Academic Supervision as Pedagogical Work in Higher Education

Abstract

This essay concerns the dialogical-dialectic processes of academic supervision as an intentional educational praxis and as a potential scientific object, considering it is one of the foundational academic discourses in the teacher-researcher-professional training. However, the national legislation and politics don’t feature guidelines or specific training for this type of work. Also the naturalisation and individualization discourse of the reading-writing processes in Higher Education reinforce the ideologies that maintain the academic capitalism, a context in which university professors undertake several roles in intensive work loads. I emphasize the need for a linguistic education project that is committed to training on all sides.

Keywords
Academic Supervision; Teacher-Researcher-Professional Training; Discourse Genres; Linguistic Education; Pedagogical Work

Resumo

Ensaio sobre os processos dialógico-dialéticos de orientação acadêmica como práxis educativa intencional e como objeto científico potencial, sendo os gêneros discursivos acadêmicos axiais na formação de professores-pesquisadores-profissionais. Entretanto, no cenário nacional, a legislação e as políticas não apresentam diretrizes nem formação específica para esse trabalho, além de os discursos de naturalização e individualização dos processos de leitura-escrita no ensino superior reforçarem ideologias mantenedoras do capitalismo acadêmico, contexto no qual professores universitários assumem múltiplas funções em intensas cargas de trabalho. Sublinho a necessidade de um projeto de educação linguística comprometido com a formação omnilateral.

Palavras-chave
Orientação Acadêmica; Formação de Professores-Pesquisadores-Profissionais; Gêneros Discursivos; Educação Linguística; Trabalho Pedagógico

Preliminary Issues

In this essay, I dedicate myself to observing discursive practices specific to public higher education institutions and to reflecting on the challenges of the dialogic-dialectical processes of academic supervision that I have experienced so far, because they I am mobilized by them in the educational work produced at the university. Seeing them as the construction of historical subjects situated in the time-spaces of a society like ours – of neoliberal nature – is also seeking to understand the praxis invested by professors in undergraduate courses and in postgraduate programs aimed at training professors-researchers-professionals as a non-material production of collective life, considering that the legitimacy of knowledge produced through research depends on the “mediation of the intentionality of the historical-social existence of men.” (Severino, 2016, p. 27).

As a summary, I intend to observe and understand the processes of supervising, which I have called academic supervision, as an object of research and, therefore, as a social phenomenon in movement, recognizing the axiality of the genres of academic discourse, concrete statements, especially secondary ones (Bakhtin, 2011), as they are texts typical of the most complex, sophisticated and organized sociocultural coexistence that manifest “the tension between the forces of stabilization of ideologies and the forces of transformation of life” (Grillo, 2008, p. 65). If supervision is a pedagogical and, therefore, educational work (Saviani, 2021), if work and language develop organically following productive relationships (Volochínov, 2013), I find thus an extremely fruitful path to dialogue with researchers in the areas of education and language studies. In this debate, are included the linguistic education lato sensu and the linguistic education stricto sensu, as understood by Bagno and Rangel (2005), the latter having been produced in the academic discursive sphere.

Regarding the focus of this essay, the book A bússola do escrever: desafios e estratégias na orientação de tese e dissertações, organized by Bianchetti and Machado (2012), is one of the few works that concern the processes of supervision in postgraduate studies, even though it presents fundamental guidelines for reflecting on the necessary developments for research related to the scientific training of undergraduate, masters and doctoral students. With texts by Dermeval Saviani, Olinda Evangelista, Judith Alves-Mazzotti, Regina Zilberman, among others, the work highlights both the importance of supervision for the training of researchers and for the scientific and technological performance of the country, as well as the problems that involve this process, summarized in what Bianchetti and Machado (2012) call the “degradation of the intellectual environment”. The book focuses on postgraduate studies in education, but, for me, it justifies itself on the need to focus on undergraduate studies, especially on teaching degrees, given that the scientific production, in the latter case, is poor.

