Towards a Person-Centred Discourse in Doctoral Supervisor Development

This chapter employs critical discourse analysis to examine the language of national and institutional policy and practice documents. These texts inform the design of doctoral supervisor continuing professional development at one UK university and appear to reflect a bias favouring regulatory processes over people. Although rhetoric emphasises systems and functional interactions between supervisors and doctoral researchers, this study identifies themes that frequently relate to personhood. It proposes a model of supervisor development that engages with disciplinary knowledge, the workplace and institution through person-centred pedagogy.