In contemporary higher education, there is a growing emphasis on interdisciplinarity as institutions seek to respond more effectively to complex social challenges (ed. Frodeman 2017). This shift involves moving beyond rigid disciplinary silos and fostering integrated approaches to knowledge-making and doctoral-level supervision within postgraduate education. While the discourse surrounding interdisciplinarity is widespread, the practical application within doctoral supervision often remains constrained by entrenched disciplinary protocols and institutional structures (Chilisa 2019; ed. Frodeman 2017; Repko & Szostak 2021). As Repko and Szostak (2021) argue, disciplinary gatekeeping frequently limits genuine integration in supervisory practices, even within institutions that advocate for interdisciplinarity. Chilisa (2019) further contends that in postcolonial contexts, these constraints are amplified by epistemic hierarchies that privilege Euro-Western paradigms, complicating efforts to implement relational, context-sensitive and transformative research supervision.

This article reflects on the experience of co-supervising a doctoral study that brought together selected elements of Health Sciences (Sports Science) and Education. The study was initiated by a student, a Physical Education lecturer at a teacher education institution, who registered for a PhD under the Health Sciences faculty. Rather than merely drawing insights from two fields, the research created an integrated intellectual space where knowledge was co-constructed across paradigms. This approach distinguishes itself from multidisciplinary practice by requiring negotiation of underlying epistemologies, not just parallel application. The supervisory process thus demanded iterative reflection, adaptation and the integration of distinct theoretical, methodological and institutional norms.

As supervisors located on different campuses and within structurally distinct departments of the same university, we (Rowena Naidoo and Michael A. Samuel) drew on our respective disciplinary strengths and experiences. This article documents our shared supervisory journey, tracing how we navigated disciplinary boundaries, responded to institutional expectations that often revert to mono-disciplinary norms and fostered the student’s agency in a complex academic environment. Grounded in theories of interdisciplinarity (Bammer 2013; Lyall & Meagher 2012) and supervisory reflexivity (Wilkinson, Wilkinson & Holliday 2016), this article draws on the authors’ practical experiences of co-supervising a doctoral candidate across the fields of Health Sciences and Education. It critically examines the supervisory process, highlighting epistemic tensions and moments of convergence between positivist, interpretivist and critical traditions. While such tensions are not unique to interdisciplinary contexts, they become especially pronounced when supervision spans fundamentally different paradigms and knowledge cultures (Lyall & Meagher 2012). Although institutions have begun to support interdisciplinarity through policy reforms, implementation remains uneven, with disciplinary norms still shaping key aspects of doctoral education, particularly examination and supervisory models.

This article acknowledges these transitional dynamics and argues that effective interdisciplinary supervision requires more than structural alignment; it demands deliberate, reflexive practices that enable both students and supervisors to navigate the complexities of interdisciplinary knowledge-making. Rather than offering a theoretical account, the article draws from lived supervisory experience to provide grounded insights into supervision models, assessment practices and institutional challenges. In doing so, it contributes a situated, practice-informed perspective to ongoing debates on doctoral education reform.

Interdisciplinary supervision refers to the integration of theoretical frameworks, methodological tools and epistemological assumptions from two or more distinct disciplines to guide the doctoral research process (Bammer 2013; Lyall & Meagher 2012). Unlike co-supervision within a single disciplinary frame, interdisciplinary supervision requires deliberate negotiation of differing academic cultures, knowledge systems and expectations. Our engagement in such a supervisory model was informed by our own academic journeys and professional trajectories, which spanned diverse fields and institutional contexts.

Rowena Naidoo is primarily rooted in the Health Sciences, with expertise in Sports Science, but has also contributed to the field of Education through teaching, curriculum input and collaborative module design, particularly in areas related to pedagogy and applied research methods. This exposure cultivated a foundational understanding of educational research traditions and deepened appreciation for interpretive and constructivist paradigms. Michael A. Samuel, on the other hand, is located within Education, with longstanding involvement in curriculum studies, higher education and the socio-cultural dimensions of learning. MAS has supervised doctoral candidates across multiple methodological orientations, including critical, narrative and transformative paradigms.

Our disciplinary diversity also intersected with experiential diversity. Collectively, we have contributed as policymakers, academic managers and curriculum advisors and have worked extensively on professional education and postgraduate mentorship. We draw on what we refer to as ‘supervisory interdisciplinarity’ a hybridised, reflexive practice of knowledge integration that foregrounds respect for epistemic difference while striving for coherence in guiding a doctoral journey.