That said, the dialogic-dialectical processes of supervision in academic training, which are based on linguistic education, also permeate, and in a very significant way, teacher training courses, but not only in the preparation of Course Conclusion Papers (TCC, Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso in Portuguese), such as the monograph, or in the teaching internship, on which there is a considerable number of publications (Garcia; Bonfim; Gomes, 2021). In Scientific Initiation and Teaching Initiation projects, for example, there is supervision, which I understand to be a responsible-responsive act (Bakhtin, 2017) — and therefore ethical — of historical subjects who conduct and accompany acts of reading-writing-researching as collective scientific-academic-professional training. In this dialogic and therefore dialectical process, as Cardoso (2019) reinforces, we develop secondary discursive genres (Bakhtin, 2011) that materialize the dialogue between authorized social voices, since they record and disseminate the progress and results of this formative movement in which everyone teaches and learns.

I therefore argue that there is an urgent need to establish a deeper debate on the problems related to academic supervision — often confused with the technical teaching of reading and writing academic-scientific texts — which is hampered by a certain lack of definition among university students and professors regarding this task, recognized by me as a “pedagogical task” (Ferreira, 2016). Therefore, I intend to address the reflections of a specific academic community concerned with supervision in undergraduate education (but not only), considering this to be a sine qua non condition for the formation of the “investigative posture” (Severino, 2016) of researchers-teachers-professionals and for the advancement of Brazilian research in the national and international scenario, especially in postgraduate studies.

Furthermore, for this essay, I consider fundamental the work carried out by the academic community with which I dialogue, both in the teaching and extension program Academic Literacies Laboratory (LabLA/UFF) and in the Study and Research Group on Academic Reading and Writing (GEPLEA/UFF), whose current research has successfully addressed the concerns related to the presented problem: (i) Dialogical relationships between advisors and advisees: teaching-learning process of research and teaching through the production of the monograph discursive genre in undergraduate courses at UFF and (ii) Main challenges of undergraduate students in Pedagogy and Letters at the Fluminense Federal University, Gragoatá Campus, in the practices of reading and writing academic discursive genres, both approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the aforementioned institution (respectively, CAAE 40092020.8.0000.5243 and CAAE 40092120.4.0000.5243). These studies, already in their final phase, and the teaching and extension activities developed, carried out without interruption since 2019, have presented vast material for Dialogical Discourse Analysis (DDA), which, through comparison, in which the responsive understanding of the discursive set is involved (Bakhtin, 2011), has substantiated the dialogical stance (Brait, 2017) of the academic community in question.

Based on the pedagogical and educational work of the GEPLEA/LabLA academic community in teaching-research-extension, on the (re)readings of the records made in my field notebook and on the daily dialogue with historical subjects involved in the academic discursive sphere, especially in undergraduate courses in Pedagogy and Letters, I write an essay on the emergence of debates on the dialogic-dialectical processes of academic supervision in the initial training of teacher-professional-researcher. To this end, I organize the text into four sections: in the first, I seek to portray an overview of the gaps in scientific research on academic supervision; in the second, I focus on the work carried out by university professors with secondary discursive genres, especially the monograph, which has figured as a substantial process-product in undergraduate training; in the third, I lead the dialogues to academic supervision as a central dialogic-dialectical process in the linguistic education of students and teachers; and, finally, I present some considerations of/in openness to the continuity of the dialogue.

The Problematization

In the national literature, there is a considerable amount of research that discusses the centrality of reading-writing processes in university scientific education, much of it interested in postgraduate studies and the publication of their products. Furthermore, writing centers/laboratories have emerged in Brazilian public universities (Vignoli; Ferrarini-Bigareli; Cristóvão, 2021), much of it concerned with the qualified elaboration and publication of these same products. However, there is little research on academic supervision in the reading-writing-research process in undergraduate courses, especially in teaching degrees, that is, on this pedagogical (Ferreira, 2016) and educational (Saviani, 2021) work with discourse genres, especially written ones. It is different in the international literature, however, as it accumulates some studies on the supervision processes in undergraduate and postgraduate courses (Massi; Giordan, 2017), even flirting with a proposal to develop a “pedagogy of supervision” (for example, in McCallin; Nayar, 2012), while in Brazil I find models of academic supervision (for example, in Costa, Sousa and Silva, 2014) or even methodologies of academic supervision (for example, in Teixeira, 2020).

