Abstract:

The development of a theoretical frame for doctoral thesis supervisors is a relatively new area, and the responsibility for managing it lies on different parts of the university’s organisation like the doctoral schools. Since 2008 a supervision-approaching framework has been developed and subsequently been refined. This framework defines five types of approaches according to which effective supervisors develop their activities:
1) the functional approach (emphasising performativity ),
2) enculturation (offering a sense of belonging),
3) critical thinking (emphasising intellectual rigour),
4) emancipation (which has a core value of enabling the candidate to become autonomous), and
5) relationship development (which has the core value of altruism).

Specially for functional approaches, team supervision is a way of performance. In fact, with the increasing demand for doctoral education, team supervision, understood as “the formally agreed supervision of a research student by two or more academics in doctoral programmes” (Olmos-López & Sunderland (2017)), has become common practice.

If supervision with one academic is complex, having two supervisors makes this process challenging to be specifically investigated in research. However, team supervision is under-explored in the academic literature. Particularly interesting is the need of harmony between both supervisors. This demands special attention when main supervisors mostly drawn from academia, but co-supervisors can draw from industry, professional and creative practice.

Taking into account the above mentioned aspects, this work is focused on the description of the team supervision model in the field of Sciences in the University of the Basque County. The methodology consists on quantifying the percentage of doctoral thesis that is team supervised for the last ten years. Additionally, the precedence of the co-supervisors is used to evaluate the evolution of this practice. The results reveal a trend according with the increasing internationalization of the doctoral studies in UPV/EHU.

References:
[1] Pamela Olmos-López & Jane Sunderland (2017) Doctoral supervisors’ and supervisees’ responses to co-supervision, Journal of Further and Higher Education, 41:6, 727-740, DOI: 10.1080/0309877X.2016.1177166

Keywords:

Doctoral supervisors, doctoral team-supervision, doctoral internationalization, doctoral industrialization.