The student at the centre of this study further exemplified the border-crossing nature of the research. With foundational training in Sports Science (Health Sciences), the student transitioned into a lecturing role within a teacher education institution. The student’s undergraduate experience was grounded in predominantly empirical and quantitative approaches. However, we acknowledge that critical and interpretive paradigms are also increasingly present within the broader field of Sport Science. The research project demanded theoretical engagement with both public health promotion and pedagogical practice. Initially, the student interpreted interdisciplinarity as simply combining methods. The student’s early drafts presented quantitative and qualitative strands as parallel components, echoing a simplistic understanding of mixed-methods design (Creswell 1999). While Creswell’s framework is foundational, more recent transdisciplinary perspectives (Hadorn et al. 2008; Jahn, Bergmann & Keil 2012) advocate for deeper epistemic integration responsive to complex societal questions. However, through supervision, deeper conceptual and epistemological integration was encouraged, guided by more nuanced perspectives (Chaves Cano et al. 2024; Cresswell 1999; Östlund et al. 2011).

This supervisory process involved ongoing reflexive dialogue. As Govender (2024) asserts, reflexivity in supervision is not only about methodological choices but also about creating spaces of mutual learning, care and accountability. Our sessions became sites where methodological tensions were surfaced, disciplinary assumptions were challenged and new ways of seeing research were cultivated. The student’s eventual shift from juxtaposition to integration marked a key milestone in the supervision process.

We recognise that Education also contains positivist strands. However, the interpretive orientation applied in this case was distinct from the empirical performance focus that is more prevalent in Sports Science. The epistemic dissonance that emerged was not just theoretical; it played out in research design, interpretation of data and the writing of the thesis. Through shared supervision, we modelled the kind of interdisciplinary negotiation we hoped the student would develop.

It is important to note that institutions themselves are in transition. While many South African universities have developed policy frameworks to promote interdisciplinarity, entrenched disciplinary structures often persist in practice. Our experience suggests that institutional intent must be complemented by supervisory development and assessment practices that actively enable interdisciplinary knowledge construction. Effective doctoral supervision across disciplines requires more than a tolerance for epistemic difference; it demands reflexive engagement, structural flexibility and pedagogical innovation.

Supervising an interdisciplinary PhD study requires a structured yet flexible approach, particularly when integrating methodologies from distinct academic traditions. This section outlines the supervision and research process, highlighting key stages such as proposal defence, ethical clearance, data collection, chapter revisions and examination. Additionally, the student’s responses are considered to provide insights into the interdisciplinary research journey.

The proposal defence marked the first critical step in the PhD journey and adhered to formal institutional procedures. Because the student was registered in the College of Health Sciences, the process involved presenting a comprehensive proposal that demonstrated methodological rigour, feasibility and alignment with ethical standards. While the College of Education follows a similar structure, requiring students to justify their research design, theoretical framework and epistemological stance, there are subtle differences in emphasis. In Education, greater attention is often placed on conceptual framing and the theoretical underpinnings of the study during the early stages. Both faculties require the student to present their proposal to a panel comprising academic staff with relevant disciplinary expertise, as well as at least one external member who provides an independent perspective.

Navigating these disciplinary differences required a balancing act, ensuring that the proposal met the methodological rigour expected in Health Sciences while also incorporating the critical and interpretive dimensions valued in Education. The supervisory team played a key role in guiding the student through this process, ensuring that both quantitative and qualitative components were well justified within a mixed-methods framework. This further entailed challenging the naïve conception of mixed methodology that the student brought to the study. This allowed extending the normative discourse within the Sports Science discipline. For example, whilst a sequential mixed-method approach was adopted (a quantitative data production followed by a qualitative data production strategy), the study proposal argued for a design of equivalence between the different data production strategies. This entailed not just a dominant or recessive account of the status of the data typologies but also how the quantitative and qualitative data forms could be interpreted one against the other, sometimes offering counter viewpoints and contradictions and sometimes complementarities and paradoxes. These divergences in the data set were anticipated in the research design stage, and the proposal defence of the study considered this not just as a methodological matter but as a concern about what kinds of epistemologies were being developed through the study.

