The Norwegian term ”veiledning” (supervision) constitutes a theoretical field that is wide and extensive, and many are talking about a “veiledning”- expansion of our time. There are fascinating and interesting discussions on this phenomenon as an expression of social tendencies such as dissociation and globalization. “Veiledning” as part of proferssional development and education is an international theme, and developments in Norway and the Nordic countries have seen a similar tendency of expansion. In recent decades we have seen an increase of research and academic courses at Norwegian academic institutions (Skagen, 2013: 11-17).

A meaningful treatment of “veiledning” therefore implies that there must be a reduction of the complexity of the field. This paper will discuss individual supervision – that is supervision with two people – in universities concerning academic writing. Digital supervision are not discussed, -  it will be about face-to-face supervision.

The Scandinavian tradition in “veiledning” collects various tasks, role aspects and situations in onee term "veiledning" while the British tradition operates with a variety of different forms of supervision depending on the content, tasks or role. In this paper it is all about the kind of academic supervision that can best be translated with the English word "supervision" (Bengtsen, 2012: 13-15). It is the term "academic depth guidance" that I want to develop and argue for, and it can best be understood as a form of supervision.

A concept of academic in-depth supervision tries to go deeper in the context than more general descriptions of the supervision process. General descriptions also have value, but they do not catch in the distinctive living disciplinary knowledge that represents a force in the supervision discourse. Academic in-depth supervision is about knowledge in the supervision process, and especially about the professional-personal knowledge that supervisors develop in their professional lives.

The term academic in-depth supervision has been used to show that practical supervision programs in state-run secondary schools in the 1990s tended to ignore the academic content of supervision. A popular concept was that interdisciplinarity was the most important aspect in supervision. Professional competence was in many cases seen as an obstacle to transparency and student perspectives. Academic in-depth supervision was also developed because some supervision theories limited themselves to general descriptions of methods and psychological strategies. Strategies and approaches that did not hold sufficient academic depth tend to be unproductive in relation to academic and didactic development (Ryeng and Skagen, 2011: 116-127).

This paper then poses two research questions:

1) What is the content of the term “personal” in some research works in Nordic research on supervision in universities?

2) Does the term "academic in-depth supervision" add an important aspect to describe and understand supervision at Master level?

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