Developing a practice of supervision in university as a collective learning process

The point of departure of the paper is a university pedagogical course established with the purpose of strengthening the university teachers’ competence regarding the supervision of students working on their master’s thesis. The purpose of the course is furthermore to ensure the improvement of the framework surrounding the supervision process, both as regards the students and the teachers; to de-privatize the problems encountered by the individual teacher during the supervision; to ensure that students would be able to graduate within the timeframe of the education (the institutional economic perspective), and in general enhance the quality of the supervision. The participants of the course range from young associate professors with few experiences in supervision to professors with more than 25 years’ experience. One of the observations during the course is that it opens up the possibility of creating a transformation in the sense that it may change from being a top-down project (instigated by the Faculty) and develop into being a bottom-up project. It may hold the potential for developing collective learning processes assuming that good structures and frameworks can be created, as well as the facilitation of the collective reflective process of supervision. In a broader perspective it may have the potential of creating pedagogical change and innovation in an organizational perspective and could thus be an opportunity to benefit from diversity and the inherent professional involvement.