A notable feature of the proposal defence was its alignment with the standardised institutional procedures followed across both the Health Sciences and Education faculties. The student was required to present the proposed study to a panel that included academic colleagues and peer postgraduate students. The supervisors were both present. After an orientation presentation by the student, a discussion primarily about the research design took on the form of a discursive engagement about the hallmarks of a mixed methodological approach that did not privilege any one form of knowing. This opened debates by the reviewing audience about the study’s merits, which would not present definitive conclusions but aimed to open generative insights into the explored phenomenon. The proposal defence occasion also posed an opportunity to reflect on whether the linguistic features of the host discipline (Sports Science) were respected or not¹. This sparked insights into how language discourses reinforce boundary policing within the discipline. The student was asked to clarify the use of the ‘exploratory’ nature of the study, where a more investigative and specific trajectory was expected from doctoral research. However, the presence of the two supervisors who were also asked to provide commentary during the proposal defence seemed to have allayed the fear about the study. As supervisors, we suggested that the design was not declining into a descriptive postmodernist ‘anything-goes’ approach. We argued that the systematic design had its own validation and ethical considerations that would still enable the potential to make policy and pragmatic curriculum implementation recommendations. The audience of the proposal defence was, through their questioning, reflecting the prevalence of the meta-goals of empirical research. Yet, they were intrigued by the more fluid conception that the student’s proposal design was presenting. Nevertheless, the student was deemed in able hands with the confidence asserted by the supervisors, who were considered confident in the value of interdisciplinary work.

However, the proposal defence interactions were marked by relative silence about the theoretical underpinnings related to the proposal. As a supervisor from the discipline of Education, Michael A. Samuel found it an omission not to foreground the theoretical and conceptual lens that informed the conception of ‘Health-relatedness’ or the critique of the history of the definitions of the proposal’s constructs. The key constructs of the study were operationally defined, drawing from the dominant definitions of the World Health Organization (WHO). Rather than focusing on the student’s critique of these definitions, the proposal reviewers were obsessed with sample size, the selection of participants and the research instruments used during the data production processes. The validity of using the survey questionnaire aimed at the South African context, using an international health questionnaire, received no attention. It was perhaps considered a norm to accept research instruments designed abroad and modified for local contexts. This methodological and epistemological borrowings were not troubled critically enough from the Education supervisor’s point of view. Overall, the concerns were methodological and operational rather than theoretical and conceptual.

Given the interdisciplinary nature of the study, exploring student teachers’ health-related activeness necessitated alignment with both Health Sciences and Education research protocols. While the Sports Science reviewers focused on maintaining researcher objectivity, the Education supervisor (Michael A. Samuel) introduced the notion of researcher positionality. The student was required to submit a biographical declaration explaining the student’s personal connection to the study’s focus, an unfamiliar yet meaningful exercise that enhanced critical reflexivity.

The study adopted a mixed-methods approach, integrating quantitative measures of physical activity with qualitative insights into student teachers’ perceptions. This methodological combination required careful planning to ensure conceptual and analytical coherence. The supervisors worked closely with the student to structure data production tools that met the rigour expected within both disciplines. Initially, the student reported findings sequentially, beginning with the quantitative results. However, the qualitative data later revealed tensions and contradictions with earlier statistical trends, and the student was encouraged to reflect more deeply on the interplay between the two strands of data and adapt the reporting accordingly.

The student provided informed consent for their doctoral journey to be included in this reflective article. For ethical and consistency reasons, the student is referred to throughout as ‘the student’.

Upon completion of fieldwork, the focus shifted to data analysis and chapter revisions, where the supervisory team’s interdisciplinary expertise was most evident.

One of the key challenges was bridging these two inductive and deductive analytical approaches, ensuring that the findings were not treated in isolation but rather synthesised into a cohesive narrative. Supervisory feedback focused on strengthening the integration of quantitative and qualitative findings, allowing for a richer understanding of health-related activeness within an educational context.

Additionally, the student’s own reflections played an integral role in this stage. Given the student’s background in Sports Science but their current role in a Teacher Education institution, the student grappled with disciplinary expectations and the need to justify methodological choices across two epistemological traditions. This experience highlighted the intellectual adaptability required in interdisciplinary research and the necessity of supportive supervision to navigate these complexities.

The (perhaps unconscious) strategy that the student adopted was to revert to working with his two supervisors separately. The draft versions of the written chapters were circulated to both supervisors, even though each one focused on different aspects. Both supervisors were aware of the data analysis progress and the feedback offered to the student. However, there were a few face-to-face interactions where both supervisors engaged each other and the student communally. This was perhaps an expedient strategy to get a written product draft onto the table. The integration across the two forms of data production methodologies emerged through critical supervision, which later offered a growing valuing of a dialogical interpretative space, showing patterns and trends that could be asserted but also contradicted, as revealed by the different forms of data and their analyses. Drawing on both supervisors’ iterative input was crucial to establishing the emergent coherence.

