The trouble with post-graduate supervision

THE level of post-graduate studies, that is Honours, Masters and the venerated PhD, has special glorified teachers that go by the title of supervisors.

For the reason that post-graduate studies can be difficult, challenging and even traumatising, it is supervisors that end up understood by some students as difficult, challenging and even traumatising. I am not about to exonerate supervisors as innocent teachers that are blamed for the difficulties, challenges, and traumas that post-graduate students face.

Some supervisors, most of them I dare say, tend to be challenging. This is mainly because supervisors, even when they are full professors and decorated PhD holders are still also post-graduate students themselves that are still learning more, including grasping the art and science of supervision, which is a specialised level of teaching.

After many years of being a post-graduate supervisor and examiner myself, I think the art and science of supervision should be taught to researchers and lecturers as a separate qualification on its own. So many great researchers and lecturers out there might have been good students and excellent lecturers and researchers but remain dismal supervisors and examiners.

Supervision is another kind of teaching that requires further tools over and above lecturing and teaching competencies and efficiencies. The sooner universities realise this, the better will be the fate and fortunes of post-graduate students in the higher education sector in Africa.

Many supervisors out there are actually learning supervision while they supervise students which makes the students mere objects in the experiments and trial and errors of their supervisors that might be needing supervision in supervision themselves.
This is not very different from reducing students to some kinds of guinea pigs. I observe and argue thus not to crucify the great men and women out there that are in the field shepherding post-graduate students. The trouble with post-graduate students is a subject that I will soon reflect on and write about, today I ponder supervision and supervisors.

The Monstrous Thing

In most post-graduate studies, there is a monstrous thing called a dissertation. It involves research and a report on the research conducted. There begins the problem. Most supervisors tell students that they are supervising their research and the writing of dissertations that are sometimes called theses.

This is a huge problem that creates huge confusion for both supervisors and their supervisees. My capital observation and argument are that what we supervise in our universities are neither dissertations nor theses. I will develop this argument elaborately in a formal book that I am working on as my intervention to decolonising supervision work in African higher education.

What we supervise students on is the research and the writing of Research Reports. Dissertations and theses are philosophical documents that have nothing to do with what our students do except the names that we loosely ascribe to the Research Report. If a student writes a dissertation today or a thesis in the true sense of the names the student will almost certainly fail.

What our students submit for examinations are research reports. In my forthcoming book I will elaborate on where and when in the progress of our colonial and westernised education we picked up the names dissertation and theses and imposed them on the research report.

An example of a good thesis is Niccolo Machiavelli’s philosophical rendition of The Prince. Machiavelli writes not as a student but an author with unquestionable authority on a subject of power in which he had personal experience.

That is a thesis, an elongated argument on a chosen subject. The City of God by St Augustine is an original personal observation about the world, some opinions, and the suggestion and proposition of another world from a religious thinker, a theologian.

That is a good dissertation that seeks to “preach” to us and persuade us to live differently. Rhetoric and logic are applied at writing dissertations and theses.

Frantz Fanon wrote his Black Skin White Masks, a classic psychoanalytical dissertation and submitted for his PhD examinations and it failed dismally. He submitted a dissertation when a Research Report was needed. Good dissertations are terrible research reports and good research reports are dismal dissertations.

I know that fellow travellers, students and supervisors, that are reading here are saddened by my observations and arguments. They most likely feel that calling their products Research Reports degrades the intellectual prestige of their work.

Dissertation and Thesis sound lofty colleagues, but they are not what we produce. We produce Research Reports and calling them as such clears all the confusion and leaves our students knowing what they are tasked to produce at the end of their research work.

The Research Report

After the approval of their research proposals, and research ethical clearances, students go out to do research, as fieldwork and or desktop research, or combined. They go there armed with a research subject area, the topic, research questions and objectives.

They should supply a problem statement stating what the intervention of their study is, and the justification (rationale). For their research to be academic and scientific they should have a clear methodology of their study.

And they must have a theory that is the intellectual spectacles they wear when they look at the data, the way scientists use microscopes and the like, the lens.

Because they are not the first and last to research on that subject area they should engage with previous researchers, affirming, disputing, or complementing them, and stating what the contribution of their own study is, this is a literature review.

After the student has collected information, the data, from the field or through desktop research, they present the results in a designated chapter and then deploy their chosen data analysis tool to discuss the data answering the research questions and fulfilling the research objectives.

In the concluding chapter, the students summarise their research report and may mention the limitations of their study to pre-empt examiners queries, make policy recommendations and suggest ideas for further study. In short, the student is reporting on their research in their Research Reports.

The research report is a technical document that tests the student’s discipline and not necessarily intelligence. Research reports pass for their novel contribution to the subject area and the discipline of following set technical rules, answering asked questions and competently using literature, theory, and method.

That is why research reports are almost always boring to write and read. They are also boring for the cold and dry academic language that they are written in. Whereas in a thesis Machiavelli can say “a good prince must learn to be a beast and also to be kind” in a Research Report the student would have to say, “based on the literature covered, it seems that for a political leader to survive in a position of power he or she might need to know how to be cruel and also how to be kind because it appears that people may at times respond to violence and at times to persuasion.” Note the timidity and uncertainty with which research reports are couched.

The Positionality of the Supervisor

The first challenge to post-graduate studies that I have noted is that supervisors have not named correctly what students must produce and this is a systemic problem in the university.

If we told students clearly that they are to produce research reports and how they are to produce them there would be less confusion around. And less problems with supervision and supervisors.

We supervisors have our own problems besides the systemic problems of the university. We may become academic messiahs that want to turn students into loyal disciples that think and write like us.

We may also be academic undertakers who think our job is to make things difficult for the students and accompany them to their academic graves when they fail.

We frequently become academic police officers who enforce rigid laws of the disciples, suppressing the originality and invention of students.

As academic prosecutors, magistrates, prosecutors, and judges we subject students to trials, judgements, and sentence them to failure instead of supervising them (which combines teaching and mentoring, and also learning from the students).

Some of us are baggage carriers and wet blankets. If we studied under difficult circumstances and struggled finishing our own research projects we tend to feel that we should not make it easy for our students.

We end up being gatekeepers and academic goalkeepers, delaying the students and at times setting them up for failure. There is also a toxic psychosis where a supervisor may begin to unconsciously compete with his or her students.

That leads to a situation where one unconsciously fights and not supervise the student, making the learner feel dull and useless, or constantly reminding the student that they can never match our industry and intellect. Or comparing the current student with our previous student that we believe was far better. Judging and condemning the work of the student instead of assessing and evaluating it in order to teach arises from a sense of intellectual insecurity in the supervisor whose qualifications and experience have not given him enough self-confidence.

I insist that if we understood the products of our students as Research Reports and that is clarified for what it is beforehand, there would be less confusion and conflict between students and supervisors. Students and supervisors would be fellow travellers, co-learners, and co-teachers, in the research process.

There would be not so many complications. Finally, there are great supervisors out there, only that the university system and its colonial disciplinary system has not told us the correct truth about what the process of research and the product thereof actually are.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes the University of Stellenbosch, Cape Town, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected]