PEDAGOGY OF RESEARCH SUPERVISION PEDAGOGY: A CONSTRUCTIVIST MODEL

Graduate research is an integral part of higher education in Pakistan but formal training in supervision is not included in any standard teacher training curriculum. Hence, supervisors usually depend on their own experiences of how they were supervised as graduate students and so every supervisor builds his/her own model of supervision. In this paper we have used Weimer (2006)'s ‘wisdom of practice scholarship' framework for describing our personal experiences of constructing a 3Ps-Pedagogical Research Supervision Model. Our model combines Zhao (2003)'s knowledge management approach to research supervision with Bybee and Landes' (1990) five E s instructional model for producing a written dissertation at a private university in Pakistan. It is informed by the constructivist philosophy of teaching and learning. Our basic purpose is to open for discussion the issues of research supervision in a context where the language of academic discourse is English but the students and supervisors hail from non-English speaking contexts.