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Traces supervision practices in Australia from early graduate-expansion periods, highlights consequences of under-resourced departments and low institutional workload recognition, and contrasts poor supervision with supportive mentorship. Emphasizes democratic, interactive pedagogy, close reading of student work, and learning to provide constructive guidance that accounts for human dynamics, frustrations, and growth throughout the PhD.",{"@graph":69,"@context":122},[70,84,105],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":40,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/on-doctoral-education-how-to-supervise-a-phd-19852011/595497/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/on-doctoral-education-how-to-supervise-a-phd-19852011/595497.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"Well Done","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-31","2026-10-15",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":24},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",{"@type":106,"mainEntity":107},"FAQPage",[108,114,118],{"name":109,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":111},"Why does the document argue that PhD supervision is not just technical work?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"It frames supervision as a human educational relationship involving interaction, ups and downs, and constructive guidance, rather than a purely technical exercise.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"What problems did the author associate with earlier Australian PhD supervision?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"The author links weak supervision to underinvestment by departments, lack of workload recognition, and badly planned projects leading to high dropout rates.",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"How did the author’s own experience influence the perspective presented?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"The author describes a supportive supervisor and an active role in doctoral education discussions, leading to a view of supervision informed by democratic, interactive education principles and close engagement with students’ work.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},595497,1792963651,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":39,"category_name":40,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":24,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":24,"language":139,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":140,"faqs":141,"seo_title":142,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":143,"read_time":144,"preview_page_count":4},5909892210082,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/avatar/56001069da27c9f41e8?x-image-process=image/resize,m_fixed,w_180,h_180&k=1789614185077863061","A U S T R A L I A N U N I V E R S I T I E S ’ R E V I E W  \nOn doctoral education  \nHow to supervise a PhD, 1985–2011  \nRaewyn Connell University of Sydney  \nCatherine Manathunga  \nVictoria University, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand  \nIt’s more than 25 years ago now since I wrote that piece on postgraduate supervision for Vestes (Connell, 1985)1. I wrote it about 15 years after I’d finished my own PhD. I believe I was the first person to be awarded a PhD in my department at the end of the 1960s. So I came into the system at the time Australian universities were just building up a research capability, and particularly a higher degree capability.  \nPrior to the late 1940s, Australian universities, which had first been founded in the Gold Rush days of the 1850s, had basically been undergraduate institutions and finishing schools for the children of the local bourgeoisie, training places for lawyers and doctors, and some teachers.They’d set up the Australian National University at the end of the 1940s in order to have a graduate element in the Australian university system.That arrangement didn’t last long because other Australian universities introduced graduate education as well. Because Australian universities were basically a colonial outpost for the British universities, they took the model of higher degree study from Britain, not from Germany or the United States.  \nTherefore, the PhD was an independent piece of research, with a supervisor who was supposed to be a learned scholar in the field giving you guidance. No one really thought very much about what this involved as a form of education. And the result was a lot of very poor supervision, a lot of really badly planned PhD projects, and a very high dropout rate.You had departments that enrolled quite significant numbers of PhD students and  \nbasically gave them nothing, just expected them to get on with it and a few years later produce this magnificent thesis. So there was a lot of really bad practice because departments got kudos for having graduate students and invested very little in return. They didn’t count PhD supervision as any part of an academic’s workload either. It was as if you did this by a kind of divine aura around you as a scholar, and the student would stand close and get warmed by this.  \nThis approach was all very well if the student already knew how to do it, which a few did. I was lucky in that respect because I did know how to do it more or less. I had a good honours undergraduate programme and I had role models within my family and so forth. My relationship with my supervisor was very benign,and he was very supportive, but it was largely me kicking on and doing it, without any interaction with the other students in the department about our theses.Also, when I was a doctoral student, I was involved in the student protest movement of the 1960s, which had a pretty sharp critique of universities, and quite rightly so, as degree factories and tired bureaucratic institutions.  \nWhen I wrote the paper in 1985, I’d become a head of department. I was the professor of sociology at Macquarie at the time. I was supervising a number of graduate students, so I’d had to work this out from the other side. I also had a commitment to a democratic notion of education, an interactive notion of how you did education at this level, rather than a top-down one. And that certainly  \nvol. 54, no. 1, 2012 On doctoral education, Raewyn Connell and Catherine Manathunga 5  \nA U S T R A L I A N U N I V E R S I T I E S ’ R E V I E W  \nwas one of the things that stimulated me to think about supervision as important and as a quite difficult piece of educational work.  \nSo I sat down one day and thought about my discussions with my PhD students. They seemed to like my practice reasonably well; and here’s this whole university system that’s now putting through increasing numbers of PhD students, but doesn’t actually have a thought-out way of doing it. It wasn’t a piece of research; i","cbCaijJMiLJSI5il","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaijJMiLJSI5il","pdf",102564,"English","# On doctoral education\n## Historical context of PhD supervision in Australia\n## Supervision as a human relationship\n## Institutional practices and student outcomes","[{\"question\":\"Why does the document argue that PhD supervision is not just technical work?\",\"answer\":\"It frames supervision as a human educational relationship involving interaction, ups and downs, and constructive guidance, rather than a purely technical exercise.\"},{\"question\":\"What problems did the author associate with earlier Australian PhD supervision?\",\"answer\":\"The author links weak supervision to underinvestment by departments, lack of workload recognition, and badly planned projects leading to high dropout rates.\"},{\"question\":\"How did the author’s own experience influence the perspective presented?\",\"answer\":\"The author describes a supportive supervisor and an active role in doctoral education discussions, leading to a view of supervision informed by democratic, interactive education principles and close engagement with students’ work.\"}]","On doctoral education - How to supervise a PhD - 1985–2011 | PDF",1792081260,13]