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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Higher Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1521452
This article is part of the Research TopicDemystifying Academic Writing in Higher Education: A Process View on Academic Textual ProductionView all 8 articles
Four Supervisory Mentoring Practices that Support Online Doctoral Students' Academic Writing
Provisionally accepted- 1University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada
- 2Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
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Academic writing in both face-to-face and online environments is often fraught with tension, emotion, and challenge. The quality of doctoral students' online academic writing experiences can be a difference maker in the successful completion of programs. This study examines how mentoring practices support online doctoral students' academic writing, building on prior research that identified five enabling factors of effective online doctoral supervision, with a focus on cultivating a collaborative online community of support for academic writing. Using a comparative case study approach, interviews with five recently completed faculty of education doctoral graduates at a large university in western Canada were analyzed to identify four mentoring supervisory practices that support online doctoral students' academic writing:(a) fostering a trusting, supportive community of practice; (b) engaging in regular synchronous meetings combined with iterative cycles of mentoring and scaffolding; (c) using coursework and program structures as a springboard for writing; and (d) providing diverse models of academic writing. Central to the effectiveness of the four online supervisory mentoring practices was the notion of trust which enabled students to develop their academic writing skills, scholarly identities, and successfully complete their doctoral degrees. This study is significant for identifying supervisory mentoring practices that led to students' sense of gratitude and flourishing, further highlighting how crucial relational trust is for online doctoral students' academic writing. This study is significant in that it identifies the supervisory mentoring practices that foster a led to the doctoral students' sense of gratitude and flourishing among online doctoral students, reinforcing the pivotal role of , further highlighting the importance of the relational mentorship in their academic writing development. for online doctoral students.
Keywords: Online doctoral supervision, Academic writing, Supervisory practices, graduate mentorship, Graduate student writing
Received: 01 Nov 2024; Accepted: 07 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Becker, Jacobsen and Friesen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sandra Lynn Becker, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada
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