Cultivating a Continuous “I Don’t Know”: Four Supervisory Mentoring Practices that Support Online Doctoral Students’ Academic Writing

Abstract Academic writing in both face-to-face and online environments is often a challenging experience for many faculty and students and can be fraught with tension and emotion. Thus, the quality of doctoral students’ online academic writing experiences can be a difference maker in successful completion of programs. Building on our earlier work identifying five enabling factors of successful online doctoral supervision, this study explores practices that enable factor five: Cultivating a collaborative online community of support for academic writing. Using a comparative case study approach, we analyzed the data from interviews with five recently completed doctoral graduates to determine the mentoring practices that cultivated for them, effective online doctoral student academic writing relationships. Findings identified four supervisory practices: (a) engaging in regularly scheduled meetings with iterative cycles of mentoring and scaffolding; (b) engaging students in a trusting, supportive community of practice; (c) using coursework and program structures as a springboard for writing; and (d) providing diverse models of academic writing. Central to the effectiveness of these practices was the notion of trust. Most of the doctoral students trusted their supervisor to engage in the four practices to support them. Through the provision of timely and thoughtful feedback and feedforward strategies from their community, doctoral students were able to develop their academic writing as a tool for communication, as a tool for thinking and creating new knowledge, and for developing their academic identities.