Following the successful Sisonke 2.0 Certification and Celebration Day at the Cape Town Hotel School recently, Adjunct Professor in the Education Faculty, Janet Condy, has urged the CPUT community to “please” volunteer to be part of this unique Sisonke 3.0 project in 2024.
“We believe this is a wonderful capacity development programme for novice supervisors,” said Condy. She said supervision remains an academic practice that requires continuous learning and refining, but more can be done to support and capacitate supervisors. Condy said that world-wide supervisors are struggling with two issues of quality and capacity, “they are expected to be supervising and getting more and more PHD candidates through, despite our students lacking the necessary academic skills. Hence building sustainable higher education supervision mentoring programmes is needed to increase completion and prepare them for work in the higher education sector as well as in professional practice”. “There is a general agreement among academics that this process requires a 'special pedagogy'.”
She said since 2021, a few core participants at CPUT have been working on the Sisonke Supervision Mentoring Programme (SSMP). 'Sisonke' in isiXhosa means 'together' or 'to bridge'. This transdisciplinary research project, involving multiple stakeholders, driven by a real-world problem, has the potential to produce transformative and sustainable supervision pedagogies. Condy said supervision practice was the mutually agreed upon point of reference, which provided a basis for shared language.
At the Sisonke 2.0 Certification and Celebration Day, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research, Innovation Technology and Partnerships, Dr David Phaho, welcomed the guests, and provided the opening address where he hailed the “exceptional work” done by the Sisonke Supervision Mentoring programme. The keynote address was delivered by Prof Stephanie Burton and was titled: Supervision and supervisors: Being inspired and inspiring.
Condy said in 2023 there were about 72 volunteer mentors and mentees who attended the 12-week Learning Programme from 4 August to 26 October, every Thursday between 13:00 and 14:30. During this time they included a 40-minute input by an expert in a particular field, then they went to break-away groups with their mentors and mentees. In these smaller groups they discussed the topic they have listened to. Finally in the last 30 minutes they all went back to the main group where the mentors reflected on the discussions in each group.
Reflecting on her overall impression about the event, she said: “For me the best part of the day was meeting face-to-face with all the mentors and mentees. All the speakers spoke eloquently on this very necessary topic and gave us much to think about.
“The activity which Prof Retha De La Harpe did with us was exciting as we worked together reflecting on our past learning and thinking ahead of what we want to achieve. The certificates were a highlight as well - it was wonderful to see how excited people were to receive these.”
She added that in 2020 the Director of the Research Development Directorate, Prof Dina Burger, had invited her and De La Harpe to run with this project. They both wrote the initial proposal and got ethical clearance for this research project. Currently Condy is heading the project with Dr Heather Phillips who manages the Learning Programme. “We have a large research team.”
Written by Aphiwe Boyce
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