance student well-being and use implicit regulation, emotional support and frequent posing of questions to facilitate student learning. Implications for cross-cultural and international education are provided.     

Journal Writing and Learning: Reading between the structural,holistic, and post-structural lines

This paper explores the use of journal writing for providing adults with the opportunity of reflecting on their learning. The article examines the author's own experiences teaching students on an undergraduate part-time degree evening course where journal writing was an important component. Three understandings of journal writing are compared using examples from students' journal entries. They are characterised as structural, holistic, and post-structural positions, respectively. Structural approaches to journal writing claim benefits in enabling the learner to manage her/his own subjectivity with a view to finding an “objective truth”. An holistic approach, while “useful”, attempts to synthesise multiple ways of knowing and presents a false sense of completion and inclusion. The post-structural view positions the learner intertextually in a processual learning context where the text the student writes is driven by other discourses. Here, the student/journal writer is constituted by discourse but not necessarily determined by it because the strategies of reflexivity and deconstruction are available. This last position draws on the sociology of interpretative biography and narrative theory. The implications for assessment and the ethical dimensions of privacy and disclosure of student journals are examined also.     

A day in the life (and death) of a public university

This is a narrative of an actual day in the author's working life at a large public university in the southern hemisphere. It is an enquiry into life, and death, at the university. It attempts to balance a critical and informed perspective with a lived perspective and, as a story that contributes to a developing genre of academic writing, it works to counter the dominant neo-liberal discourse in the university by reaffirming the value of the imagination. It reflects on a remarkable–unremarkable day to show the complexity of being an individual subject, situated in language, hailed by different discourses, feeling and sometimes thinking contradictory things at once, in a contemporary university context.     

Critical discourse analysis and inclusive educational policies: the power to exclude

The legislative shift towards an inclusive education policy in Cyprus has allegedly been fragmented and contradictory. The textual hybridity of the ostensibly more inclusive policy documents prevents the realization of an inclusive discourse. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is proposed as an emancipatory research tool that has the potential to destabilize the authoritarian discourses entrenched in educational policy agendas, thereby facilitating the linguistic and, by implication, conceptual reinstatement of inclusion as a notion that unequivocally advocates the protection of the human rights of children with special educational needs (SEN). In the first section, the article concentrates on the theoretical perspectives of CDA within the context of inclusive education policymaking. For illustration purposes, CDA is used here to expose the power/knowledge grid and its subjugating attributes, enshrined in two official legislative documents. The aim is to answer the following questions: (1) In what ways does the legislative document construct and sustain asymmetrical power relations? (2) In what ways are children with SEN constructed and positioned? and (3) In what ways are children’s human rights silenced? The next section is given over to the criticisms of CDA, whilst the final section raises some issues and identifies some problems in relation to the value of CDA as an emancipatory research tool.     

The multi‐modal redesign of school texts

Multiliteracies‐related research is just emerging from the formal discourse of pedagogical theorising and how it may look in practice needs further exploration. This research, initiated under that warrant, presents practitioner research and the enactment of a multiliteracies curriculum with Year 8 students in New York City's Chinatown. The study describes a collaborative digital literacies project with a local contemporary arts museum where students engaged in the multi‐modal redesign of school texts. First, the article outlines a move of multiliteracies theory into curriculum practice where students explored questions of Chinese‐American and immigrant identities through a discourse analysis of history texts. Then, drawing on a digital gothic and hip‐hop cartoon Web project, it outlines how students challenged ways their ethnic identities were positioned by drawing political satire cartoons about immigration to the United States. The project concluded with a virtual exhibition of students' artwork where they inserted their cartoons within existing educational websites using HTML and Flash. It argues that the redesigned websites are a new set of multi‐modal literacy practices that allow youth to disrupt racist and exclusionary discourses they encounter in school texts and their lived experiences.     

