Enhancing Doctoral Supervision in a Diverse Higher Education System, Rhodes University
The latest edition of the IAU Horizons (Vol. 19 No.2) is now available online.
The In Focus section of the magazine includes 14 papers focusing on Innovative Approaches to Doctoral Education in Africa.
By Chrissie Boughey and Sioux McKenna, Rhodes University, South Africa (C.Boughey@ru.ac.za). Since 1994, the focus in South African higher education has been on the need to transform the fractured, unequal system of apartheid into a single coherent system that would serve all South Africans equally. In spite of the enormous amount of work which has gone into developing and implementing policies since that time, many of the old divides still remain, one of which relates to the capacity to produce research.
A small number of universities continue to produce the great majority of research outputs. These universities (Cape Town, Stellenbosch, the Witwatersrand, Pretoria and KwaZulu-Natal) produce more than 60% of articles published in accredited journals. The three most productive universities on a per capita basis are Cape Town, Stellenbosch and Rhodes. These also happen to be the universities with the highest proportion of doctoral graduates on their staff. All these research productive universities are historically white and have benefitted from the resourcing and prestige afforded to them under apartheid.
A report produced in 2010 by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) makes a compelling case for increasing the number of doctoral graduates in the country if South Africa is to be able to compete meaningfully in a globalised economy. South Africa needs more doctoral graduates if it is to be able to compete yet, in a country striving for more equality, where are these graduates going to come from given that old divides of privilege appear to continue? Clearly the production of doctoral graduations needs to be increased and, importantly, evened out across the higher education system. The ASSAf report mentioned above, shows traditional universities (as opposed to universities of technology or ‘comprehensive’ universities – institutions offering a mix of vocational and disciplinary based programmes) as producing 80% of all doctoral graduates in the country.
Over the years, a number of alternative models of doctoral training have been developed in addition to the traditional oneon- one supervision of a piece of original research. These include doctorates by publication, taught doctoral programmes and the ‘professional’ doctorate which usually has specific outcomes. All require supervision of the doctoral candidate in some form, however, and it is here that the system often falls down.
Many supervisors supervise on the basis of their own experience of being supervised omitting to consider that the students they are now working with are very different to those who worked beside them in the past. In South Africa especially, the notion of ‘under preparedness’ continues right up to doctoral level and supervisors may be challenged by their students’ ability to work independently or even to write at an appropriate level. Students may also be more likely to pursue doctoral study on a part time basis and will need to juggle multiple demands in addition to those imposed by their research. What does all this mean for supervision and the supervisor who needs to guide her student?
It is not only ‘new’ students who have challenged supervision, however. New orientations to knowledge production along with an increased interest in interdisciplinarity may mean that supervisors are challenged at a methodological level by the projects their students want to pursue. Given these considerations, it is clear that an intervention with supervisors offers the promise of meeting many of the challenges involved in producing more doctoral graduates in South Africa. It is here that a recently developed course on doctoral supervision aims to play a role.
The course has been developed by a consortium of South African universities (Rhodes, Stellenbosch, Cape Town and Fort Hare) along with Dutch partners from the Vrije University of Amsterdam, the African Studies Centre in Leiden and the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. The development and roll out of the course has been funded by the Dutch government under the auspices of NUFFIC. Rhodes University is the lead partner in the project.
The course, which comprises three phases – an initial four day face to face workshop, a six week period of online engagement and a further three days of face to face teaching, has been piloted at three universities. Feedback from the pilots will be used to revise materials whereafter the roll out to other universities will commence. Dutch funding currently allows for the course to be offered free of charge to 18 of the 23 South African universities although attempts are now in progress to raise funding for all institutions to have the opportunity of the course being offered on their campus under the auspices of the project. Significantly, the course carries a Creative Commons license which means that any university will be able to use the materials on a non-profit basis to benefit its own staff in the future.
Response at the launch of the course at the National Research Foundation in Pretoria in November 2012 was extremely positive. Interest has also been indicated from universities beyond the borders of South Africa and, if funding becomes available, the consortium will be glad to respond.