In retrospect, we as supervisors acknowledge a missed opportunity in not establishing a more integrated supervisory model from the outset. Although we maintained regular contact with the student individually, we did not initially implement a structured triangulated approach that would have allowed for more collaborative, cross-dialogic supervision. This fragmented engagement may have unintentionally reinforced the student’s compartmentalised view of the disciplines. Moving forward, we suggest that interdisciplinary supervision teams develop shared protocols early in the doctoral process, such as joint meetings and coordinated feedback sessions, to create a more cohesive and supportive framework that models the integration we hope to foster in student research.

The final written draft of the thesis report reflected the tensions of trying to accommodate the varied interpretations of the whole data set when one moved beyond purely descriptive statistical trends of what health-related activities constituted and how it was constructed across the participants sampled. The integrative analysis provided the student with the opportunity to weigh up the deeper qualitative insights to clarify why students chose unhealthy lifestyle preferences. This was not just a methodological but a theoretical matter. While the student had already presented a draft version of his initial statistical analysis in a separate conference presentation before his final thesis report, he also became aware of the superficial engagement that only the purely quantitative approach yielded regarding the phenomenon of the student’s study. Both methodologies and methods and their analytical modes of inquiry need to dialogue with each other to provide in-depth interpretation and theoretical analysis, which is the hallmark of a doctoral PhD study. This was the benefit of an interdisciplinary analytical stance.

The final stage of the PhD process followed the College of Health Sciences’ examination protocols, with Health Sciences examiners ensuring the thesis met disciplinary, empirical and methodological standards. While interdisciplinary elements were acknowledged, the process primarily reinforced traditional norms. Unlike institutions that offer oral defences, this university relies solely on written examiner reports, limiting the student’s opportunity to demonstrate scholarly independence. This approach privileges examiner authority, ultimately preserving disciplinary boundaries under the guise of quality assurance.

The feedback from the examiners reflected the rigorous expectations of Health Sciences while engaging with the study’s interdisciplinary elements. One must note how the student chose to respond to the critiques offered by the examiners, who did (not unexpectedly) attempt to confine the report to the rituals of the Health Sciences and its disciplinary routines. While initially, the student capitulated to the examiners’ recommendations, the student presented an increasingly more assertive voice defending the interdisciplinary stances in the Schedule of Revisions (SOR) report after the examination. The student’s navigation of the response to the examining committee in the Health Sciences was clearly a strategic move. He needed to ensure that he received their approval for graduation. The three examiners’ reports are dominated by technical matters related to linguistic clarity and the turn of phrase in the presentation of the report structure. The student dealt with these matters in compliance with their suggestions. One example of this adherence to the power of the examiner is evocative. At the start of Examiner One’s report, the examiner advises a change to the study title:

The examiner is suggesting that there are normative conventions about foregrounding the contextual space of the study report. The student retorts and amends the title accordingly.

This recommendation signals the preference of the Health Sciences discipline to extend the notion that research is expansionist, radiating from a core of established theoretical frameworks. Hence, the new naming of the space in the title signals the shifting of the core application into new contexts. There is no critique in the examiner’s report about whether the core choice is appropriate for the localised context, but merely that the title should reflect the contextual contribution. By contrast, a more interdisciplinary approach would appreciate contributions that are not only contextual but also methodologically and theoretically innovative.

Examiner One also provocatively questions the value of inserting a biographical profile into the study report:

One notices an appreciation for the insight offered by the Prologue, but it subtly prefers the normative ‘abstract format’ as providing an adequate synthesising orientation to the study. However, this examiner’s comment misses how the Prologue is intended to capture not just a biographical orientation about the thesis writer or researcher for the reader but also declares the shifting epistemological journey that the student had undertaken.

The student’s response to this provocation is as follows:

Examiner One further reinforces the conventions of the linguistic discourse of a positivist study in their recommendation:

Examiner Two’s comments support this:

Both examiners are attempting to buttress the view that a Health Sciences research report should profess an objectivist distancing between the researcher and the researched to maintain scientific value.

The student’s more defensive response indicates their respect for the value of the interpretivism and the critical stance they adopted in the study:

Another indication of endorsing the examination as a form of prescription to paradigmatic conventions is seen in how Examiner One asks about the sequencing of research questions flowing linearly from the pre-established objectives of the study:

Disappointingly, the student’s response is to capitulate by listing in the positivist argot of the Health Sciences a reformulation of the critical questions with a lockstep-wise unfolding of a linear sequencing of the reworked research questions. So, whilst interdisciplinarity had been explored through the study process, the final research thesis report would reflect a largely empirical positivist formulation of the critical research questions.

Overall, Examiner One seems intrigued by the troubling of conventions and allowed the thesis to be revised under the auspices of the supervisors. The examiner concludes the report with a backhanded compliment as follows:

The comment indirectly favours a singular approach (a qualitative study) rather than an interdisciplinary approach to the study design.

