Postgraduate supervision: Enabling narratives

Over the last 2 years, the facilitators of this workshop have been editing a collection of essays entitled: Postgraduate Research Supervision: Transforming (R)Elations (to be released by Peter Lang Publishers later this year). The essays in this collection, drawing on a wide range of disciplines and researchers, reflect on personal experiences of postgraduate supervision from the perspective of the candidate, the supervisor or both, and then examine the broader meanings and implications for future supervisory practices which emerge out of those experiences. Articulating our experiences of supervision in public is still relatively rare, and unresolved anxieties about past experiences of supervision can resonate deeply in our work practices, as Lee and Williams have recently revealed in their research.

The objective of this workshop is to facilitate the articulation of narratives of lived experience of supervision. We propose to provide a supportive environment in which participants narrate in the third person their supervisory experiences (as supervisor and/or candidate), and then discuss the practical and theoretical implications of their stories. Utilising the techniques of Frigga Haug, we will facilitate the rewriting of these stories into more enabling and enduring narratives. The aim of this narrative work is to make the interaction between current practices and previous experiences of supervision transparent and meaningful, to empower participants to problem solve creatively in the context of their own experiences.

This workshop aims to enhance the participant's ability to:

1. be flexible in their supervisory practices and;
2. to implement productive, enjoyable and completable supervisions in the future.