Constructing and Contesting Discourses of Heteronormativity: An Ethnographic Study of Youth in a Francophone High School in Canada

This article explores the possibilities and impossibilities of establishing queer discursive spaces within a minority-language high school. Data examined here are from a three-year study of language and identity in a Francophone high school in Ontario, Canada. As two members of the larger research team, we draw on our close observations of teenage students as they interacted with their peers at school events and in corridors and classrooms. The article analyses the ways in which discourses of heteronormativity-which privilege heterosexuality-were reproduced as well as contested in students' interactions within three domains: the general student population, a friendship network of five socially marginalised female students, and the lives of two gay male students. The analysis indicates that the heteronormative discourses produced and reproduced by the students had a silencing effect on gay male students but, paradoxically, created space for some straight female students to "play-act" lesbianism as a counter-hegemonic discourse. The findings highlight the irony of this school's motto-"Unity in diversity"-in relation to young women and queer youth in particular.     

Science Teaching and Argumentation: One-sided versus dialectical argumentation in Chilean middle-school science lessons

Since the late 1990s, there has been consensus among educational researchers that argumentation should play a central role in science education. Although there has been extensive relevant research, it is not clear enough how oral argumentation spontaneously occurs in science teaching. This is particularly important with regard to the empirical evidence suggesting the effect of discussion of contradictory views on scientific learning. In order to contribute to the research on argumentation in science teaching, we conducted a study that aims to sketch a panoramic view of the uses of oral argumentation in Chilean middle-school science teaching. A total of 153 videotaped science lessons were observed, involving students aged 10–11 and 12–13. Whole-class argumentative discourse was analysed as a function of thematic episodes and teachers' and students' utterances. Results suggest that argumentative discourse in which contradictory points of view are discussed is scarce but when it occurs it does so predominantly within discourse among students. On the contrary, argumentation aimed at justifying points of view is widely used, even more so when students are older.     

“Everyone is Just Mixed to Me”: Exploring the Role of Multiraciality in College Students' Racial Claims

Examining discourses of multiraciality through college students' claims about race offers helpful insights for educators striving to create equitable campuses for mixed race students. One area of discourse is the positioning of multiracial individuals as evidence for the social construction of race. Another critiques the multiracial movement, with its large college student base, for reinforcing the biological concept of race. This study investigates how a diverse sample of 40 undergraduate students from two U.S. West Coast institutions used multiraciality in varied ways to assert their claims about race and whether it mattered. Six patterns of multiracial discourse emerged in their racial claims. These findings suggest that the novelty of multiraciality allows it to be invoked to support various claims about the nature of race, namely whether race is biological, and the current and future relationship between mixedness and “post-racial” progress. Implications for research and practice also are discussed.     

Editor's Note: Learning about Self and Others

This article uses the lens of critical discourse analysis to examine the religious education efforts of the Newfoundland School Society (NSS), the main provider of religious education in Newfoundland in the 19th century. Although its focus was initially this colony, the NSS quickly broadened its reach to the whole British empire, making it one of the largest religious education bodies in the world. In this article, the author's focus is on the social context and discourses produced by the Society in its annual reports and accompanying anniversary sermons. Data are drawn from archival records of the NSS for the years 1830–1840.     

Examining the discourse on the limit concept in a beginning-level calculus classroom

Existing research on limits documents many difficulties students encounter when learning about the concept. There is also some research on teaching of limits but it is not yet as extensive as the research on student learning about limits. This study explores the discourse on limits in a beginning-level undergraduate calculus classroom by focusing on one instructor’s and his students’ discourses through a communicational approach to cognition. The findings indicate that some of the limit-related contexts in which students struggled coincided with those in which the instructor shifted his elements of discourse on limits. The instructor did not attend to the shifts in his discourse, making them implicit for the students. The study highlights that the discrepancies among participants’ discourses signal communicational breakages and suggests that future studies should examine whether teachers’ explicit attention to the elements of their discourse can enhance communication in the classrooms.     

