Keywords

In order to complete their education and obtain a degree, university students in various disciplines and academic programmes around the world are generally expected to produce some form of major written academic work or thesis. Such theses or degree projectsFootnote 1 are usually produced under the guidance of a supervisor, making supervision an extensive activity within higher education in many countries. This raises issues relating to teaching and learning in higher education, but also to time and funding. How do we ensure that all these people, time and money are well spent? And, given the time and financial frameworks available, how can supervision be designed to best contribute to student learning and development? This last question is the starting point for this book, in which we will discuss degree project supervision in relation to student independence and academic literacies.

Not all higher education students are required to produce an academic thesis as part of their education, as higher education systems and degree requirements vary between countries, universities and academic programmes. Nevertheless, in many parts of the world, this is a common requirement for students at bachelor’s and master’s level. Eurydice, the European Commission’s website providing information on higher education systems in the European Union, shows, for instance, that degree projects generally are a compulsory element for students to obtain a bachelor’s or master’s degree (European Commission 2023).Footnote 2 The Bologna Declaration on Higher Education, which focuses on students obtaining academic degrees that are relatively equivalent between participating countries, also includes countries outside the European Union, such as the United Kingdom, Norway and, earlier, Russia,Footnote 3 all of which follow the same organisation of higher education with a bachelor’s and master’s level (European Ministers in charge of Higher Education 1999; Curaj et al. 2012). Also outside Europe, a student thesis is commonly required for a bachelor’s or master’s degree, which means that a considerable amount of time and resources are devoted to the supervision of these degree projects, making this a significant part of the workload for many university lecturers and professors.

Academic supervision of student theses has traditionally been associated with an individualistic learning culture, where individuals, mainly students and supervisors, are part of a primarily dyadic pedagogical relationship, characterised by relatively informal relationships and meetings, where one person teaches and another is taught (Vehviläinen and Löfström 2016). In recent years, this view has been increasingly challenged and the social and collective aspects of supervision have been more widely acknowledged. This can be understood in terms of how practical, economic and pedagogical circumstances have made it common for students to be supervised in pairs or groups for all or part of the supervision process, with implications for supervision interactions and relationships. However, it can also be seen in the light of a greater focus on the collegial structures and collective learning of the academic community, with more attention being paid to the process in relation to the end product. Troelsen (2021, 2) describes this as the need to open up the individual supervisory space and make visible what is happening in the supervision situation.

One way to describe these processes is in terms of academic professionalisation, which takes place through several channels: pedagogical courses on academic supervision, supervision handbooks and research on supervision, as well as collegial meetings and discussions on supervision (cf. Van Veldhuizen et al. 2021; Brodin et al. 2020; Wels et al. 2017; Epstein et al. 2007; Lee 2019). Through these channels, networks and forums are created for the exchange of expertise and experience that help to clarify what actually happens in the supervision process, as well as the factors that can influence it in different ways. This book should be seen as part of this ongoing professionalisation, with the aim of shedding light on supervision practice and contributing to its development. The ambition is that the book will serve as a starting point for individual and collegial reflection on the supervision of degree projects/theses in higher education. It has a solid research base, based on both focus group interviews and documented supervision interactions, and offers useful tools for developing supervisory skills and competences, with a theoretical starting point for discussions. Our ambition is that it will be relevant to those new to supervision at the undergraduate level, such as doctoral students or new lecturers, as well as to experienced supervisors who wish to develop their skills and practice, and to groups of supervisors/colleagues within a particular discipline or academic programme who wish to work together on the collegial development of their degree project courses and supervision practice.

The primary audience for this book is thus academic teachers/lecturers involved in supervision, and more specifically academic teachers as reflective practitioners, as the book is both research-based and aimed at professional and pedagogical reflection on the supervision of degree projects/student theses. The research project from which the examples in the book are drawn was primarily concerned with teacher education and journalism education in Sweden and Russia, but, as the research and handbooks on academic supervision indicate, the issues and challenges surrounding the supervision of degree projects are similar in many disciplines within the social sciences and humanities and in many countries.

What Is Academic Supervision?

This book starts from an empirical perspective on academic supervision, which means that the focus is on how supervision is talked about and described by supervisors, but also on what supervision interaction might look like in practice. Drawing on a multidisciplinary research project in which we have interviewed supervisors and recorded and documented supervision processes, we will highlight and discuss different perspectives on supervision and supervision practice.

