Cirque du Research Supervision: New research approaches for research supervisor professional development.

How can we get research supervisors to reflect on their practice? The constantly changing agendas around Higher Education (HE) and specifically research degrees and candidature have generated a need for research supervisors to constantly re-evaluate their practice. Sometimes these agendas invite thinking outside the hegemony of both research supervision practices and research supervisor education/professional development practices. What other approaches could we take? Amidst many models for research supervision are a plethora of metaphoric references. People see the research as the journey and the research supervisor as the guide; the research as the challenge and the supervisor as the coach or trainer. These different metaphors provide lenses through which to explore research supervision and by which to develop a range of intervention strategies to enable research students to complete. Our contention is that we can use metaphors in an explicit way to engage supervisors with reflecting on their practice The rise in popularity of the performative paradigm inspires many different ways of thinking about research supervision. This workshop, inspired by conversations with Arts Design and Media academics, embraces performative research supervision from a Cirque du Soleil framework. Considering elements of research supervision as ?circus? acts creates an atmosphere of excitement and interest to advance this particular academic practice.