To complement this panorama, I recover part of the results of the study Relações dialógicas entre orientadores/as e orientandos/as: processo de ensino-aprendizagem da pesquisa e da docência mediante produção do gênero discursivo monografia nos cursos de licenciatura da UFF(Dialogical relations between advisors and advisees: teaching-learning process of research and teaching through the production of the discursive genre monograph in undergraduate courses at UFF), that had the purpose of: (i) carrying out a survey of in-person undergraduate teaching courses at UFF, based in Niterói, RJ, which require writing in the monograph genre and, according to their Course Pedagogical Projects (PPC), map and understand the roles attributed to the supervision carried out by university professors in this teaching-learning process of research and teaching for Basic Education; and (ii) among those that require writing in the monograph genre, conducting a survey of courses that present significant dropout rates and, according to the students themselves, mapying and understanding the main difficulties and the dialogical relationship between advisors and advisees in this teaching-learning process of research and teaching for Basic Education. In the period from 2012 to 2022, considering the areas of Education and Letters, in a survey of the narrative review type in the Capes thesis and dissertation database, I verified 76 studies on pedagogical work with reading-writing in undergraduate teaching courses in Pedagogy and Letters. Regarding studies on the dialogical-dialectical processes of academic supervision in undergraduate courses, in the same areas, the quantity is quite significant from the point of view of its exiguity, totaling 15 theses and dissertations. This same panorama circumscribes the survey carried out on the Scielo platform: in the first section, I identified 35 articles and, in the second, only 3 articles.

But that's not all. In the same research, I also found that students failed the Monograph curricular component more than in practically every other undergraduate teaching courses at the aforementioned university, whose official documents present, in a very timid way (when they present it, of course), the specificities of academic supervision for this purpose, as is the case with the role of advisors and the responsibilities of students. In general, there is a bureaucratization of this relationship, determined in a “contract” signed by both parties and taken as a naturalized task in academic life, (re)producing itself from generation to generation and confirming countless difficulties, dissatisfactions and anxieties stated by undergraduates. In an interview, a student reiterates these findings:

I think that a monograph is only important when it makes sense to us. I think that apart from that, it becomes just a product, you know. Just a thing. For me, it's just... It's... The importance of a monograph only exists when it's linked to this. Is that what you want to write? [...] If not, it's just [silence] something bureaucratic for you to finish your course. It's just something... that you have to do. I don’t think that’s good [laughs].

Costa, Sousa and Silva (2014), in an article concerning the formulation of an academic supervision model for postgraduate studies, define a set of dimensions of the pedagogical work performed with masters and doctoral students, namely intellectual, contextual, social, emotional, political and moral. This debate led me to engage in a more productive dialogue with Deconto and Ostermann (2021), who, from a Bakhtinian perspective and, according to them, a dialogic-responsible perspective, elaborate other dimensions for a counter-hegemonic training of teachers: praxis, ethics and aesthetics. However, as my dialogical stance keeps me coherent in the articulation between teacher training and the training of professional-researchers, from a perspective of linguistic education and omnilateral human formation, I think that these dimensions inhabit the training of the teacher-professional-researcher — especially the praxic dimension, concerned with the correlation, of “product and process, object and subject, in moving between the universal and the singular, in situating around real life, in which the future teacher must assume his/her social role, his/her commitment to the transformation of reality”, according to Deconto and Ostermann (2021), through the exercise of his/her non-alibi, as a responsible act, in always otheritarian relationships.

For now, the GEPLEA/LabLA academic community has been investigating undergraduate teaching courses and, within them, the dialogic-dialectical processes of academic supervision as an educational praxis, as an omnilateral formation of historical subjects, even though the “isolation” of the object is a mere abstraction. I say this because the material, concrete reality, the world of life, presents countless determinations for the object of research — the processes of academic supervision — which, always in movement, requires a systematic dialogic stance for the exercise of comparison between statements, between the profusion of social voices. In the university hallways, in informal conversations with professors, students and technicians, other elements shine through. It is not difficult to find posters of “academic consultants”, “academic advisors” or other equivalents displayed on the walls of UFF buildings or posted on social media, which promise to perform academic supervision work or, worse, promising “Your TCC or scientific article completed 5X faster and without suffering” (Instagram account, 2023). This is not exactly an informal market. When I check the existence of specialized websites that sell either supervision services or the product resulting from this service, the text. It is the pedagogical and educational work transformed into a service provision. Amazing.

