Supervision Beyond Borders: Perspectives on a Mutual Process of Becoming in Higher Education

In the context of problem-based higher education, students are typically supervised by a person referred to as either a teacher, a tutor, or a supervisor. The supervisor’s job is to facilitate students’ learning—most prominently by asking questions encouraging students to reflect and become active participants in the construction of knowledge. But supervision can take many different forms. The purpose of this paper is not to provide readers with a set of strict guidelines for how to supervise students in the context of problem-based higher education. Rather, we merely strive to show that even within the confines of the neoliberal university, there is room for maneuver to resist the status quo of commoditization and to carry out oppositional practices that may ultimately result in transformational learning. To accomplish this goal, we have employed a post-qualitative perspective allowing us to think supervision differently and describe ways in which the relation between supervisors and students may also be performed differently. We argue that while it is necessary to let go of the rigid thinking and professional expectations about what proper supervision is that confine supervision to a limited and limiting space, such oppositional practices can challenge hegemonic discourses and contest the legitimacy of the structures governing higher education today. More specifically, we draw on a patchwork of collaborative narratives written before, during, and after the fall semester of 2018 to describe a particular process of supervision that significantly affected the both of us, that is, the student as well as the supervisor.