Researcher Education and Development Scholarship Conference

Dr Kay Guccione (ORCID), University of Glasgow, UK, Dr Sian Vaughan (ORCID), Birmingham City University, UK, and Natasha Kitano (ORCID) Queensland University of Technology, Australia

The Supervisor Development Reading Group (SDRG) is a free, monthly reading group for people who develop Research Supervisors and cultures of good supervision. After two years of running it, we have begun to analyse the value it adds for the developer community.

Origins of the Supervisor Development Reading Group

The group began in 2023 as a collaboration between authors – Kay (Supervisor Developer, and informal academic), and Sian (Academic, and informal supervisor developer) – as a way to engage in collegial meetings of the supervisor development community across disciplines and role types, and support each other to engage with the literature regularly. Our meetings were consciously designed to be developmental, inclusive and cooperative; it was ok to not understand a theory, methodology or outcome. The group learned together, pooling expertise on the discipline-crossing research traditions, that make up the supervisor literature base.

International partnership

After hosting a UK SDRG session in 2023, Natasha (Supervisor Developer and Academic) was approached by Kay and Sian about hosting an Australia and New Zealand time-zone version of the SDRG. This created an opportunity for Australian and New Zealand participants, many of whom were keen to join the discussions, to participate at a time that better suited their region. What began as a UK initiative, now connects colleagues across multiple regions, demonstrating how initiatives like the SDRG can create space for collaborative learning and professional dialogue. To maintain the continuity between her monthly reading groups, Natasha began keeping ‘hairdressing notes’, which were small reminders of previous conversations. The participants shared many experiences on topics like mentors who had shaped their thinking and institutional contexts influencing their work. These notes helped build rapport within the group and contributed to the gradual development of a supportive community, traversing professional and personal support.

Collaborative auto-ethnography

We used a collaborative auto-ethnography to systematically record, analyse and understand our ‘tangled experiences’ that is our being “process and product of an ensemble performance, not a solo act” (Chang et al., 2013, p. 11). The study’s collaborative approach allowed us to discuss and reflect both independently and together, on the personal, and collective benefits of the SDRG from our relative positions and perspectives (Bochner and Ellis, 2022).

Firstly, we recorded our three-person group discussion in which we covered topics we had pre-defined by email and cross-questioned each other to draw out comparative experiences. Following this, we individually annotated the transcript to elaborate and reflect more deeply. Analysis to date, is based on two research questions:

 (1) How does SDRG benefit the developer community?

 (2) How does SDRG enhance research cultures?

The findings below speak to both research questions, noting that the benefits, experienced by the three coordinators and their participants in the developer community, flow out into their teams, classrooms and strategic work as developers, formally and informally, cascading at the cultural level.

Finding 1: Generating strategic ‘Pull Impact’

Traditionally, ‘research impact’ work is conceptualised as a ‘push’ dynamic whereby the authors of published works generate channels for their findings to influence others’ policy and practice. (Chubb and Reed 2018). Through the SDRG, we regularly engage in, what we are terming, ‘pull impact’. By occupying a third space between research and practice, we are translating others’ research findings directly for our development strategies and activities (Guerin, 2021; Freeman and Price 2024).  From our data, we are “systematically and intentionally pulling down impact from the literature”.

Finding 2: Boundary spanning

Through the SDRG, we are crossing international, organisational, role type, and disciplinary lines to develop critical and contextual understanding(s) of ‘good practice’. This is visible in the data as a gain in understanding of comparative global policies and practices in researcher education and supervisory practice, as well as a developing appreciation of disciplinary lenses leading to greater appreciation for and ability to critique our readings. For example:

“…I didn’t know if the UK was similar to Europe. I didn’t know if the UK was similar to Australia and then it turns out. You know, people are people. The relationships between students and supervisors absolutely are the same. The contexts are different. The policies might be different. The way we position people is different, but the fundamental nature of a lasting, trusting relationship…”

“And when you’re working really quickly, you only ever get to that first thought or second thought, don’t you? Don’t sit down and really interrogate a paper. You read it and think, what can I draw from that? Let me do something quickly with it. But other people look at things in different ways. So I think that the the multidisciplinarity of it […] it gets me to read things that are slightly outside my discipline…”

Finding 3: Intentionality

Through SDRG we are signalling a collective desire to iteratively reimagine our practice in a way that responds to the shifting and rising demands placed on contemporary supervisors (and hence, supervisor developers). We are creating legitimate and recognised spaces for interrogation of practice, what we select to draw into our practice to take place. This brings ways of developing supervisors out of a ‘hidden curriculum’, and into a more accessible learning space. As visible in the data below:

“… quite often when people introduce themselves […] they’re new to a role or they’ve just been given additional responsibility for supervisor development. So I think they do come along, intending to try and sort of find their feet. ”

“…it’s become a safe space to and I know I’m very guilty of this, to actually to be quite critical about some of the ideas that are out there and about some of the papers. And therefore also to be critical about our own practices and the institutional constraints that we work in.”

Finding 4: Peer support

The SDRG enables us, as evidenced in the data below, to find creative ways to interpret and deploy new knowledge to enhance working cultures, and at the same time withstand the pressures and tensions of working within our current university cultures and national tensions over funding and our role in society.

“There’s a validation that it is that sense checking, it is that reassurance. It’s feeling that if you are working in quite an isolated role or with a big other remit as well, having conversations with people who get it, where you don’t have to explain the context, I think is really valuable.”

“…you can only do that productively if there is this atmosphere created of mutual respect. Acknowledgement of difference. It always makes me think back to one of my favourite quotes from bell hooks’ work around beloved community and difference and it is that I suppose the slightly unwritten rules of engagement.”

 Working conclusions

With more analytical rounds to follow, the data we present are preliminary. We consider that the SDRG plays a role in legitimising boundary-spanning work that leads to ‘pull impact’. We can evidence how developers gain professional, personal and career development benefits, which they then cascade out to supervisors, and on to create positive experiences and outcomes for postgraduate researchers.