Speaking at the recent meeting of Universities South Africa’s (USAf’s) Community of Practice (CoP) for Postgraduate Education and Scholarship (PGES), Professor Dina Burger, Director: Research reported on the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT)’s Sisonke Supervision Mentorship Programme.
Professor Burger (above) said that the model they had developed for postgraduate supervision was unlike any other in the world, because it was co-designed by mentors and mentees themselves. It was based on real needs and ideas from the collective and all stakeholders had had the opportunity to contribute.
Furthermore, “we were flying the plane while building it,” she said, as it had been a research project from the outset, with no clear distinction between research and design, or moving from the abstract to the concrete.