Successful Masters Support in the Humanities Profiled at UTLO Conference

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The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Educations’ Code of Practice (September 2004) clearly highlights the responsibility of Higher Education Institutions in defining mechanisms for monitoring and supporting postgraduate students progress.  

The benefits of the doctoral cohort supervision model, as an academic support mechanism, in the discipline of Education have been well-documented.  

Arguably, the most significant advantage, of the doctoral cohort model, these studies have shown, has been its ability to produce graduates who become critical thinkers and responsible knowledge producers and researchers. But what about Masters students? Can they benefit from such support and if so, what are the features of such a support system?  

These were the questions which Dr Saras Reddy and Professor Sarojini Nadar, College Dean of Research: Humanities, recently engaged with in their conference presentation at the University Teaching and Learning Conference held from 25-27 September at Edgewood campus.   

The title of their paper was “Crossing Knowledge Boundaries: A Case-Study of a Trans-disciplinary Masters Cohort Supervision Model in the Humanities”.  Speaking about the programme, Nadar acknowledged the importance and contribution of the Teaching Development Grant to assisting the College in increasing its throughput rates of postgraduate students. 

Due to the enormous success of the support programme for PhD students in 2012, in 2013 Prof. Nadar, together with Reddy (who is currently on sabbatical and researching this model) conceptualised and developed the Masters programme of support.  

However, Prof. Nadar says that it is not enough to simply offer the programme. ‘In-depth pedagogical theoretical and qualitative reflection (not just number-crunching) is needed, if such a model is to be meaningful for both academics as well as policy-makers,’ she says.  

Their paper sought to understand what knowledge boundaries are crossed by the Masters students registered in a trans-disciplinary cohort within the Humanities.  

Since the authors were the key facilitators of this cohort model, their research was framed by the notion of “design experiments in educational research” as propounded by Cobb et al.  They describe this as “a more grounded theory” approach which is described by the theorists as: “entail[ing] both engineering particular forms of learning and systematically studying those forms of learning within the context defined by the means of supporting them…the purpose of design experimentation is to develop a class of theories about both the process of learning and the means that are designed to support that learning…”.  

The research sample comprised the Masters students in the cohort, the supervisors of those students, and the cohort facilitators. The data was collected through interviews, questionnaires, and observation. The study concluded that the trans-disciplinary nature of the cohort enables the participants to develop their critical thinking skills; to acquire a theoretical literacy outside of their disciplines; and to broaden their knowledge of methodological approaches used in the Humanities and Social Sciences.  

These findings will be relevant to Higher Education policy makers, as well as educationists interested in academic monitoring and support of postgraduate students, which is currently perceived as a priority in the Higher Education landscape in South Africa.

-          Maheshvari Naidu