Supervising doctoral students off-shore: Critical directions for discussion

There is growing evidence in higher educations that overseas students engaging in higher degree supervision in on-shore contexts learn to live within a supervisory discourse that is not their own. Further, the earlier work of Aspland (1999) confirms that students from overseas countries who are studying in Australia are more often than not positioned on the margins or outside their supervisory relationship, facing the dilemmas of cross-cultural supervision alone, feeling disempowered, fractured and having little access to a discourse that entrusts them to confront or resist inappropriate supervisory practices. These findings have implications for ongoing research that is investigating the practices of higher degree supervision in off-shore contexts. Further, it is timely to scrutinise how the politics and existing practices of supervision contribute to the perpetuation of structural, pedagogical and personal obstructions to inclusive supervision for candidates enrolled in doctoral programs conducted by Australian universities in off-shore contexts such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and India. Most of the current literature is largely premised on unquestioned assumptions and essentialist notions of supervision that imply all students share the same experiences within higher degree supervision whether they are domestic students or international students or whether they are completing doctoral studies in onshore or off-shore contexts. This paper raises questions concerning what is problematic about off-shore supervision and offers some critical directions in which to move to enhance the quality of off-shore supervision