What’s wrong with fairness? How discourses in higher education literature support gender inequalities

The role and influence of department heads on women in academia is understudied and weakly conceptualized. This article expounds on prior work, which identified limitations of department head literature, to put forth three problematic discourses that run through much of the department head research: the discourse of fairness, the discourse of collective good, and the training imperative. The discourse of fairness encourages an unproblematized adoption of fairness as a core criterion, ignoring the ways fairness may be conceptualized to benefit some groups over others. The discourse of collective good encourages department heads to seek out resolutions that maximize the ‘good’ for the department and its constituents but may perpetuate gender biases. The training imperative discourse places a heavy emphasis on training, regardless of whether training is or is not an effective means to address gender inequalities. Implications and directions for future work and practices are discussed in closing.     

Field Supervision of Counselors in Training: A Survey of the North Atlantic Region

Most of the research on supervision has focused on supervisors in academic institutions (faculty members or doctoral students). In this article the authors describe a study in which they examined supervisors in community agencies where master's level counselors were assigned for practicum and internship training. The survey suggested that agencies were heavily invested in supervising graduate level counseling students and providing them with a rich clinical experience. Respondents typically had a master's degree, used various models of supervision, and provided feedback by means of self-report and audiotape or videotape review of counseling sessions. Results suggest that these supervisors had little contact with the concurrent academic supervisor and may have had little formal training in supervision. Implications of this survey include a need for more training for supervisors in graduate counseling programs and a need for more liaison between campus and field supervisors.     

Mapping the Pleasures and Risks of Supervision

Good supervision is central to successful graduate research, yet it is a pedagogy that is poorly understood. This may be one reason why it is often experienced as problematic, especially by students. To address these concerns, in this paper I delineate a map of supervision which is informed by contemporary theories of education. As I describe the layers of the map, I will attempt to show traces of each layer in some texts from the supervision of a master's student. The fruit of my analysis is a view of supervision as a complex and unstable process, one filled with pleasures and risks. This view is potentially useful for informing the practices of supervisors, students and the academic advisors who work with them.     

Choice Within Constraints: Mothers and schooling

ABSTRACT This article explores the discourses of choice in the context of the current, and international, public policy debates about providing freedom of choice for parents as consumers in the education market place. In particular it explores the public and private discourses of choice to illustrate the argument that mothers as parents are not 'free to choose' but act within a range of constraints. We term these both structural and moral constraints and offer evidence about them as experienced by mothers over time in relation to bringing up children, from resources to negotiations about relationships and expectations about both the nature of family life, employment and their children's place within the future. It also offers some evidence from our various research studies of mothers from their perspectives, about the processes of choice, in the context of both structural and moral constraints, including issues about involvement in their children's education and schooling. Consideration is also given to mothers' evaluations of their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their possibilities of child rearing and education. The article concludes with the argument that mothers' experiences of the processes of bringing up and educating their children are not at all in harmony with the, albeit contradictory, public policy discourse of their being free to choose. Mothers' various perspectives from their varied vantage points are indeed limited by structural and moral possibilities in a patriarchal and racist society.     

“Poetry? Of course we do it. It's in the National Curriculum.” Primary children's perceptions of poetry

What can listening to children's ideas about poetry teach us? This article considers ways in which exploring primary‐aged students' perceptions of poetry can inform teachers' work with children. Using strategies from earlier studies in secondary schools, a small‐scale project with Year 6 students revealed their complex and sometimes contradictory ideas. These ideas reflect some of the current debates around the nature of poetry and ways of teaching it. The children's ideas are analysed with critical attention paid to the impact of the view of literacy in England's National Literacy Strategy on the teaching and learning of poetry.     

Secret Transmissions: Modelling cross‐cultural relations in classroom discourses

It is often assumed in education that we have left the deficit model behind, but this paper suggests that policies and programs continue to position Indigenous students within a discourse of progress and enlightenment. Through this discourse, they are positioned between an image of what they once were as disadvantaged and what they are supposed to become in the process of studying at school and university. This paper examines some of the messages that are secretly transmitted both inside and outside the classroom when Indigenous students are constituted in discourse as behind or below and having to catch‐up to the non‐Indigenous students. It suggests other ways in which teachers could address the production of cross‐cultural relations through classroom discourses to avoid positioning Indigenous people in a deficit relation to non‐Indigenous people.