Holding space for reflective supervisory praxis

Praxis is the bread and butter of education professionals. We know some stuff, we do some stuff, we think about the stuff we did in light of the stuff we know (and perhaps the stuff we have assumed), we develop modified stuff to do. And so on. If that sounds like a flippant rehash of Kolb’s reflective cycle (1984) or Argyris and Schön (1974) double loop learning, that is, of course, because it is.

This blogpost reflects on the praxis of two intertwined sets of education professionals – Doctoral Supervisors and Researcher Developers. In this instance, the Supervisors were working towards UK Council for Graduate Education (UKCGE) Supervisor Recognition Award for their reflective supervisory practice. The Researcher Developers (us) were facilitating a reading/writing/discussion group to help Supervisors find time, scholarly literature, and a peer community to do the difficult work of reflection and writing. For the most part we are going to take for granted the importance of supervisory pedagogy (richly covered in, for example Taylor and Kiley, 2025) and instead focus on our own practitioner research “from within the doing of professional practice” (Simon, 2022).