Betwixt and between: Liminality and dissonance in developing threshold competences for research supervision in South Africa

Abstract

Neoliberal performativity imperatives that drive the strategic vision and mission of many higher education institutions in South Africa have begun to shape the higher education project in particular ways. While research and knowledge production will always remain the defining hallmark of a university, the fragility of the system to deliver on this objective in substantive ways remains a challenge. Graduate supervision capacity and competence continues to be a serious obstacle for many higher education institutions in South Africa. Of concern for this article, is that in the quest to rapidly develop supervision competence amongst faculty, to what extent will fast tracking be at the expense of learning as ‘process’ and deep conceptual development of the young academic. How do novice supervisors negotiate liminality as they learn to be researchers while simultaneously teaching the craft to their assigned research students? In this article, I reflect on my experiences of teaching a structured, accredited postgraduate supervision programme at seven merged higher education institutions in SA from 2014 to2016. I argue that high-level research supervision depends on having certain minimum threshold research supervision competences, the achievement of which necessitates a process approach. Young novice faculty however, have to negotiate a precarious liminal space in which they learn the research ‘trade/craft’ as apprentice whilst simultaneously teaching the research ‘trade/craft’ to research candidates they supervise. I engage the implications of this risky and contradictory agenda for novice faculty and a discussion of how this ‘parallel learning’, which entails learning the research craft and simultaneously learning how to teach the research craft is likely to play out in the South African higher education research context.