Suchergebnisse

The Council on Higher Education (CHE)'s report on the doctoral programme review states that offering postgraduate programmes seems to be a challenge to some South African universities. Amongst others, the report expresses that postgraduate supervision at universities suffers from many challenges, some of which result in students being delayed or not completing their studies. Underpinned by Archer's (1998) theory of the interplay between structure, culture, and agency (support programmes), the study seeks to examine factors that hinder postgraduate students' completion of their dissertations and theses. The study adopted narrative research where the qualitative design was used. Postgraduate students (Master and Doctoral) who have registered for these programmes repeatedly in the university served as participants in the study. The purposive sample was used to sample eight postgraduate students who have frequently registered for more than the required residency period. Semi-structured questions were formulated to guide data collection. Data was collected through a focus group of eight Master and Doctoral students. Collected data were analysed using the content analysis method. The study found that the university does not have adequate (or weak) supporting structures for students to complete their degrees in record time.

This autoethnographic (AE) paper draws directly from a national collaborative project called the New Academics Transitioning into Higher Education Project (NATHEP), which is funded by the University Capacity Development Grant (UCDG). We adopted evocative and narrative AE methodology to confront, interrogate, and uncover our own biases, assumptions, and preconceptions of induction before NATHEP, how it is now, and how it should be understood and conducted after being part of the NATHEP project. Our AE showcases our critical and reflective thoughts on the learning acquired throughout the journey, consciously and intentionally asking ourselves whether the NATHEP journey was worth it and how it benefitted the induction programme we conceptualised and implemented. Through a combined autoethnography study design and technique, we were able to gather qualitative data from the two of us and present it as written reflective narratives. Together, we developed an open-ended questionnaire in which we asked questions that sought to elicit our experiences throughout the journey as a way of reflecting on the overall learning acquired by being part of the NATHEP project. Our responses and narratives are reflectively and thematically analysed to make sense of how we interpret our eventful NATHEP journey thus far. We conclude and submit that this paper has implications for academic development practice and academic developers who aspire to be reflective practitioners, constantly reflecting on their practices to dismantle and disrupt cultural tendencies in their quest to transform their context of work and induction practices.