If I defend a certain project of society, education and linguistic education(Bagno; Rangel, 2005), in order to think about it, I reclaim here the understanding that education is non-material production, which is divided by Saviani (2021) into two modalities: the first, which disconnects the producer and the product; the second, which intertwines them. The text-objects (articles, essays, theses, etc.) — products of our work + language + education — gain autonomy in relation to the responsible-responsive act of production, elaboration; academic supervision, as linguistic education not reduced to teaching (Saviani, 2021), although it presupposes the presence of the advisor and the advisee, juxtaposes the acts of production and consumption of these texts, which indicates the insufficiency of academic text reading-writing courses, or even of curricular subjects created for this purpose, even though it does not disregard them as complementary to the model of academic literacies as pedagogical practices for the acquisition of appropriate uses of academic discourse, considering the approach of Lea and Street (2014), which pay special attention to ideological, hierarchical and power relations and to epistemological issues related to enunciation.

In short, in a socio-historical-ideological context that, for now, I agree to call academic capitalism (Slaughter; Leslie, 1997, 2001), work-language-education, even though being themselves dialogic-dialectical processes, tend to adapt to the demands of multitasking and speed in the completion of its products (goods?) - after all, linguistic relations develop in productive relations (Volochínov, 2013). Garcia, Bonfim and Gomes (2021), Bianchetti, Zuin and Ferraz (2018), Bianchetti and Sguissardi (2017), among other researchers, point to the precariousness of the pedagogical work of university professors, which are forced to exceed their workloads to dedicate themselves to the individual writing of academic texts even on weekends and holidays. Having that said, I maintain that the commitment to working conditions that are consistent with its nature and specificity hic et nunc must go hand in hand with the improvement of social practices that are fundamental to academic training in its triple dimension - epistemological, pedagogical and social (Severino, 2016) - at the center of which is research, a fundamental mediating activity. Investigating the dialogic-dialectical processes of academic supervision in higher education is essential for this, and pedagogical work cannot be separated from the academic text, which, more standardized, is understood in the Bakhtinian sense of a secondary discursive genre.

Secondary Genres in the Academic Discursive Spheres

I base myself on the discursive perspective of language, because I privilege the space of interlocution, the communicative event in which it is produced, which is comprised by social, historical, and dialogical subjects, and is also comprised by them. Based on important works by the Circle, especially Marxismo e filosofia da linguagem (2010), Estética da criação verbal (2011) e Para um filosofia do ato responsável(2017), I consider language a key element for the intellectual formation of subjects, as emphasized by Geraldi (2015), to whom historicity (and its discursive events), continuous human formation (and the polyphony and dialogism that this represents), and the mediate and immediate context of interlocution of discourses (and the ideologies that permeate and sustain them) are axes that explain the fact that language is a sine qua non condition in the apprehension and formation of concepts that allow subjects to understand the world and act in it; “It is still the most common form of encounter, disagreement and confrontation of positions because it is through them that these positions become public”(Geraldi, 2015, p. 34). Verbal, visual and verbal-visual texts, as manifestations of discourse (Fiorin, 2017), in this sense, are produced in the space of interlocution, as concrete statements, as processes and not as products, since meanings are produced dialectically and dialogically by interlocutors, by those who write, by those who read, by those who listen, without dispensing knowings (collectively produced in situated social practices) and knowledge (also collectively produced by areas and their methods, but recorded and disseminated in the academic-scientific sphere) (Geraldi, 2015).

