Leveraging Technology in Doctoral Supervision: A Complementary Approach in Kenya’s Institutions of Higher Learning

This paper examines previous empirical studies on adoption of emerging technologies in supervising doctoral students. The conceptual framework highlights the relationship between technology use and enhancing quality of supervision process, borrowing greatly from the theory of change methodology. It highlights the challenges and benefits analysis on the use of technology. The aim of this paper is to examine the efficacies of integration of the technology into the supervision process. As a result, it will provide students, supervisors, colleges of graduate boards, training institutions of higher learning, and regulatory bodies with a framework of incorporating the use of technology, based on needs assessment of respective doctoral supervision process.

Doctoral supervision and COVID-19: Autoethnographies from four faculty across three continents

Doctoral students represent the fresh and creative intellectuals needed to address the many social, economic, political, health care, and education disparities that have been highlighted by the 2020 pandemic. Our work as doctoral student supervisors could not be more central nor vital than it was at the beginning of, during, and following the pandemic. Written during the pandemic of 2020, the purpose of this paper was to describe how four faculty from three continents navigated their relationships with doctoral students in the research and dissertation phase of their doctoral programs. Using a common set of prompts, four faculty members each wrote an autoethnography of our experience as doctoral student supervisors. Even though our basic advising philosophies and contexts were quite different, we learned about the possibility and power of resilience, empathy, and mentoring online. Our findings imply that new online practices could be closely examined and retained after the pandemic to expand the reach, depth and impact of doctoral education.

Bringing the critical into doctoral supervision: What can we learn from debates about epistemic justice and the languaging of research?

In this article, we discuss how, as supervisors in largely Anglophone university contexts in England, we are trying to develop supervisory practices informed by the discussions of epistemic (in)justice and the languaging of research. Having rehearsed these discussions, and considered the opportunities provided by research integrity policy formulations in our context, we conceptualise doctoral supervision critically, interculturally, and ecologically. We then report our efforts to shape the supervisory agenda so that, in the local spaces available to us, the shaping influences of the epistemic and linguistic in the wider research environment are problematised. In particular, we focus on two strands of our thinking, namely: a) the implications of epistemic hierarchies and the value of an intercultural ethic for the transknowledging at the heart of doctoral research; and b) the role of language(s) in research and the value of a translingual researcher mindset. In both strands, our thinking has moved from a more instrumental to a more critical stance regarding research, researcher thinking, and supervision. This development highlights some of the complexities involved in developing critical intercultural praxis for doctoral supervision. We conclude with recommendations—aimed at all those involved in doctoral supervision—to facilitate a critical intercultural supervisory culture.