Doctoral Students’ Academic Supervision: A Systematic Review of Approaches to Conceptualization and Empirical Analysis

Abstract

The article presents a systematic review of theoretical and methodological approaches to the conceptualization and empirical study of doctoral students’ supervision. Three approaches (mentoring, doctoral student-centered, and environmental) are distinguished depending on the main responsibility for the result. The mentoring approach attributes the responsibility for the result to the supervisor. This approach is generally associated with the so-called «apprentice model», which understands the doctoral student as a «neophyte» introduced to the academic world by the supervisor. The doctoral student-centered approach is characterized by imposing the responsibility mainly on the doctoral student. This approach assumes a more active role of the doctoral student and goes back to the models of student-centered pedagogy. The environmental approach focuses on studying the role of the environment and on the issues related to the academic and social integration of doctoral students. All these approaches notably have a number of limitations due to their concentration on certain factors of the educational process and less attention to the dynamic and relative nature of various aspects of academic supervision and its relationship with the effectiveness of doctoral training. There is substantiated the importance of developing a relational approach, which would synthesize the key points of the three approaches considered, and assume a distributed model of responsibility within the academic supervision. As it understands «learning alliances» more broadly than pairs or teams of scientific supervisors and graduate students, this approach focuses not only on the activity of individual actors, but also on the system of relationships between them.