In this context, I recognize language as inherently human, founded on interlocution, and the text as a concrete statement, based on the dialogism that constitutes the creation of subjects and their social voices. From this consensus, I begin to understand that we, in the social roles we assume and occupy, and in specific, situated spaces and times, produce a repertoire of forms of discourse in socio-ideological communication (Bakhtin; Volochínov, 2010) established by the relations of material and non-material production of life. I refer here to discursive genres as types of verbal communication and statements that move the history of society and language (Bakhtin, 2011), produced intentionally and situatedly, refracting and reflecting the various fields of human activity and their arenas of dispute over the meanings of words. In this sense, the secondary, more complex genres, such as dissertations, theses, monographs and scientific articles, are texts-statements produced in certain discursive spheres, fields of human activity that, like academia, structure their creation, circulation and reception. Even so, Grillo warns about the relationship between these and primary genres:

Attempts to make products autonomous from ideological spheres should be viewed with suspicion, as they represent a dissociation of cultural products from their incorporation by society as a whole. A good example of the harmful effects of this distancing are the effects of the isolation of scientific and technological knowledge from the culture as a whole, as if they were the concern of only a small circle of initiates and specialists

(Grillo, 2008)¹.

In dialogue with Voloshinov, the author considers that the ideologies of everyday life produced in primary discursive genres concentrate greater potential for rupture with the established ideological systems or, better said, with the official ideologies, attributing greater emphasis to the “relative” than to the “stable” of the discourse genres. The discourse genres produced in the processes of academic supervision, in acts such as monographs and dissertations, arise then from a tension between centripetal forces — of maintenance, conservation — related to the most informed ideological systems, such as the scientific-academic sphere, and centrifugal forces — of creation, transformation — affected by the ideologies of everyday life and, additionally, the world of life. This is why academic supervision is not restricted to the text that is the product of this process, that is, it is not doomed to a stability that pre-exists the genre. Supervision, in my view, lies in the tension of discourses between at least two dialogical subjects – the advisor and the advisee – who bring, to this pedagogical work, the marks of their discursive history.

I have unveiled concepts from Bakhtin (2011) and the Circle, such as Volochínov (2010, 2013), as I consider them fundamental to discussions about the uses of language, as occurs in social reading-writing practices situated in more standardized discursive spheres, without disregarding the importance of primary discursive genres as movements of rupture and creation. or the academic community GEPLEA/ La-bLA/ UFF, these elements are essential for understanding that the university is a discursive sphere in which the uses of language are its own, even though they present intersections with other fields of human activity, such as the basic education school, its systematic and formal teaching-learning processes, the articulation between scientific and pedagogical activities (Geraldi, 2015) and the linguistic education of subjects whose training is permanent and always unfinished. Academic supervision is a part of this phenomenon.

The Dialogical-Dialectical Processes of Academic Supervision in Teacher Training

The teaching-learning relationship or, as I prefer to call it, the pedagogical work carried out in formal educational environments is linked to the process of constructing knowledge and the object (Severino, 2016). However, in modern history, the teaching profession emerged from the division between those who produce “scientific truths” and those who transmit them, often operating on self-explanatory teaching materials. According to Geraldi (2015), approaching Paulo Freire’s concept of banking education, “the teacher’s head, empty by nature, is filled with what was learned in initial training, and this is transmitted to the student’s head, also empty by nature” (Geraldi, 2015, p. 93), as if “What is constructed in science as a hypothesis, in school becomes truth” (Geraldi, 2015, p. 88). Such irony mobilizes me to reflect, then, on the pedagogical and educational work with secondary discursive genres, as concrete statements, in the initial-continuous training of teacher-researchers-professionals.

Kleiman (2006), thinking about the political-ideological changes in undergraduate courses, highlights the actions related to literate practices, such as writing, whose teaching-learning, usually understood as a function of basic education, ends up becoming an obstacle for students entering these courses. Thus, if the uses we make of language depend on the time-space in which they are produced and on the interlocutors and their social orientations, allocated in particular discursive spheres, academic discursive genres, as concrete statements central to literate social practices at university, also depend on this. I argue, in summary, that the indichotomizable practice, as Freire (2019) reminds us, of reading-writing is related to the academic sphere, it is central to it; therefore, in order to participate autonomously, it is necessary to invest in more careful work with its discursive genres, especially in undergraduate courses, which train teachers who will work in the processes of teaching and learning texts in schools as literacy agents. However, for university professors to create spaces for pedagogical work with reading and writing, it is essential that they take on the students' reading and writing processes, being their interlocutors, their readers, their collaborators, teaching them to construct questions based on their experiences, on the analysis and understanding of problems, and to seek ways to answer them, but not to construct answers to questions they do not know (Geraldi, 2015). Teaching in higher education cannot do without its educational contribution in the formation of students, of which the relationship between advisors and advisees is an example, as one of the students said in an interview:

