Enabling connections in postgraduate supervision for an applied eLearning professional development programme

This article describes the practice of postgraduate supervision on a blended professional development programme for academics, and discusses how connectivism has been a useful lens to explore a complex form of instruction. By examining the processes by which supervisors and their students on a two-year part-time masters in Applied eLearning negotiated the blended approach adopted to supervision, it illustrates the conditions that enable connections to occur and flourish. The socio-technical context for supervision was supported using learning technologies (VLE, research wikis and ePortfolios), small group supervision (two to three supervisors and students) and traditional individual supervision. Qualitative data were obtained through surveys and focus groups, and analysed using a framework which drew on connectivist principles. Findings suggest that for increased connections between supervisors and their students, a sense of sanctuary, community and regulation within the supervision process is important; the role of technologies in unifying postgraduate supervision in professional development are discussed.     

Characteristics of the research supervision of postgraduate teachers’ action research

Today, many institutions of higher education support students in conducting practice-oriented research. This research refers to a broad array of approaches geared toward practitioners’ practice. The supervision of such research is of crucial importance, but little is known about its nature and characteristics. This study examined what research supervisors and postgraduate, in-service teacher students perceive are key elements of successful action research supervision. Four action research supervisors and eight postgraduate students were interviewed. Data were analysed by using theory and empirical data. Findings reveal 24 key elements of action research supervision, which refer to supervisors’ (1) skills in supporting knowledge development through and about action research and creating a supportive environment for developing knowledge, (2) knowledge and expertise in supervising action research, (3) attitude in the supervision of action research and (4) the motives driving supervisors’ actions in the student-supervisor relationship.     

Supervision of supervisors: on developing supervision in postgraduate education

During the 1900s, the path to a PhD degree has seen many changes for both postgraduate students as well as their supervisors. The supervisor's duties have increased in scope and the demands made on PhD candidates have augmented. This paper deals with supervision as pedagogic method. Departing from a project aimed at studying ‘supervision on supervision’ through a programme including a special pedagogic model for learning, process‐oriented group supervision as a method of improving doctoral supervision is discussed. In the model used, the supervisors' relationships and the experiences form the basis for reflection process connected to, among others, communication theory and social‐psychological explanatory models. Pointing out the five requirements of trust, theories, tools, training and time, it is concluded that ‘supervision on supervision’ well may serve as a way of improving doctoral supervision.     

Enhancing postgraduate learning and development: a participatory action learning and action research approach through conferences

As supervisors who advocate the transformational potential of research both to generate theory and practical and emancipatory outcomes, we practice participatory action learning and action research (PALAR). This paper offers an illustrative case of how supervision practices based on action learning can foster emancipatory and lifelong learning within a university context that is becoming ever more focused on throughput of students, rather than on the quality of their learning. Conference attendance offers an excellent opportunity for postgraduate students to develop as researchers and lifelong learners, yet anxiety often prevents them from making the most of the learning experience. We explain how we encouraged the development of capabilities in students through a PALAR support programme that assisted postgraduate students prepare for a conference to make overall participation, presenting a paper and subsequent publication a true learning experience. We generated and analysed data from the written reflections of 11 postgraduate students who participated in the programme. The findings suggest that action learning, specifically PALAR, can be used to enable a rich learning experience for postgraduate students attending conferences through fostering relationships, building trust, a supportive environment, collaboration, communication and competence among them. Postgraduate students who experienced our PALAR support programme developed not only skills, knowledge, confidence and deeper appreciation of learning opportunities through conferences, but also understanding of the principles of PALAR that apply not just to the conference context but across all aspects of learning and research and life at large.     

Who's in Charge? School Counseling Supervision in North Carolina

Survey results of school counseling supervisors in North Carolina are summarized. Responses show that the majority of school counseling programs in the state are supervised by noncounseling personnel, usually supervisors of curriculum, instructional programs, or other educational areas. Supervisors' educational backgrounds, professional memberships, opinions about counselor certification issues, dominant supervisory functions, and staff development activities are described. The survey results give impetus to recommendations for future AACD and ACES directions regarding counseling supervision.     

The Impact of University of Zululand Structural and Cultural Contexts on Postgraduate Supervision Practice (2011–2016)

There is a constant interplay between the “people” (agency) and the “parts” (structure and culture), not only in teaching and learning, but also in postgraduate supervision practices globally. However, in South Africa, the tendency to use structure (higher education architecture, institutional history, institutional rules, policies and procedures) to address all challenges related to postgraduate (especially doctoral) studies has resulted in university managers ignoring the role that institutional research culture (social norms, expectations and practice) plays, not only in perpetuating some of these challenges, but also in understanding and resolving them. At the University of Zululand (UniZulu), these factors combine to affect not only the postgraduate supervision practices of supervisors, but also the quality of doctoral throughput (doctorateness) with overall implications for society in general. This article is a critical self-reflection on the author’s postgraduate supervision practice at UniZulu between 2011 and 2016 with a view to highlight how structure and culture combine to impact on his supervision work at the institution. The discussion shows how these factors impact on the quality of doctoral output with implications for the author’s practice and society in general. To deal with the challenges arising from the discussion, the article recommends: establishing a dedicated postgraduate studies unit headed by a director or dean as supervisors and supervisees need a support system that functions optimally; improving staff qualifications and training of supervisors to keep up with best practice in postgraduate supervision; and the Department of Higher Education and Training factoring differentiation realities into its funding modules for universities.     

