Most research into research supervision practice focuses on functional, collegial or problematic power-related experiences. Work developing the supervisory role concentrates on new supervisors, and on taught development and support programmes. Most literature on academics' professional learning concentrates on learning to be a university teacher…

Much research into postgraduate student learning focuses on generic issues of research development. Early work, reported here, uses threshold concept theories and theories of conceptual threshold crossing to focus on the learning and supervisory support of postgraduates researching in the fields of literature and art. This paper is based on…