For me, it was like a helping hand. I had no idea of how to do academic writing, even though I think we need to increase this idea, of the rules, of the document. This selection of the monograph's theme, of the texts. This trained look at the monograph, to increase the bibliographical references, and the things that I found interesting. My advisor is still part of my journey and it is not limited to the monograph, even though it starts from there, it goes beyond it. In one of the advisory meetings, the professor said that life is a dance, you have to learn to dance with it, it is not to be heavy, it is to be light. The role of the advisory should not be only for the final work, not that he is a psychologist, but it should go beyond the writing. The monograph is not just one thing.

For Delcambre and Reuter (2015), there are three spaces for writing in the academic discursive sphere: the first, academic writing for the validation of studies developed in courses; the second, academic writing as a training process; and the third, the writing of researchers. I was interested in investigating, in this sense, the second type of writing, considering that the production of monographs, dissertations and theses, as secondary discursive genres, constitute the training of researchers and, for us, that of teachers and professionals who produce knowledge in practice, bringing to the core of these processes the primary discursive genres, such as informal conversation with the advisor. Therefore, I prioritize supervision as one of the specialized activities performed by university professors. However, I clarify that the roles of researchers and advisors, as portrayed by Machado (2012), are different, although they are confused, with the latter being erased, which, treated in a generic way and/or being confused with the former, is vital in the training process for research and teaching.

Santos, Perrone and Dias (2015) emphasize the relationships established between advisors and students, considering that the relationship (in terms of dialogue) between both is one of the relevant points during the postgraduate training process and one of the factors that contribute to students continuing or dropping out of courses — with the role of the institution supporting their insertion into the academic discursive community. This is no different in the undergraduate training process, when reading and writing are pointed out as structuring factors of this relationship and, unfortunately, drivers of possible dropouts, as exemplified by the report of one of the students with whom I spoke in the research:

I already dropped out of the previous course and held on to this one because I really want the degree and the opportunities it can provide me, but I still hate the whole research and academic context, as I suffer a lot of stress and anxiety in trying to meet the demands.

It is a fact that, by not meeting the demands of reading and writing in academic genres, such as the requirement of an authorial stance, from whom one claims to assume an enunciative position (Grigoletto, 2013), not only the training for teaching and research, but also the students' permanence in the courses is compromised. And it is here that another element of reality becomes prominent, which makes supervision an inexcusable condition for writing in the training process of both the advisor and the student. For Schnetzler and Oliveira (2010, p. 20), supervision is “a space of intimacy, where two people focus on an object under construction (the research) that is sometimes confused with a subject under construction (the researcher)”.

In this sense, Azevedo and Terrien (2012) emphasize, in one of the rare studies that analyze the process of producing monographs in Pedagogy courses, that supervision is an activity inherent to learning how to teach. Criticizing the focus of studies on supervising postgraduate work, the authors, in addition to explaining that university professors tend to “avoid” this activity in undergraduate courses, because they consider it complex and laborious, explain that one learns to offer supervision based on lived experiences and the practice in which one assumes this role, “[in] the revisitation of the processes of becoming a supervisor [that] makes visible the presence and collaboration of supervisees, former supervisors, postgraduate colleagues and professors for the socialization or internalization of the ways of supervising” (Azevedo; Terrien, 2012, p. 5). For Machado (2012), the experience of having been mentored becomes the guide for teachers to develop this educational function. However, this leads me to question the quality of these educational experiences in the processes experienced by those who today carry out the work of mentoring.

