Seeking supervisors and PhD students for research into PhD supervision

At the Department of Science Education, KU, we are starting a qualitative research project about PhD education and PhD supervision, and we are seeking PhD students and supervisors to take part in this over a period of 10 months, from February to December 2012.

We are looking for some 10 pairs of supervisors and PhD students from different disciplines, supervisors with varied experience, PhDs in different phases of their study (1st, 2nd, 3rd year PhDs), male and female supervisors and PhDs, and different educational/national background of PhDs. Co-supervisors are also welcomed.

The benefits from taking part would be the learning gained from the reflections, that interviews into supervision and learning will bring. The idea is to observe and video record 1-3 regular scheduled supervision sessions, and beyond that, you should be prepared to allocate around three hours for interviews over ten months and a bit of time for communicating with the researcher about logistics.

The research will be carried out by PhD student Sofie Kobayashi. The methods for the study will be observations of supervision sessions, video-recordings, and interviews with PhD students and supervisors. The number of cases from start will be around 10 for a single round of observation, video-recording and interviews, but reduced to three cases for the longitudinal study with recurring observations and interviews. For the longitudinal study the plan is to have 3-4 observations and simultaneous video recordings of supervision sessions and 2-3 interviews over the 10 months’ period.

If you are interested to take part in this study or you would like to know more, kindly contact Sofie by email: , or phone: 3532 0346.

Sofie Kobayashi is a PhD student at the Department of Science Education. She has worked with supervision over the last 10 years as teacher and as an organizer of supervision courses at LIFE. She is co-author of the booklet ‘To lead the way’ (At lede vejen) published by the University of Copenhagen. She currently teaches supervision at LIFE Introduction course for PhD students and she is responsible for the supervision courses offered by IND. Camilla Rump is the principal supervisor and Brian Grout is co-supervisor.

Your help will be greatly appreciated.

Kind regards,

Sofie Kobayashi, PhD Student, IND

Camilla Rump, Associate Professor, IND

Brian Grout, Professor, IJØ