Effects of an Inductive Versus a Deductive Instructional Approach on the Constructive Feedback and Problem-Solving Skills of Supervisors

This study investigated the effects of an inductive versus a deductive instructional approach on the constructive feedback and problem-solving skills of supervisors. Sixteen supervisors were randomly assigned to either an inductive or a deductive instructional group for one of the instructional units in a supervisory training program. The topic of the unit was the constructive feedback process. Supervisors' acquisition and transfer of skill in giving constructive feedback, problem-solving skill, facilitation of subordinate problem-solving skill, and attitudes toward training were assessed. The findings showed that while supervisors in the deductive group demonstrated greater ability to transfer their learning, supervisors in the inductive group perceived that the quality of their training experience was better. No significant differences were found on either measure of problem-solving skill. Implications of these findings for instructional design theory, research, and practice are discussed.     

The (d)(t)oxic lifeworld of early career postgraduate supervisors

In the context of higher education as social space or field in the Bourdieusian sense, exploring the lived experiences of early career postgraduate supervisors allow us to (re)consider the institutionalised rhythms, procedures and practices that shape graduate supervision. At the intersections of, inter alia, increasing numbers postgraduate students, the urgent need to transform SA higher education, and the need for appropriately qualified and experienced supervisors, many early career postgraduate supervisors are caught between understanding the doxa and orthodoxy shaping postgraduate supervision, and the necessary symbolic capital to formulate, engage with and practice heterodoxy. This article employs Bourdieu’s doxic schema (doxa, orthodoxy and heterodoxy) along with symbolic capital to make visible the doxic lifeworld experiences and journeys of early career supervisors. The research found that early career supervisors are often under-prepared, lacking symbolic capital and experiencing (toxic) shame.     

Discerning Pedagogical Quality in Preschool

A well‐developed and researched conceptual framework exists for identifying undergraduate students' conceptions of learning. In addition, research has been reported on teachers' conceptions of teaching as they relate to their conceptions of learning. The research reported in this paper takes the existing framework into a new area, postgraduate supervisors' conceptions of “research”. It is hypothesized that the development of a conceptual framework that identifies postgraduate students' conceptions of “research”, and how these articulate with the conceptions of research held by their research supervisors, will enable support mechanisms to be developed and used to assist students early in their candidature. In addition, supervisory practice will benefit from being aware of, and sensitive to, the variety and potential effect of these conceptions. While it is recognized that there are strong cultural influences on conceptions of research, this project has focused initially on the conceptions of research generally adopted by Western academic institutions. However, the students involved in the study were not necessarily of a Western educational background. This paper outlines the results of research undertaken to date in identifying supervisors' conceptions. In addition, it discusses supervisors' views on: the purpose of research and what characterizes “good” research and good researchers. Various strategies reported by supervisors to assist their students to develop more comprehensive and sophisticated conceptions of research are also discussed.     

Teaching practice in Initial Teacher Education: its impact on student teachers' professional skills and development

This paper describes the main gains resulting from student teachers' first contact with the teaching profession. The Inventory of Experiences and Perceptions at Teaching Practice (IEPTP) was used to assess the range of experiences of a sample of 224 student teachers on five dimensions of teaching practice: (1) learning and professional development; (2) professional and institutional socialisation; (3) socio‐emotional aspects; (4) support/resources/supervision; and (5) vocational development. The results describe the main changes occurring in the student teachers' perceptions between the beginning and the end of teaching practice. They also suggest more significant changes in the areas of vocational development, professional and institutional socialisation, and learning and professional development. Strategies to promote student teachers' learning process and to decrease the difficulties emerging during this period are suggested. Supervisors' role in fostering and supporting the new candidates' professional and personal growth is also addressed.     

Postgraduate Supervision Practices: Strategies for Development and Change

This paper describes strategies for enhancing postgraduate supervision procedures and practices developed at Sydney University in response to a national focus upon improving the quality of postgraduate research education. The results of needs analyses conducted in Departments and Faculties and amongst postgraduate coordinators, supervisors and students are reported, and the subsequent development of an ongoing and systematic training program for supervisors of postgraduate students is described. The structure of the program, training methods adopted, and participant evaluations of the constituent workshops and seminars are discussed. Finally, consideration is given to aspects contributing to or militating against the success of the program and to alternative or complementary strategies for improving the quality of postgraduate research supervision.     

