Scholarly Community of Practice

This session focuses on the engagement of supervisors with their academic community and the need to induct their graduates into this community. It engages supervisors in ways to nurture and sustain their membership within the academic community.

Good supervision requires multiple skills and practices, but crucially, it requires that supervisors are themselves active researchers. Supervisors might already be expert researchers or they might be novices who have just achieved their doctorates and are just starting their own research trajectories. The key is active engagement.

Spend fifteen minutes completing this questionnaire in as much detail as possible. This is for self-reflection purposes only and you will not be asked to submit your responses.

1. Do you feel like you have good access to the essential journals in your field? Which are these? Do you find the time and space to keep up with key literature in your field?
2. Have there been challenges (shifts, schisms, radically new approaches) to the dominant theories, concepts, methods or approaches in your field? What happened as a result? Is your field quite stable or are there frequent shifts in schools of thought?
3. Who is your immediate academic community? List people with whom you can discuss issues related to your field. These may be colleagues at work or people with whom you engage online or at conferences.
4. How active are you in your academic community? How did you become a member of this community? How do you engage with this community? Forms of engagement might include examining for other universities, publishing your research in journals and books, presenting at conferences, reviewing for journals. Are these relevant to your practice? Are there others?

Perhaps these questions have highlighted your areas of strength and areas for further development. What actions can you take to enhance your own development?

On this module’s forum, please share your responses to any of the following questions. Let’s start a conversation.

1. What is a scholar in your view? What does scholarship mean to you?
2. What does it mean to be active in an academic community?
3. How can you introduce your students into this community? Is this part of the role of the supervisor?
4. What might a PG supervisor’s support network provide? How can such a network be built?
5. Have you had experience of academic jealousies? What were the effects and was it resolved? How can you contribute to a more respectful and generous support network?