Workshop 1
Supervisory Strategies to prevent and cope with problems and incidents: Learning from research and experience
Date: 25 March 2025 (9:00 – 12:30)
Brief Description:
Supervising postgraduate research can be challenging, and many supervisors face common problems without the benefit of formal training or peer support. This workshop provides a rare opportunity to reflect on your supervisory practices, learn from the latest research, and exchange experiences with colleagues.
Research shows that challenges are a regular part of supervision, but what truly matters is how we respond to them. Through a combination of evidence-based insights and peer learning, this workshop will help you reflect on your supervisory practices, identify areas for improvement, and develop actionable strategies to enhance your effectiveness as a supervisor.
By the end of the workshop, participants will leave with a set of concrete goals and strategies to apply in your supervision, tailored to the unique needs of your students and your research context. The objectives for this workshop are thus: (a) To understand supervisory challenges: and identify key factors that can hinder the completion of a postgraduate thesis or research proposal; (b) Analyse common issues by examining typical problems that arise during the research process and how to address them; (c) Explore supervisory roles by better understanding the impact of different supervisory roles on student development; (d) Develop coping strategies by exploring practice strategies to handle common supervisory difficulties effectively; (e) Plan tailored supervision by drafting supervision plans that consider the student’s academic profile, research goals, and professional aspirations.
Methodology:
The workshop will combine guided discussions with case study analysis based on participants' experiences, supported by insights from current research. An anonymous pre-workshop questionnaire will help tailor the content to the specific needs of participants, ensuring practical and relevant learning.
Facilitator:
Montserrat Castelló is Full Professor in Educational Psychology and Director of the Research Institute on Applied Psychology at Universitat Ramon Llull in Barcelona, Spain. Her research interests include early career researcher writing and identity development.
Workshop 2
Supervisors supporting postgraduates and postdoctoral colleagues in writing for academic publication and building a research and writing career
Date: 25 March 2025 (9:00 – 12:30)
Brief Description:
In this research and experience informed, interactive workshop, participants will identify, explore, and discuss successful practices to support, supervise and empower postgraduates and postdoctoral colleagues to write, to publish and to build a writing career. In so doing, effective experiences and practices will be shared, referring to and building on research and published work in supporting and supervising writing for academic publication.
In particular, the workshop will aim at:
It is hoped that by sharing experiences, published research and proven strategies will also support senior degree study supervisors in their own ongoing writing and publishing success.
Facilitator:
Professor Gina Wisker, holding visiting positions at Aarhus University, Denmark and Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, England. She is chief editor of the Taylor and Francis (SEDA) journal ‘Innovations in Education and Teaching International'.
Workshop 3
Generative AI for Research Workshop: Principles, Practices and Pitfalls
Date: 25 March 2025 (9:00 – 12:30)
Brief Description:
The fundamental ideas around Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools have been around for over three decades. Not until recently (after the release of ChatGPT in November 2022) have they garnered widespread popularity and panic in higher education. Most concerns centre around academic misconduct and the ethical use of these tools for assessments and research-related activities in a range of disciplines. This workshop will take a critical approach by introducing participants to the potential of GenAI tools for supporting various stages of the research process. Through presentations, group discussions and interactive exercises, participants will reflect on and explore both the possibilities and challenges of leveraging GenAI in their research workflows.
Facilitators:
Dr Nompilo Tshuma and Dr Sonja Strydom. Dr Tshuma is a senior lecturer in the Centre for Higher and Adult Education. Her postgraduate supervision and research expertise are concerned with a critical exploration of learning technologies and the contexts within which they are employed. Dr Strydom, Deputy Director at Stellenbosch University's Centre for Learning Technologies, is researching higher education and digital technology. Her work explores social justice pedagogies, GenAI, and student voice in digital innovation in post-digital educational landscapes.
Workshop 4
Feedback as dialogue in postgraduate research supervision – A workshop for research students and supervisors
Date: 25 March 2025 (14:00 – 17:30)
Brief Description:
Feedback lies at the heart of any learning experience, and giving and receiving feedback is an important and integral part of postgraduate supervision practice. This interactive workshop draws on recent research on the feedback process. In this interactive workshop we will explore:
Research shows that challenges are a regular part of supervision, but what truly matters is how we respond to them. Through a combination of evidence-based insights and peer learning, this workshop will help you reflect on your supervisory practices, identify areas for improvement, and develop actionable strategies to enhance your effectiveness as a supervisor.
The workshop aims to increase supervisors' and candidates’ skills when giving and receiving feedback, thus leading to a better understanding of how to close the gap between students’ current achievement and expected goals.Facilitator:
Professor Elke Stracke, University of Canberra, Australia
Elke is a professor in applied linguistics and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) in the Faculty of Education at the University of Canberra, Australia. She is an applied linguist who brings her expertise to solving language-related problems in postgraduate supervision and assessment practice.
Workshop 5
Supervising postgraduate students at a distance
Date: 25 March 2025 (14:00 – 17:30)
Brief Description:
Learning to work with postgraduate students at a distance (including in formal ‘distance’ programmes, and informal off-campus or hybrid formats) is an important dimension of contemporary supervisory practice. For many students, a distance pathway is the only way possible to access postgraduate education given their life circumstances. As such, there are important equity dimensions to learning to supervise well at a distance. The COVID-19 pandemic has also brought questions about distance postgraduate supervision to the fore, as many supervisors and students switched to working remotely due to social distancing requirements. There is a need for us to come together and reflect on what has been learned through this experience.
This workshop offers an opportunity to identify effective strategies for supervising postgraduate students at a distance, to learn from global evidence about wise practice, and the opportunity to engage in collective discussion with colleagues. Importantly, the workshop takes a strengths-based view of distance learners, arguing that distance doesn’t need to mean ‘second best’.
Researchers have identified a host of challenges that postgraduate students can experience in studying at a distance, as well as the agency and opportunities it can bring for their development as a researcher. This workshop will introduce contemporary research to help you reflect on your own practice, and to identify areas for your development as a supervisor.
The goals of the workshop include:
At the end of the workshop, participants will have a deeper understanding of postgraduate supervision at a distance and will have identified a series of goals to take away to improve distance supervision practice.
Facilitator:
Associate Professor James Burford works at the Department of Education Studies at the University of Warwick and co-founded the Doctoral Education and Academia Research Centre (DEAR). He is an editor-in-chief of Studies in Graduate and Postdoctoral Education.
Workshop 6
"The conversation in the margins” approach to feedback on students’ writing
Date: 25 March 2025 (14:00 – 17:30)
Brief Description:
Providing feedback on students’ writing is a time-consuming task for supervisors. A lot of poor student writing can be conceptualized as ‘speech written down’ (Boughey, in press; Gough & Bock, 2001), an observation that is not surprising in South African contexts at least given the privileging of orality in many social groups. This workshop describes a strategy for the provision of feedback that draws on students’ communication strengths by advocating for a ‘conversation in the margins’ of their written texts. The rationale for the approach will be explicated and the approach itself demonstrated. Participants will then try out the approach for themselves on pieces of their own students’ writing they bring to the workshop.
The workshop will also provide an argument for the benefits of written engagement with students rather than the oral engagement of traditional face-to-face supervision meetings.
Facilitator:
Emeritus Professor Chrissie Boughey is a full research professor in the Centre for Postgraduate Studies at Rhodes University and a professor extraordinaire in the Department of Curriculum Studies at Stellenbosch University. Chrissie has been involved in several large projects on creating capacity for postgraduate supervision funded by NUFFIC and the European Union.