From the periphery to the center? Creating a community of practice and scaffolding Kazakh graduate students’ scholarly voices and identities

Postgraduate or novice student research is gaining much attention with calls for new approaches to supervision or for a “pedagogy of supervision” (Fataar, 2013, p. 111) to reveal students’ threshold crossing into a scholarly identity and discourses during the supervision process. However, literature has paid limited attention to the pedagogy involved in supervision. In this paper, we address this research gap by illustrating how scaffolded tasks functioned as artifacts that inducted our students into the communities of practices of expert scholars (Lave & Wenger, year). Therefore, the purpose of our paper is to highlight how a situated learning approach opened a space for a pedagogy of supervision that enculturated our students from “legitimate peripheral participation” toward the center through a “community of practice” framework (Lave & Wenger, 1998). We argue that such a model activates students’ voices and facilitates their trajectory toward the center of a scholarly community of practice. For this reason, we pose the following research questions: How did a set of scaffolded tasks facilitate graduate students’ scholarly voice, identity development, and their movement from the periphery to the center?