What is meant by supervision—how it is defined, what activities it consists of, what it should cover and what its main purpose should be—can be understood in many different ways. At a more general level, the purpose of supervision may be defined, for example, as teaching the student to learn (Manderson 1996) or contributing to a more general development of the student’s ability to work academically or scientifically (Lundström 2016, 89). However, the purpose of supervision can also be understood in a more specific sense, such as that supervision should help to socialise the individual into a particular disciplinary culture or tradition, or that the completion of the individual degree project or student thesis is the goal of supervision. Other differences in how supervision is understood and defined may concern whether it is seen as a form of teaching (Gustavsson and Eriksson 2015) or primarily as feedback or guidance (Lundström 2016), and whether it is perceived to involve only a few learning activities or a greater variety (Rienecker et al. 2019, 11).

This book focuses on the perspective and activities of supervisors and is therefore based on an inclusive and general definition of supervision, borrowed from Randi Brodersen (2009). Brodersen defines supervision as everything that supervisors do through oral and written communication in order to

  1. 1.

    assist the student in the process of completing academic work within a specified timeframe and in achieving an academic degree

  2. 2.

    promote student learning and practice of self-reflection

  3. 3.

    socialise the student into the disciplinary community.

    (Brodersen 2009, 181, author’s translation)

Based on this definition, we have chosen to consider all dialogical activities between supervisor and student as supervision, which, based on the material we start from, includes

  • oral communication in the form of supervision discussions between students and supervisors

  • written communication from supervisors in the form of comments on drafts of texts either sent or used as the basis for supervision discussions

  • written communication in the form of e-mails between supervisors and students.

Thus, when we talk about academic supervision in this book, we are referring to all these types of interaction between supervisors and students.

Another key feature of this book is our view of supervision as a social and collegial practice involving more actors than the individual supervisors and students. Course coordinators, programme directors, colleagues, examiners and fellow students, as well as governing documents and policies at different levels, are all important to what individual supervision practice looks like and what the interaction between supervisors and students will be like in a particular setting. In order to develop supervision practices within such local academic contexts, as well as at the individual level, there is a need for concepts and tools that can be used to share experiences and knowledge about supervision between these different actors. It is our ambition that this book will contribute to this.

Finally, we would like to return to the book’s focus on supervision practice. Much of the existing research on academic supervision is primarily based on interviews, where a number of aspects of supervision are described by different actors in the supervision context: expectations, experiences, cultural and disciplinary differences, identity perspectives, challenges and so on (e.g. Brodin 2018; Ding and Devine 2018; Vereijken et al. 2018; Jacobsen et al. 2021; Neupane Bastola and Hu 2021; Henttonen 2023). Several studies have also proposed different types of supervision models, for example, based on identified types of supervisor styles and patterns (e.g. Scholefield and Cox 2016; Nordentoft et al. 2013; Mainhard et al. 2009; Agricola et al. 2021; Knight and Botting 2016).

There is also research that focuses on the practical level of academic supervision, for example, based on recorded supervision conversations, which often examines specific aspects of the interaction and conversations between students and supervisors, such as asking questions or giving and receiving feedback (e.g. Björkman 2015; Henricson and Nelson 2017; Magnusson and Zackariasson 2021; Thanh Ta 2021, 2023; Vehviläinen 2003, 2009, 2012; Zhang and Hyland 2022; Schneijderberg 2021). Research based on this kind of material thus provides a further perspective on academic supervision by opening up to questions oriented towards supervision practice, such as What do supervisors do to show commitment and support to students, and how do they do it? How do different supervisor styles emerge in the supervisory interaction? and so on.

As this book is based on research that includes interviews with supervisors, as well as recorded supervision sessions and documented communications between supervisors and students, we are able to explore and discuss supervisors’ views and experiences of supervision, as well as the actual practice—what the interaction between supervisors and students may look like. Throughout the book, we will highlight in particular two important aspects of academic supervision of student theses: student independence and academic literacies. These are discussed from five main perspectives: (1) supervisors’ perceptions and understandings of student independence, (2) the relationship between supervisors and students, (3) the emotional dimension of supervision, (4) supervision tools for independence, and (5) the role of the supervisor not only as a guide and helper but also as an assessor of students’ work.