Peer mentoring groups for supervisor development in doctoral education: CRADLE Seminar Series
10 March 2020
Updated 16.3.20: this seminar has now been cancelled.
The quality of supervision in doctoral education has received increasing attention from institutions and policy makers across the globe. Developing and ensuring quality in higher education practices is increasingly regarded as a collaborative endeavour rather than individual faculty members’ private responsibilities. Join us as Prof. Anne Line Wittek (University of Oslo) explores peer mentoring groups as a collaborative learning strategy for supervisor development in doctoral education.
In this seminar, I will shed light on one specific collaborative learning strategy called peer mentoring groups (PMGs). With a focus on improving practices, PMGs involve small groups that explore work-related challenges. The context is a national research school working towards the development of research-based competencies for PhD candidates and their supervisors, within the municipal health and care sector. Supervisors from across Scandinavia met each semester and participated in PMGs in which specific challenges from their everyday practices were discussed according to a specific PMG model.
The questions to be discussed in the seminar are as follows: What types of challenges do the supervisors identify? How are these challenges and tensions unpacked during peer mentoring sessions? In what ways are the potentialities for learning enhanced or hindered in these sessions? Empirically, I report from an ongoing large-scale project (PeTS) funded by the Research Council of Norway, with the overarching aim of investigating collaborative teaching and supervision practices in Norwegian higher education. The national research school is one of several case studies included in the larger project. The seminar will present empirical examples through which the relational constitution of learning potentials within PMGs might be perceived in concrete terms.
