Troubling the Hierarchy of Doctoral Supervision: Critical Inclusion through Decentred and Decolonising Pedagogies - Professor David Hyatt

The traditional approach to doctoral supervision has been one of a master/apprentice relationship, with the supervisor as an authoritative figure dispensing factual information and advice. However, this hierarchical arrangement can be problematic in that it can position the doctoral researcher as a ‘diminished scholar’, potentially patronised or infantilised. My work advocates a different, more collaborative, collegial relationship, creating spaces/opportunities to challenge assumptions and consider alternatives for transformation. I argue it should be about inducting candidates into an academic discourse community, viewing them as ‘becoming researchers’ and future leaders/experts in the field. So, decentering the power relationships in the doctorate means moving from hierarchy to partnership, and as supervisors our job is not to ‘skill up’ doctoral candidates but to help them to develop a repertoire for becoming a successful member of the academic community. We do this through a range of activities that reflect the activities that academics take part in - publishing, presenting, commenting on academics’ draft work, reflecting on what new understandings they have constructed, not what they have been taught by supervisors, and many other such practices.

A decentering approach is relevant for all doctoral candidates, but might have particular meaning for ‘international’ PGRs – often code for ‘non-Western/non-white’ students, whose experience is imbued with not only these pedagogic power relations but with the legacy of a colonial past still visible in our universities every day - in attitudes to PGR’s language use as deficit, in the literature / theoretical frames and methodologies PGRs are directed towards, in orientations to knowledge and pedagogy, and even in the names of our buildings and institutions. Traditional hierarchical approaches have often privileged approaches and knowledge developed in a western colonised context and ignored, marginalised, misrepresented, excluded and silenced voices and knowledges from other parts of the world, despite their being a rich history of knowledge, academia and pedagogy from those contexts often dating back thousands of years. Decolonizing doctoral pedagogies aim to redress this balance and truly reflect developments, methodologies and knowledges from the whole world, not simply those privileged by a western colonial view of the world.

So, in summary, a decentred pedagogy is one in which learners are invited to re-appropriate and take back ownership of their learning and to develop their academic repertoire. The doctoral process then becomes an invitation to critical inclusion in, and reimagining of, the academic discourse community. Decentred doctoral pedagogies could provide a safe or even resistant space for doctoral students to push back at the colonial/Eurocentric legacy of epistemic injustice (the dominance of Western forms of knowledge and the marginalization of other forms).

By Professor David Hyatt 

Director for Postgraduate Research Students