Crossing the border from candidate to supervisor: the need for appropriate development

ABSTRACT

Postgraduate education has grown enormously worldwide, which has led to supervisors being expected to take on a supervisor's role immediately upon graduation. But crossing the border from being a doctoral candidate to becoming a doctoral supervisor entails significant shifts in identity and an understanding of postgraduate pedagogy and institutional expectations. This paper argues that supervision development opportunities are crucial, but they need to be contextualised and include critical key agents with some institutional authority if they are to be deemed worthwhile and effect change. An online survey completed by 186 participants from across institutional types and disciplines in South Africa is analysed using Archer's social realism to provide insights into how emerging supervisors are currently supported. The resultant recommendations on supervision development could contribute to more confident border crossing by emerging supervisors.

KEYWORDS:

• Supervision development
• social realism
• postgraduate
• Higher Education
• doctoral education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation South Africa under Grant 87646.