Examiner Two questioned whether ‘one quantitative method applied to one of the multiple research questions, is sufficient to label the research design as a “mixed methods design”’. Both examiners infer a hesitation about the merits of an interdisciplinary approach and preferred following established compartmentalised conventions in research design. Nevertheless, both agreed that the study was making an innovative contribution to the field. The student’s voice is more assertive towards the latter part of the SOR, where he argues against the request of the examiner to apply the WHO definition of the construct of ‘health’:

These examples above underscore the need for structured revisions, particularly in ensuring that the qualitative findings were explicitly linked to the quantitative results in a way that satisfied examiner expectations. Moreover, they reflect the student’s choice to provide a justified rationale for their interdisciplinary stance and defend their methodological and interpretive choices. While the student made revisions where necessary, they also articulated clear justifications for retaining some aspects of their work. The supervisors encouraged this critical engagement, reinforcing the importance of intellectual independence in doctoral research.

Ultimately, both supervisors approved all revisions, ensuring the final submission was robust, methodologically sound and met Health Sciences’ academic standards. Following the successful completion of the revisions, the thesis was formally accepted, and the student was awarded their PhD. The final thesis report reflected a polyglot of paradigmatic forays, not all necessarily coherent with an interdisciplinary study. We, as supervisors, acceded by concluding in the citation read at the graduation that (the study) revealed the complex interplay between lifestyle, professional development and personal well-being, thus contributing to a deeper understanding of health in the context of teacher education. The value of insight into the phenomenon was of paramount importance.

This marked the culmination of an intellectually rigorous and methodologically complex research journey, reflecting the strengths of interdisciplinary supervision in navigating the expectations of different academic traditions.

The experience of supervising an interdisciplinary PhD study gave the supervisory team valuable insights into the complexities and rewards of guiding a student through a mixed-methods research journey. The lessons learned were particularly significant during three critical phases: Proposal defence, Chapter revisions and the Examination process.

The proposal defence was a crucial phase for establishing the foundation of the research. Early on, it became clear that interdisciplinary supervision demands careful negotiation between different academic traditions. The process required the supervisors to ensure that the quantitative methods required by the Health Sciences framework were justified while still providing space for qualitative insights drawn from Educational theory. The key takeaway was the importance of developing a research proposal that clearly explains the integration of mixed methods. This phase taught the supervisory team the value of clear articulation of interdisciplinary research goals and the necessity of engaging with multiple perspectives to ensure that both the student and their research were prepared to bridge disciplinary divides.

The chapter revisions stage presented its own set of challenges. A key lesson here was that interdisciplinary research demands more than the sum of its parts. It is not enough to present the findings of each method in isolation; instead, the findings must be synthesised into a cohesive narrative underpinned by a theoretical justification. The process of revising the thesis emphasised the importance of actively integrating quantitative and qualitative results in a way that highlights their complementary strengths. The supervisory team’s role was not only to ensure that the findings were accurate but also to guide the student in justifying their methodological decisions and in defending the interconnection between their results. It was through this continuous back-and-forth between the quantitative data (focused on measurable outcomes) and the qualitative insights (focused on lived experiences) that the research began to take shape as a truly interdisciplinary study.

The examination process underscored the importance of student assertiveness. In response to examiner feedback, the student became more confident in defending key aspects of the study while making necessary revisions. The Schedule of Revisions (SOR) served as both a tracking tool and a space for critical reflection, allowing the student to decide when to align with feedback and when to justify their original position.

This phase also reinforced the dual responsibility of supervisors to ensure that examiner concerns were addressed while also supporting the student’s academic independence. As the supervision evolved, it demanded greater flexibility, negotiation and reflexivity than traditional single-discipline supervision. Ultimately, the process highlighted the value of empowering students to engage critically with feedback, a hallmark of intellectual maturity and a successful doctoral journey.

Additionally, one key difficulty lay in selecting appropriate examiners who could engage meaningfully with a study that straddled both Health Sciences and Education. While institutional procedures required disciplinary alignment, the candidate’s thesis, shaped by integrated paradigms and a reflexive narrative voice, did not sit comfortably within conventional expectations of either discipline. This led to diverging assessments, with one examiner questioning the narrative writing style typically accepted within interpretive traditions. The feedback underscored how examiner selection in interdisciplinary research is not just a procedural step but a strategic and epistemic consideration that can significantly impact how the work is received and assessed. In retrospect, a more proactive discussion about examiner criteria and cross-disciplinary literacy may have helped mitigate this misalignment.