Transforming supervisors? A critique of post-liberal approaches to research supervision

Preparation for research supervision has assumed greater importance in academic departments of universities with the increase in the number and diversity of both research candidates and supervisors and the financial incentives for on-time completions. Over the past decade a body of literature by both academics and academic developers has emerged and more recently post-liberal theories and frameworks (feminism, postmodernism and post-colonialism) have been used to problematise the field of postgraduate supervision. Central to the feminist and post-colonial critiques is the belief that supervisors are best equipped for their roles by a process of personal self-transformation which allows them to achieve an appropriate balance between emotional and rational elements in their supervisory practice. We wish to set critical and post-modern approaches in historical perspective. We seek to show that feminist and post-colonial approaches are heir to a form of critique, which was founded upon the assumption that certain institutions and practices of modern society are dehumanising because they fragment human beings’ essential unity. We argue that engaging supervisors in a process of self-transformation reinforces the idea that successful supervision is a function of the supervisor's recovery of a fully integrated and higher self.     

Reflective and Reflexive Practice in Initial Teacher Education: a critical case study

Abstract

This article outlines approaches that are being adopted to encourage students training to be teachers on a Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) course to reflect upon their teaching. It takes the form of a special case designed to nurture good practice in Teacher Education. Applications for those working in higher education are discussed. A distinction has been made between reflection and reflexivity (Ashmore, 1989; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). It was found that engaging students in reflexivity can have benefits in terms of classroom effectiveness and reflective writing can play an enhancing role in this process. It was found that many students were judged to have exhibited reflexivity in their teaching and in their written work. Ways in which the emphasis on reflective practice has led to the development of classroom skills were identified.     

The Experience of Disseminating the Results of Doctoral Research

Postgraduate study is something of growth industry with, worldwide, a substantial increase in the number of courses offered and students enrolled (Kerlin, 1995). A substantial part of the requirements for the successful completion of a research degree is that the research conducted should be in some way original and also make a worthwhile contribution to knowledge. Given these requirements it would be expected that the dissemination of the results of the research should be a routine part of the process of postgraduate study and its aftermath. However, it would seem that this is not the case and that the progression from completed dissertation to publication is not the universal experience. Certainly, those publications which deal with 'how to' get a research degree rarely if ever specifically address the issue of dissemination at any length. One would assume that supervisors of postgraduate research would see advice about the matter as one of their duties but it is not at all obvious whether this is the case. This article reports the results of two international studies of the experience of 'doing the degree' conducted with samples of 139 and 53 doctoral holders. Specifically, it concentrates on the participants' experiences of disseminating, or otherwise, the results of their research.     

Australian Postgraduate Students' Perceptions,Preferences and Mobility

Postgraduate students' choice of university, and related mobility issues, have been of interest to Australian university researchers, supervisors and administrators for some time. However, with the release of the Commonwealth Government's 1999 Green Paper on research and research training, which proposes greater portability of research student funding, a sense of urgency regarding these issues has developed. This paper reports on students' choice of a particular university for postgraduate research and on what information they made those decisions. A survey was conducted in 1997 of 938 applicants for Postgraduate Research Scholarships to Flinders University, Macquarie University and the Universities of Western Australia, Adelaide and Melbourne. The survey sought to identify respondents' choices and possible movement to undertake research awards. Questions dealt with a wide range of issues with a particular focus on sources used to access information on higher degrees, preference(s) for where they wished to study, factors leading to their preferred choice, and influences on the decision to move or not move to another institution. Approximately 50% of respondents were younger than 25 years and only 27% were living with their parents. An Honour's degree was the most common prior qualification for students (73%), but only 61% were enrolling directly from their previous degree. Thirty-six per cent reported that they regularly read their main local paper for information related to postgraduate research opportunities and 39% of respondents did not regularly access any source of media for postgraduate information. Forty-two per cent of students did not explore any opportunities at other universities prior to making their decision about enrolment. Almost all students who were planning to enrol at the same university were remaining in the same department. Commensurate with this, 73% reported that their Honour's supervisor or academic staff in their original university were their major source of information on study destinations. These results provide baseline data, which can be used to approach the issue of postgraduate mobility more strategically.     