Therefore, in the two GEPLEA studies, I analyze the understanding of academic supervision in undergraduate courses at UFF, through a study of the Política Institucional de Formação Inicial e Continu-ada de Professores da UFF (Institutional Policy for Initial and Continuing Teacher Training, in English) at UFF (2018) and the Curricular Pedagogical Projects of the 18 courses in Niterói, RJ, in order to map the roles of academic supervision in monographic production, as well as analyzing students' discourses about their own supervision processes for writing the monograph in these courses, through the application of a semi-structured questionnaire in 2022 and the holding of focus groups in 2023. On the one hand, there are almost no references to academic supervision, confirming the hypotheses of both studies, based on the fact that Brazilian legislation and public policies, according to Garcia, Bonfim and Gomes (2021), do not present the function of supervision or the specific training to carry it out. On the other hand, the difficulty of dialogue with the responding undergraduates - many of whom did not want to participate for fear of breaking their anonymity (Field notebooks, 2022) - reveals the strength of ideological, hierarchical and power relations (Street, 2014) in maintaining the social places historically marked in academia, in which the most informed, official ideological systems are found.

In the teaching and extension activities carried out since 2019 with public school teachers and undergraduate students from federal institutions, it has been no different. In discussion groups, reading-writing workshops for academic texts, research project courses, etc., the data reveals the feeling of individualization and naturalization of the reading-writing processes of the monograph, as well as the responsibility for teaching reading-writing in basic education, which, for us, already seemed to have been resolved. In the context of academic capitalism, which exceeds the workload of university professors and multiplies their roles in the university sphere, the lack of didactic-pedagogical aspects in the academic supervision of undergraduate students, future teachers, points to the need for supervision pedagogies with a strong practical dimension, which will only be possible through the mobilization and organized dialogue between academic communities concerned with a language education project aligned with an omnilateral perspective of education.

Considerations for Expanding the Debate

[...] In the guidance process, we must recognize and even emphasize the importance of the figure of the supervisor

(Freire, 2019)².

The dialogic-dialectical processes of academic supervision arise from the pedagogical and educational work of teachers, students and the academic community, socio-historically situated subjects, in collective formation, in the epistemological, social and pedagogical dimensions. However, the concrete reality moves along neoliberal lines that outline an education for the market and support hasty practices of producing scientific products, as secondary discursive genres that are more “stable” than “relatively stable”. It is a way of doing science based on utilitarian pragmatism, which formats and controls research and its researchers (Bianchetti; Zuin; Ferraz, 2018), gaining commercial space through the purchase and sale of texts or even the offering of paid academic supervision, often called academic consultancy and even linguistic consultancy.

In order to critique, confront and qualitatively transform this situation, I have recovered, in this essay, at least two major aspects: (i) the university as an educational institution, as a discursive sphere whose social subjects produce knowledge and understanding dialectically and dialogically, maintaining but also modifying concrete reality; (ii) academic supervision, as collective pedagogical work of knowledge production, indispensable to the formation of the investigative posture necessary for any and all teacher-professional-researcher, which does not happen if we exempt the primary and secondary discursive genres as mediators of this entire educational and, therefore, political process. Paulo Freire's epigraph, taken from one of his rare texts – O papel do orientador de trabalhos acadêmicos numa perspectiva democrática – sets this tone.

Given the centrality of social practices of reading and writing discourse genres in training, the scarcity of research on the topic of academic supervision in undergraduate courses, the statements compared in ongoing GEPLEA research, my experiences as a supervisor and as a student, I conclude this essay by reinforcing the need for recognition, prioritization and appreciation of the work of academic supervision, especially in undergraduate courses, initial training of teachers-researchers-professionals, as well as the need to create spaces for debate and continuous recording on the topic with the broader scientific community.

• 1
  Translated from: “As tentativas de autonomização dos produtos das esferas ideológicas deve (sic) ser vista com desconfiança, por representar uma dissociação dos produtos culturais da sua incorporação pelo conjunto da sociedade. Um bom exemplo dos efeitos nocivos desse distanciamento são os efeitos do isolamento dos conhecimentos científicos e tecnológicos do conjunto da cultura, como se eles dissessem respeito somente a um pequeno círculo de iniciados e especialistas”
• 2
  Translated from: “no processo de orientação, temos de reconhecer e mesmo sublinhar a importância da figura do orientador ou da orientadora”

Availability of research data

The dataset supporting the results of this study is published in this article.

References

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• Editor in charge:
  Lodenir Karnopp

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  10 Jan 2025
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  22 Oct 2023
• Accepted
  02 Sept 2024