Golding, Jennie; Luneta, Kakoma; Kapenda, Hileni; Phirinalube, Patricia; (2022) Collaborative development of doctoral supervision. Presented at: University of London Research in Distance Education conference (RIDE 2022), London, UK.

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Abstract

Postgraduate research supervision is under-valued, under-provisioned and under-developed in many HEIs globally (Taylor et al., 2021). There is a tension in aims between traditional nurture of embryonic researchers fit to contribute to the curation and development of an academic field, and managerial imperatives towards a scientific-technical postgraduate education that serves wider purposes of market economies: new industry/university partnerships and a perceived need for specialist human capital to build advanced knowledge economies. Additionally, doctoral supervision takes place against a background of contextual, political, economic and cultural affordances and constraints but in a global higher education system. The result is multiple and significant tensions for supervisors, and often, an unsatisfactory experience for PGRs. UKGCE has recently introduced national accreditation of experienced doctoral supervisors in an effort to support deliberate systematic and scholarly reflection on, and valuing of, a wide range of aspects of doctoral supervision. Within UCL IOE, we are adopting a design research approach to a series of online collaborative workshops that support such activity and accreditation. The involvement of two external ‘critical friends’ from Egypt and the University of Johannesburg has underlined the global accessibility of such approaches and catalysed the instigation of a similar locally-informed approach in southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Zambia), and in parallel, a comparative element to the research. As a complementary goal, and as a matter of equity, we are developing an annotated bibliography of sub-Saharan literature focused on postgraduate research supervision, which is at present under-recognised and under-valued in the global field. We report on the first iteration of UCL workshops and on early stages of the southern Africa-UCL supervision collaboration (SAUSC). Our research encompasses people (postgraduate research students and their supervisors), pedagogy (of postgraduate research supervision) and practice (postgraduate supervision and systematic, sustainable processes to support development of that).

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