INTRODUCTION: The Department of Education Policy Studies decided to produce this
occasional publication on the topic of thesis supervision as a way of bringing
our academic labour in this hitherto ‘invisible’ area into academic view. This
is in contrast to the plethora of awareness, debate and published work on the
quality of teaching and learning and research production. Thesis supervision
commonly takes place in one-on-one consultation arrangements between
academics as supervisors and postgraduate students behind the proverbial
closed door. Its pedagogical and intellectual entailments remain largely
invisible and conceptually under-explored. There is very little systematic
scholarly focus or conceptual consideration of this important dimension
of academic work, and departments do not seem to engage in conversation
and systematic approaches that address their productivity in this area.