Supervision as mentoring: the role of power and boundary crossing

There is a current consensus in the literature and policy documents on postgraduate supervision that positions mentoring as the most effective supervision strategy. Authors suggest that this approach to supervision overcomes some of the problematic, hierarchical aspects embedded in supervision as a pedagogical practice. They portray supervision as an innocent and collegial pedagogy between autonomous, rational supervisors and students. However, mentoring is a powerful form of normalization and a site of governmentality. Therefore, I argue that rather than removing issues of power from the supervision relationship, describing effective supervision as mentoring only serves to mask the significant role played by power in supervision pedagogy. I have applied Devos’ investigation of mentoring to postgraduate supervision to highlight the work that mentoring does as a form of academic and disciplinary self-reproduction that can have paternalistic impulses located within it. In particular, I argue that supervisors need to be conscious of the operations of power in postgraduate supervision despite their best intentions. I have also begun to explore what implications this more nuanced understanding of supervision might have for people such as me, who are charged with the responsibility of providing academic development programs on supervision.     

Appropriating WhatsApp-mediated postgraduate supervision to negotiate “relational authenticity” in resource-constrained environments

Despite the surging prominence of literature that explores mobile instant messaging’s (MIM) capacity to leverage transformative pedagogical practices in higher education, studies that unravel the appropriation of MIM to leverage postgraduate supervision in authentic learning contexts are less frequent. Consequently, a gap persists on the nature of postgraduate supervisees’ existential and relational authenticity as they interface with MIM and supervisors during their consultation processes. This study drew on Heidegger’s existential authenticity, a netnography of WhatsApp-based supervisor–supervisee consultations and in-depth interviews to unravel how WhatsApp-mediated postgraduate supervision fosters the social construction of relational and existential authenticity in resource-constrained contexts. The findings suggest that authentic supervision was constructed through supervisor–supervisees’ negotiation of academic hierarchies, supervisees’ self-expression and self-disclosure, their management of moments of anxiety and conflict deflation in ambivalent supervision scenarios. The study recommends that supervisors need to manage the significant yet unrecognised “nervous moments” in technology-mediated supervision environments, where compression of hierarchy may be conflated with negation of the supervisor’s authority.     

Reflecting Reflective Practice

This paper demystifies reflective practice on teaching by focusing on the idea of reflection itself and how it has been conceived by two philosophers, Plato and Irigaray. It argues that reflective practice has become a standardized method of defining the teacher in teacher education and teacher accreditation systems. It explores how practices of reflection themselves can suggest ways out of dictated pathways of reflection in teaching. Drawing on Luce Irigaray's and Plato's ideas on reflection, the paper includes a critical overview of how reflective practice can contradict its own aims and become non‐reflective, shutting off possibilities for transformations and educational differences that it has set out to achieve. Keeping up the deconstructive mood, the paper draws on Irigaray's re‐reading of Plato's parable of the cave to argue that reflective teaching that merely reflects phallogocentric educational systems and that attempts to universally reproduce standardized forms of reflective practice can never be conducive to the diversification of educational spaces.

The paper seeks to re‐think Plato's idea of reflection as mere copying and takes up Irigaray's strategic mimesis to explore ways through which reflective practice can regain its critical edge and reactivate teachers' reflective voices. It argues for the repetition of the practice of reflection by drawing on a feminist critique that challenges phallogocentric reflective tendencies in education and for mimetic strategies that engender difference.     

Supervising a social science undergraduate dissertation: staff experiences and perceptions

This article reports on a research project that investigated the experiences and perceptions of staff supervising final year social science undergraduates enrolled on a dissertation module in a post-1992 UK university. Using data from semi-structured interviews, the article explores staffs perspectives of the supervision process, the different approaches taken by staff to supervision and the challenges they face in supporting students through the dissertation journey. The paper offers a picture of the dissertation supervisors’ experiences and, it is hoped, will encourage other supervisors to interrogate their own supervision in light of the practice of colleagues.     

Moths,candles and fires: examining dance as creative practice research in a Master's degree

This article reflects on the purposes and functions of examination criteria for Masters' research degrees with creative practice components. With a particular focus on dance projects that incorporate both a performed and a written expression of the research, we consider how a rubric for creative practice research degrees might address formative and summative assessment purposes and clarify goals for learners, supervisors, examiners and academic institutions. Our discussion is situated within a South Pacific postgraduate learning context and is informed by post-colonial and post-Cartesian concerns over how dance knowledge is recognized in global academia. Much current literature has argued how particular research methods and diverse approaches to the presentation of research outputs can destabilize dominant, logocentric methods of valuing knowledge. Our queries extend this argument into the actual quantifiable measuring and evaluation of such knowledge, which Masters' grading necessitates in order to maintain its value as an institutional currency. This leads to the reflections on the rubric for Masters' degrees with Creative Practice components that is currently used within the Dance Studies programme of the University of Auckland, and how this rubric might be seen as contributing to an evolving ‘cultivated’ community of practice within postgraduate examination. The rubric continues to grow through ongoing consultation with postgraduate students, supervisory staff, internal and external examiners and international experts in creative arts academia. Our reflections extend the argument for how creative practice might be further rationalized within academia.