These strategies draw upon life history and time mapping methodologies that were primarily designed to improve the supervision of Indigenous and transcultural doctoral students researching in the Humanities and Social Sciences. These supervision pedagogies were developed around the central premise that when we supervise doctoral students, we embark on a shared journey of exploration into a particular research area shaped not only by students’ intellectual curiosity, professional experiences and desire to understand more about a particular issue or phenomenon but also intimately shaped by their own life journeys and their histories, geographies and cultural knowledges. So too, as supervisors, we bring our own cultural, linguistic, historical and geographical understandings into our own research and our interactions with students.
The meeting will begin with a presentation about my collaborative research that applied three Indigenous knowledge approaches to doctoral education to develop additional supervision strategies that link life histories and research together through discussion prompts supervisors can use to help students unpack their life histories and through the creation of time maps by students and supervisors. We will then have an open discussion about the implications of this presentation for supporting academics to think critically and creatively about how histories, geographies and cultural and linguistic knowledges can be actively and sensitively used in supervision.
Speaker:
Professor Catherine Manathunga is the Co-Director of the UniSC Indigenous and Transcultural Research Centre. Catherine is a Professor of Education Research in the School of Education and Tertiary Access at the University of the Sunshine Coast. Catherine is an historian who draws together expertise in historical, sociological and cultural studies research to bring an innovative perspective to higher education research. She has worked for more than 35 years in universities throughout Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand as an historian, an academic developer and an Education academic.
Programme
10.00-10.30: Welcome and introduction
10.30-12.00: Presentation and facilitated discussion by Professor Catherine Manathunga, University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia
12.00-12.30: Lunch
12.30-13:45: Reflection and discussion in the two SIG groups facilitated by the SIG coordinators
13.45-14.00: Wrapping up