How Is the Process of Self-Study Transforming Me as a Graduate Research Supervisor in a “Research-Intensive” South African University?

• In Event: “Starting With Ourselves”: Perspectives From the Transformative Education/al Studies Project

Abstract

In this presentation, I offer an understanding of the complex nature of the supervisory relationship in the context of self-study research and the pedagogy of graduate education. The key research question that frames my response in this presentation is: How am I transforming as a Higher Education researcher-practitioner-supervisor in a “research intensive” South African university through the supervision relationship in self-study? And, following on from this central question, I ask: What kinds of supervisory support are necessary in self-study research in which the very process changes its practitioners and their situations (Pithouse, Mitchell & Weber, 2009)? What is my role in a self-study supervisory relationship, where the significance of the intellectual endeavor is gauged both by its original contribution to knowledge and its contribution to education/al change?

Supervision as pedagogy might be understood as the provision usually by an academic to a student of either the expert guidance in subject knowledge or genre knowledge in relation to graduate thesis development. However, supervising a self-study jolts me out of complacency and knowing as the ‘expert’, and puts pressure on me to engage in exploring my supervisory ‘teaching’ as an act of re-knowing and researching myself and my practice so as make explicit the values informing my knowing, being and acting. I seek to better understand the self-study supervision relationship in graduate pedagogy through asking by what conditions and what means do we (the student and I) as partners come to know and act.

Drawing on video recordings of my supervisory meetings and sessions, email correspondence, supervisory records of meetings and photographs of the learning/supervision spaces, I reflect critically on my learning and identity an inquiry-based supervision relationship. Using trust, respect, moral support and equality as the key markers for the relationship, I explore the nature of the critical dialogue and scholarly conversations as a co-learner/developer of knowledge and identity production (Calma, 2007).

The presentation concludes with the understanding that the capacities and forms of identity that are being produced, and the means by which they are being produced, is held to spring from ‘deep within’. The ‘deep within’ is constituted through the performances I as supervisor enact and which are open to ongoing transformation. The presentation contributes to the understanding that the intellectual development that occurs offers both student and supervisor new perspectives, and the result of their joint labor represents a public gain in both education/al knowledge and education/al change.

Author

• Guruvsagie (Daisy) Pillay, University of KwaZulu-Natal