Mentoring Doctoral Candidates Into Academic Careers in South Africa

• In Event: Doctoral Education in the Global South: A Critical Analysis From Chile and South Africa

Abstract

Doctoral enrolment increased from 9,400 to 22,572 between 2005 and 2017 (Essop, 2020). It is estimated that the participation of black PhD scholars increased by 267% in this period, indicating the historical racial disparities are slowly decreasing. The increase in doctoral enrolment and graduation rates in South Africa suggests significant success in working towards the goals set for 2030 in the National Development Plan (2012). This paper presents an analysis of the national New Generation of Academics Programme (nGAP), which seeks to accelerate the entrance of women and black people in the academic profession in South Africa. The nGAP is a structured intervention for early career academics pursuing doctoral studies. One of the main components is a mentoring program. In this paper, I examine the capacity of the nGAP mentoring program to allow PhD scholars to participate fully in the research community.
Theoretical perspectives
I draw on literature pertaining to academic staffing (Breetzke and Hedding, 2016; Essop, 2020) that reveal the gains in transforming the academic staff profile, but also show the glaring inequalities and slow pace in the process of transforming the academic workforce in South Africa.
Systemic responses aimed at transforming the profile of academic staff feature mentoring as an essential component of nurturing academic careers, and it is not uncommon for new or early career academic staff to be offered mentoring, related to specific aspects of their careers such as successful completion of doctoral studies. This paper draws on the concept of mentoring in the literature to reflect on the use of this pedagogical initiative in the nGAP program.
Methods
I conduct a Critical Discourse Analysis (Kress, 1989) of a comprehensive report that evaluate the nGAP program in the period 2016-2018. I extrapolate the meaning and values expressed by the lecturers and mentors reported in this report. I take into account Fairclough’s (2005) contention that discourses are just one set of mechanisms on a continuum of available structures with enabling and constraining powers that account for the phenomenon under discussion. I therefore consider the various constraints and enablements of mentorship in doctoral education.
Preliminary results
South Africa’s colonial and apartheid legacies shape the political and socio-economic manifestations of any attempt of transforming the higher education system. Therefore, in historically well-resourced institutions, seasoned senior academics are paired with younger early career academics for mentoring relationships.
In these institutions, positions of seasoned senior academics are predominantly occupied by white middle-aged men. Academics participating in the nGAP are specifically from designated groups of women and/or black early career academics. Mentors and mentees can be in the same institution, the same faculty, and even the same department and yet their experiences will be diverse from different vantage points. The intersectionality of race, gender, class, and language dynamic constrains the ability of the mentoring pair to fully appreciate each other's day-to-day experiences of the academy. This paper contends that the unexamined intersectional constraints extend to epistemic pursuits thus contributing low participation in knowledge dissemination beyond the dissertation.

Author

• Amanda Hlengwa, Rhodes University
  Presenting Author