Researcher Education and Development Scholarship Conference

Dr Ruth Currie, Lecturer in Researcher Development, University of the West of Scotland, UK, and Dr Joanna Royle, Researcher Development Manager, University of Glasgow, UK

Praxis is the bread and butter of education professionals. We know some stuff, we do some stuff, we think about the stuff we did in light of the stuff we know (and perhaps the stuff we have assumed), we develop modified stuff to do. And so on. If that sounds like a flippant rehash of Kolb’s reflective cycle (1984) or Argyris and Schön (1974) double loop learning, that is, of course, because it is.

This blogpost reflects on the praxis of two intertwined sets of education professionals – Doctoral Supervisors and Researcher Developers. In this instance, the Supervisors were working towards UK Council for Graduate Education (UKCGE) Supervisor Recognition Award for their reflective supervisory practice. The Researcher Developers (us) were facilitating a reading/writing/discussion group to help Supervisors find time, scholarly literature, and a peer community to do the difficult work of reflection and writing.  For the most part we are going to take for granted the importance of supervisory pedagogy (richly covered in, for example Taylor and Kiley, 2025) and instead focus on our own practitioner research “from within the doing of professional practice” (Simon, 2022).

We work from the starting point that Supervisors themselves go through the exercise of holding space for the doctoral researchers they support and that we, as Researcher Developers, have a unique opportunity to offer the same for Supervisors. In doing so, we think not only about what needs doing in the ‘space holding’, but also the values and experiences that inform it. Praxis.

Holding the space

To dig into the writing group itself please feel invited to read about the next iteration happening this Spring. In brief, it is a 90-mins online group that meets fortnightly over 8-months. Key to the project it is open to Supervisors and Associate Supervisors (such as Postdoctoral Research Staff and Technicians who support PGRs) all over Scotland (although non-Scotland based supervisors working towards the award are welcome to join) and is co-led by a team of 5-6 Researcher Developers from different Scottish universities. This cross-institutional pooling shares the workload, increases the participant pool, and adds value to the Supervisor Development programmes available from participating organisations. The group had around 50 regular members (approximately 25 on any given week), who fed back that not only did it help them to apply for the UKCGE Award, it also made them more creative in their supervision; opened their eyes to a new literature; reduced their feelings of isolation; and equipped them to play a part in improving research culture. All in all, a great success: but what made the group work so well?

Supervisor Development as Practitioner Research

It is far from an original observation that the nature of doctoral supervision has changed in recent decades (e.g. Adkins 2009, Guarimata-Salinas et al, 2023). Increasing numbers and diversity in the PhD population, pressures for timely completion, and a postgraduate wellbeing crisis, are only some of the variables that modulated a relatively free and easy informality into a more professionalised relationship. Concurrently, the growing recognition that effective supervision is both a set of pedagogies and a learned praxis has underpinned a rapidly growing field of Supervisor professional development (e.g. Lee, 2018, Polkinghorne, 2023). Many HEIs now offer mandatory training, and often a suite of professional development spaces for Supervisors. The UKCGE Writing Group was both an opportunity to make a contribution to supervisory development, and to better understand the diversity of ways that Scotland-based Researcher Developers approach support for Supervisors.

Read it. Write it. Discuss it.

Recognising supervision as pedagogy and a learned praxis, and thinking about creating the space for this, made us reflect on our own work and how we nurture it. We were not starting from a blank slate: there are already robust methodologies for holding scholarly space. For example, journal clubs are a well-established mode of learning through sharing critical perspectives (Deenadayalan et al, 2008; Honey and Baker, 2011; Bhagyalakshm et al, 2016), mechanisms such as Shut Up and Write (Mewburn, 2011; Micsinszki and Yeung, 2021; Proulx et al 2023) and the Power Hour of Writing (Zihms and Reid Mackie, 2023) privilege the protected time to think through the mechanism of writing within a supportive peer environment.  And for ourselves, we were also curious about how co-leading the group might operate as a Community of Practice (Wenger, 1998; Abbot and Lee, 2022), where the shared ownership and accountability of resources played a pivotal role for both the content available for Supervisors to utilise, and the leadership of the project across different HEI environments. The design of this initiative interleaved all three of these models, allowing time to read (like journal clubs), to write (like Shut Up and Write) and to discuss (as in Communities of Practice), to grow in shared praxis.

Drawing threads from these methodological underpinnings we identified three things that enabled us as Researcher Developers to effectively ‘hold space’ for the Supervisors and for ourselves: we made it spacious, made it praxis, and made it culture:

Making it spacious

It may seem obvious to state, but when holding space, the environment needs to be very spacious.  Providing ‘just enough’ content and ‘just enough’ framework that Supervisors had a starting point for discussion and knew what to do, and, using repetition in communications and formats to minimise decision fatigue. The less we did, the more space was available. By holding back from over facilitating, we framed the sessions with the self-organising values of open space technology (OST; Owen, 2008) allowing their shared identity of ‘Supervisor’ to determine the direction of discussion, and the relevance of the material to their practice.

Making it praxis

As the group progressed, we realised that we had incorrect assumptions about how confident Supervisors would be at reading and analysing supervisory practice literature and found that a central aspect of our facilitative role was raising the visibility of a new-to-them field of scholarship. Turning to our own praxis, the immediate temptation was to curate a body of literature, as you might in a traditional journal club. However, the purpose of the UKCGE Award is for Supervisors to do the symbiotic work of reading and thinking about writing as it relates to their own practice; much as the Supervisor would advise the doctoral researchers that they work with to do. That being said, we didn’t want to simply enable an interesting discussion then abandon Supervisors to find their own reading outside of their specialist research area. We introduced a shared literature bank to complement the static material available on the UKCGE website. This peer-to-peer scaffold mirrored the pared back approach to facilitating the sessions: offering space for people to engage in ways that made sense for them, within a common framework.

Making it culture

When we talk about praxis in the context of pedagogy, it’s likely educational practitioners know what we mean. What may sometimes be less explicit but none-the-less core to our work as Researcher Developers is the research culture lens on our praxis. The dual sector lenses of the UKRI New Deal for Postgraduate Researchers and the People Culture and Environment indicators for REF 2029 are currently drawing attention to the importance of scaffolding and recognising a culture of excellence in the interpersonal practices of all actors in the research ecosystem. It became increasingly apparent from both feedback evaluations and through our ongoing work with Supervisors, that the protected space to reflect and share was valuable within our shared supervisory environments. Looking forward, it is important for us to consider how Higher Education explicitly values Supervisors’ meaningful reflective pedagogy, not simply recognising numbers of doctorates completed within time limits. For Researcher Developers, this includes facilitating development environments that support the research ecosystem to consider excellence as a process of inclusion (Henley and Higgins, 2020). For both, it is essential that protected time is a cultural norm for the thinking as well as the doing of holding space together. Praxis!