Towards a humanising pedagogy: an autoethnographic reflection of my emerging postgraduate research supervision practice

Abstract

Postgraduate supervision in South Africa is a fraught academic space. The ASSAF Report (2010) indicates that supervisor competence is a key contributing factor in student attrition. The coupling of autonomous student and competent supervisor is far from being the usual pattern in South African higher education. Furthermore, postgraduate supervision workshops and courses seldom focus on how particular practices are likely to result in social exclusion, giving far more attention to technical aspects of supervision. This paper considers instead the unwitting ‘othering’ that has occurred in my history as a supervisor and gives an account of ideas and principles that have guided me in seeking to improve my own practice. I focus in particular on those elements or aspects of my practice that are likely to (or do) alienate and marginalise my postgraduate students as I engage with supervising their work. My paper records an ongoing exercise in self-reflexion, shaped methodologically by the tenets of critical autoethnography, as a means to examine potentially subjugating effects that I can identify in my practice as supervisor with a diversity of postgraduate students. In this paper I reflect on two important aspects of supervision: verbal critique and written critique. I probe these two aspects with a view to altering my own trajectory of development in the direction of a more productive level of self-awareness in my practice. I argue that a sustained, careful and considered approach to student supervision that understands and conceptualises writing as a process (rather than a product) has enormous potential for facilitating and developing student academic writing competence. A heightened sensitivity to the debilitating and demeaning effects of careless feedback commentary and embracing research supervision as humanising pedagogy have significant implications for helping students to negotiate the liminal space in which they must master the threshold competences needed for success in advanced higher education research.