In this theoretical paper we explore the authorial voice of black African postgraduate students in their writing and scholarship experience. This includes investigating the undergirding factors that need to be interrogated when it comes to the student-supervisor relationship. Some (if not most) black African postgraduate students experience…

Postgraduate education has grown enormously worldwide, which has led to supervisors being expected to take on a supervisor's role immediately upon graduation. But crossing the border from being a doctoral candidate to becoming a doctoral supervisor entails significant shifts in identity and an understanding of postgraduate pedagogy and…

This paper presents an evocative autoethnographic account of my postgraduate supervision experience in two African institutions while dealing mainly with students in the computing disciplines of Computer Science, Information Systems, and Information Technology. In this paper, the context of the postgraduate supervision, and the lessons learnt are…

South African universities have evidenced exponential increases in the numbers of doctoral students, bringing pressure to bear upon traditional supervisory practice. With the literature on the challenges experienced by international postgraduate students at South African universities being very limited, it was anticipated that the challenges…

This paper presents an autoethnographic, narrative analysis through self-reflection of my own personal transition from doctoral student to doctoral supervisor. An evaluation of the importance of the PhD in South Africa, the role of doctoral supervisors, and characteristics of good supervisors was undertaken; against which my personal experience…

The aim of the study reported on here was to evaluate the roles of supervisors in the implementation of the Integrated Quality Management System (IQMS) in South African schools. The supervisors are the School Management Teams (SMTs), namely principals, deputy principals, or heads of department (HoD), circuit managers, and district coordinators. We…

This book focuses on the topic of academic publishing. It discusses the mounting, serious problems that researchers, particularly new researchers, encounter when trying to publish their research. The book addresses the issues of publishing as well as the salient factors militating against academic publication and the mitigating factors encouraging…

Despite there being much research on the needs of students with more visible disabilities, this is not the case with students with invisible disabilities such as psychosocial disabilities -- especially in university settings. The unique needs of students with psychosocial disabilities have received less attention with not much research in this…

This study employs an Afro-centric framework of Digital "Unhu" (i.e. digital humanism) and netnographic accounts of supervisor-supervisee interactions to investigate Mobile Instant Messaging mediated interaction as a platform for honing students' career management competencies. While many existing studies foreground Western…

With the closure of educational institutions during COVID-19, some leadership and management teams resorted to technology for online teaching. However, for the teaching practicum (TP) module, the move to online required specially designed interventions, resulting in a variety of different TP COVID-19 configurations. Fortuitously, at the outbreak…

Supervisory practices are fundamental to the production of research in higher education, but these practices are undertheorized and poorly understood. Academia needs to understand and engage with supervisory pedagogies to reinforce their importance in knowledge production and the development of a knowledge society. Using content analysis of…

In the context of higher education as social space or "field" in the Bourdieusian sense, exploring the lived experiences of early career postgraduate supervisors allow us to (re)consider the institutionalised rhythms, procedures and practices that shape graduate supervision. At the intersections of, inter alia, increasing numbers…

Research suggests that identity development is a crucial dimension of the doctoral student experience. This study explores what identity formations doctoral students exhibit in the doctoral journey and how these formations affect their experiences in the process of achieving a doctorate. The methodology employed was within the qualitative paradigm…

The focus of this quantitative study was to investigate doctoral students' perception of connectedness in an open distance learning (ODL) environment. The study focused exclusively on Ethiopian doctoral students and investigated feelings of student-to-student and student-to-supervisor connectedness in an ODL environment. A total of 100 Ethiopian…

The Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) by publication is gaining impetus as a format of doctoral output both nationally and abroad. This format has become the norm in some countries and within some disciplines. As more African institutions are considering formalising this format through institutional policy and practice, it becomes necessary to consider…