A pedagogy of supervision : 'knowledgeability' through relational engagement

Date
2013
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
School of Education, University of KwaZulu-Natal
Abstract
This article is a response to a debate on the nature of postgraduate thesis supervision. I was an initial participant in this debate, having published an article on the topic in 2005. In this response article I offer an exposition of what I term a ‘pedagogy of supervision’ (PoS), which I suggest as a way of addressing the debate’s silence about the link between the personal or subjective dynamics of students’ thesis work and their knowledgeability acquisition processes during the supervision process. Based on my personal supervision experiences, I present three engagement moments – habitus engagement, knowledgeability engagement and data-analysis engagement – as a way of substantiating a productive PoS approach. The article is an argument for understanding supervision work as leveraging students’ intellectual knowledgeability through active relational mediation, which I suggest is more likely to secure the student’s ability to produce a thesis that makes a knowledge contribution to the chosen field of study.
Description
CITATION: Fataar, A. 2013. A pedagogy of supervision : 'knowledgeability' through relational engagement. Journal of Education, 58, doi:10.17159/2520-9868/i58a06.
The original publication is available at https://journals.ukzn.ac.za
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Citation
Fataar, A. 2013. A pedagogy of supervision : 'knowledgeability' through relational engagement. Journal of Education, 58, doi:10.17159/2520-9868/i58a06.