How can PhD supervisors help foster independent and critical student work in a multi-cultural setting?

In a recent analysis of doctoral students learning process, Odena and Burgess found that “Supervisors’ most helpful feedback appeared to be aimed at helping students learn how to learn by themselves, supporting the development of their critical thinking and writing” (2017, p. 578). I think this is an interesting finding, and a relevant starting point for questioning how supervisors can help foster independent at critical student work. It has become a key question for my own development as a (PhD) supervisor. Given the university focus on internationalization, I want to explore this with regards to supervision of PhD students who come from more authoritarian academic traditions. This article focuses on the following question:How can Nordic supervisors help facilitate independent and critical thinking in students from more hierarchical and authoritarian academic traditions

PhD supervision strategies in a cross-cultural setting: Enriching learning opportunities

Recent research findings highlight the importance of supervisors’ feedback aimed at helping students how to learn by themselves to develop their thinking. Responding to the current focus on internationalization of universities, this article explores how PhD supervisors can help fostering critical thinking. Based on qualitative interviews with four African double degree doctoral students, as well as participant observation, the article highlights reflections regarding different supervisory strategies a PhD supervisor faces in a cross-cultural academic setting, and the importance of meta-communication in addressing them. Results showed that most of the students appreciated the more informal student-supervisor relationship, highlighted through collaborative fieldwork experiences, as well as the use of visual tools for stimulating creative and critical thinking. However, results also showed that a coaching supervision style was experienced as unclear and scary by one student, highlighting that the supervision process is a mutual learning process in need of recurrent adaptation

Wild food collection and nutrition under commercial agriculture expansion in agriculture-forest landscapes

Wild food constitutes a substantial part of household food consumption around the world, but rapid land use changes influence the availability of wild foods, which has implications for smallholders' food and nutrient intake. With increasing commercial agriculture and biodiversity conservation efforts in forested tropical regions, many shifting cultivation systems are being intensified and their extent restricted. Studies examining the consequences of such pressures commonly overlook the diminishing role of wild food. Using a combination of collection diaries, participant observation, remote sensing, and interviews, we examined the role of agriculture-forest landscapes in the provision of wild food in rapidly transforming shifting cultivation communities in northern Laos. We found that wild food contributed less to human diets in areas where pressure on land from commercial agriculture and conservation efforts was more intense. Our results demonstrate that increasing pressure on land creates changes in the shifting cultivation landscape and people's use thereof with negative effects on the quality of nutrition, including protein deficiency, especially in communities adjacent to core conservation areas. Our study shows the importance of adopting a more nutrition-sensitive approach to the linkages between commercial agriculture and biodiversity conservation (and the policies that promote them), wild food provisioning, and food security

Planning for sustainable tourism in the Nordic region : Pan-Nordic analysis of Regional Tourism Strategies for rural areas

This project looks at the challenges facing the development of a more sustainable rural tourism in the Nordic regions. Our key interest is understanding the degree to which regional tourism strategies are used by the tourism actors, policy makers and local communities as tools to balance positive economic and social development in rural areas with the environmental or social burden of the tourism. What are the main concerns and interests in the different tourism planning documents? What visions for tourism development do they express, and what role do sustainability concerns play in the plans envisaged? Although this study was designed in 2018, prior to the current Covid-19 crisis and its wide-ranging impact on tourism, it contains results which are relevant to the changes in tourism planning taking place across all parts of the Nordic region in the wake of the pandemic