Unpacking advising: Boundaries as a key resource in academic supervision

Supervisory advice giving is a dynamic yet delicate activity that helps to build boundaries of thinking and acting within which students acquire and articulate their academic knowledge. While research has examined features of advice giving in academic contexts, it remains unclear how participants co-construct different boundaries to reshape knowledge through advice exchanges. Drawing on detailed case studies using observations, interviews, and discourse analyses of supervisions offered to two master's students, this study explores how multi-layered boundaries (cognitive, epistemic, role, practice, and knowledge) help convey supervisors’ and students’ authority and independence. Findings show students balance the supervisors’ epistemic authority with their own knowledge claims. Negotiating this tension helps to recreate an interactional space where both parties introduce or exclude resources to diminish the knowledge imbalance and shape writing decisions.