The Need For The Development Of Emerging Postgraduate Supervisors

Abstract

The demand for more doctoral education puts pressure on universities to increase the number of academics with doctoral degrees who can supervise the next generation of researchers. The Higher Education Qualifications Sub-Framework (HEQSF, 2013) indicates that being able to supervise is one of the outcomes of attaining a doctorate. Still, this study found this to be rarely the case. The study participants often took on the supervision role before they felt that their capacity had been sufficiently developed. Although emerging supervisors have been supervised during their doctoral journey, their new role may still be daunting. This study aims to provide evidence for institutions and academic developers to develop and support emerging supervisors. The qualitative study employs critical realism as an underlabourer and uses Margaret Archer's (1995) social realist framework to account for the interplay between structure, culture, and agency. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 54 participants from 20 South African institutions. The key finding is that supervisors were thrown into the deep end and relied on trial and error. They also had to supervise from experience while faced with high teaching workloads.