PhD supervision strategies in a cross-cultural setting: Enriching learning opportunities

Abstract

Recent research findings highlight the importance of supervisors’ feedback aimed at helping students how to learn by themselves to develop their thinking. Responding to the current focus on internationalization of universities, this article explores how PhD supervisors can help fostering critical thinking. Based on qualitative interviews with four African double degree doctoral students, as well as participant observation, the article highlights reflections regarding different supervisory strategies a PhD supervisor faces in a cross-cultural academic setting, and the importance of meta-communication in addressing them. Results showed that most of the students appreciated the more informal student-supervisor relationship, highlighted through collaborative fieldwork experiences, as well as the use of visual tools for stimulating creative and critical thinking. However, results also showed that a coaching supervision style was experienced as unclear and scary by one student, highlighting that the supervision process is a mutual learning process in need of recurrent adaptation.