Mentoring international postgraduate students and early career researchers through transnational telecollaboration: a supervisor’s autoethnography

The high-calibre education in Australia has attracted overseas students to pursue a Higher Degree by Research (HDR) every year. While HDR training is crucial for all HDR students, international students are relatively vulnerable due to the challenging demands of academic writing and research, couple...

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Main Author: Chen, Julian
Format: Journal Article
Published: 2023
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/93062
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author Chen, Julian
author_facet Chen, Julian
author_sort Chen, Julian
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description The high-calibre education in Australia has attracted overseas students to pursue a Higher Degree by Research (HDR) every year. While HDR training is crucial for all HDR students, international students are relatively vulnerable due to the challenging demands of academic writing and research, coupled with the cultural and language barriers different from their own. To worsen the situation, the global pandemic forced face-to-face supervision into remote supervision mode, thus exacerbating students’ social-emotional learning state even further. This article transports readers to a telecollaborative project that I initiated amid the pandemic through an autoethnographic approach. Propelled by the urgent need to better support supervisees beyond boundaries, I enacted a transnational telecollaboration to mentor international HDR students to position themselves as emerging researchers. Informed by participatory action research (PAR), I guided my junior colleagues (early career researchers (ECRs)) to conduct HDR needs analysis, hold HDR training webinars, build a virtual community via Facebook, and shadow HDR students throughout their reflection journaling via Google Docs. This viable supervision model broke down the power structure by creating an ecologically balanced framework, thus promoting collaboration rather than isolation.
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spelling curtin-20.500.11937-930622023-09-19T02:55:03Z Mentoring international postgraduate students and early career researchers through transnational telecollaboration: a supervisor’s autoethnography Chen, Julian The high-calibre education in Australia has attracted overseas students to pursue a Higher Degree by Research (HDR) every year. While HDR training is crucial for all HDR students, international students are relatively vulnerable due to the challenging demands of academic writing and research, coupled with the cultural and language barriers different from their own. To worsen the situation, the global pandemic forced face-to-face supervision into remote supervision mode, thus exacerbating students’ social-emotional learning state even further. This article transports readers to a telecollaborative project that I initiated amid the pandemic through an autoethnographic approach. Propelled by the urgent need to better support supervisees beyond boundaries, I enacted a transnational telecollaboration to mentor international HDR students to position themselves as emerging researchers. Informed by participatory action research (PAR), I guided my junior colleagues (early career researchers (ECRs)) to conduct HDR needs analysis, hold HDR training webinars, build a virtual community via Facebook, and shadow HDR students throughout their reflection journaling via Google Docs. This viable supervision model broke down the power structure by creating an ecologically balanced framework, thus promoting collaboration rather than isolation. 2023 Journal Article http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/93062 10.37074/jalt.2023.6.2.23 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ fulltext
spellingShingle Chen, Julian
Mentoring international postgraduate students and early career researchers through transnational telecollaboration: a supervisor’s autoethnography
title Mentoring international postgraduate students and early career researchers through transnational telecollaboration: a supervisor’s autoethnography
title_full Mentoring international postgraduate students and early career researchers through transnational telecollaboration: a supervisor’s autoethnography
title_fullStr Mentoring international postgraduate students and early career researchers through transnational telecollaboration: a supervisor’s autoethnography
title_full_unstemmed Mentoring international postgraduate students and early career researchers through transnational telecollaboration: a supervisor’s autoethnography
title_short Mentoring international postgraduate students and early career researchers through transnational telecollaboration: a supervisor’s autoethnography
title_sort mentoring international postgraduate students and early career researchers through transnational telecollaboration: a supervisor’s autoethnography
url http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/93062