Description: Research on postgraduate supervision often focuses on the supervisor-student relationship (Acker, Hill & Black, 1994; Pearson, 2002). This paper views supervision as a means of support within the broader academic community, and focuses on collective forms of supervision. Supervision is viewed as a social practice, and learning as a socio-cultural phenomenon. From this perspective, learning consists in the process of becoming a member of an academic community through active participation in the community's various forms of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Becoming a researcher is not restricted to the pure mastering of skills, but includes the development of an understanding and mastering of the community's way of thinking, and written and oral practices. The theme of the present paper is a research group as an arena of collective supervision. The focus, in particular, is Ph.D. candidates that belong to a research group in Biology at the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Bergen, in Norway. The research education of these Ph.D. candidates includes active participation in a variety of research activities and daily interaction with peers (Boud & Lee, 2005) of various levels of expertise. In that sense, the research group carries a supervision function for the candidates. Examples of the group's research activities include seminars, laboratory work, morning meetings, and fieldwork. The main research question is "how does the research group function as a supervision arena for the PhD candidates?". The objective is to describe how participation in the research group's activities contributes to the candidates' research and writing progress with their PhD thesis and to their general process of becoming researchers. The paper contributes to the extant literature on postgraduate supervision, sheding light on collective forms of supervision which is an emerging research field. Methodology: The research group has been followed up for a year and a half through observation and qualitative interviews with the group's participants (Ph.D. candidates, supervisors, post-doctor candidates, other researchers and laboratory technicians) focusing on the impact the group has on the candidates' writing and research process. The data are analysed from a qualitative phenomenological perspective, and the method is based on the psychological phenomenological method of A. Giorgi (1985). Conclusions: The findings indicate that the group's activities provide the candidates with a social and professional environment that is essential to candidates' research education. Specifically, the group's activities have a beneficial impact on the candidates' writing process and enable the enculturation of the candidates into the discipline. The findings are discussed from a social and sociocultural learning perspective. Active participation in the group's activities enables the candidates to become embedded in the academic research community (Lave & Wenger, 1991).The group's activities provide a social context of learning which enables the co-construction of knowledge through active participation and interaction with peers (Gibbs, Angelides, & Michaelides, 2004; Parry & Hayden, 1999). The paper refers briefly to critical factors of the above process.