‘Fail early and fail fast’: the value of group supervision for doctoral candidates

ABSTRACT

This part-reflective, part-conceptual article focuses on the issue of supervision models and the need to move away from the dominance of the traditional master-apprentice model which continues to persist in many social sciences and humanities contexts. Drawing on communities of practice theory, I critically reflect on my own PhD supervision experience in Australia in relation to my current South African context in order to highlight how varying forms of a group model of supervision can enhance the doctoral experience by creating more opportunities for PhD candidates to engage in social learning. Furthermore, the article discusses some of the challenges associated with maintaining group coherence in a community of practice due to the fundamentally social nature of knowledge and the associated contestations around the legitimacy of knowledge and ways of knowing and the effect this has on a community. The article concludes with a suggestion of how this challenge can be mitigated through the creation of smaller, theory-based research ‘clusters’ within larger doctoral programmes.

KEYWORDS:

• Postgraduate studies
• supervision models
• communities of practice
• social learning
• Legitimation Code Theory

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank the assessors of the Creating Postgraduate Collaborations supervision course for the feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The alleged ‘mantra’ of Andrew Stanton, director, screenwriter and producer at Pixar (Catmull, 2014, p. 178).

2 For more information about the Centre: https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/our-research/centres-institutes-and-groups/lct-centre-for-knowledge-building.html.

3 The ‘S’ in ‘S-Club’ stands for ‘Semantics’, one of the five dimensions of the LCT framework. The group was originally created with the aim of advancing the theoretical scope of this dimension. It also plays on the name of the British pop group.

4 The idea of a ‘brainstrust’ comes from Ed Catmull’s description of working at Pixar in Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration.

5 More information on this project can be found at: https://www.ru.ac.za/teachingandlearning/highereducationstudies/doctoralprogramme/socialinclusioninhighereducation/#d.en.228240.

6 More information on this PhD by coursework programme can be found at: https://sites.google.com/ru.ac.za/sjqinhephd/.

7 As a member of the ‘LCT cluster’, this is anecdotal evidence from my observations. The impact of the cluster groups on candidates’ learning will be researched and written up at a later stage (co-authored with cluster leaders), once the groups have had time to mature.