Supervisor seminar: Pedagogical and ethical challenges in STEM tutoring

In the last three decades, efforts to monitor, control and change doctoral education have intensified on institutional, national and supranational levels. As a consequence, doctoral education in many countries has been reformed and restructured to, among other things, strengthen students´ rights, improve supervision and other forms for support, lower attrition, increase transparency and predictability, and provide more generic skills training. Many observers have concluded this process of educational formalisation has rendered doctoral education more orderly with better scaffolding and modern forms of supervision. Absent from these accounts, however, are the effects of the parallel process of research ‘projectification’, i.e. the increased use of performance- and competition-based funding schemes to govern research and researchers (i.e. supervisors). This intentional promotion of ‘academic capitalism’ (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997), has led to a situation of hypercompetition and market-like behaviour of universities and individual researchers alike. Much research in STEM today takes place in groups that function much as ‘quasi-firms’ (Etzkowitz, 2003), working on externally funded projects while simultaneously drafting proposals to not only fund future research but also themselves. It is in such circumstances we find the majority of doctoral students and supervisors: in a tension-field between tradition, educational formalisation and research projectification. This presentation will discuss the pedagogical and ethical challenges for supervisors under these conditions but also the opportunities for student learning and academic growth

About the speaker
Anders Sonesson is a biologist and educationalist and currently an associate professor at Lund University’s department for Educational Sciences, where he served as director for the Division of Higher Education Development between 2017 and 2025. He has taught Lund University’s courses on doctoral supervision for two decades and been member of several working groups for and around doctoral education, including the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institution’s (SUHF) expert group. His has published on topics such as the consequences of research projectification and educational formalization for supervision and the doctorate, supervision in the fine and applied arts, and the evaluation practices of doctoral examination committees.