Abstract
Tertiary education transformation and associated neoliberalism and new public management policies have created a cascade of events which has impacted upon the supervisor-postgraduate student dyad. Within the health sciences, this cascade contains issues of supervisor workload, student massification, clinical research, academic staff reduction, financial strategies, and the push for mode 2 knowledge production among others which has had negative effects on the quality and quantity of supervisor-postgraduate interaction time. Formal university training initiatives to supply research skills previously acquired from supervisors are deemed insufficient to meet all current postgraduate needs. Informal alternative research-related spaces, especially those with academic staff involvement, have the potential to serve as learning spaces to supply disappearing supervisor skills and experience. Such spaces are deserving of greater scrutiny and future research, as they could provide a workable solution to the intractable tensions between the numbers of values and goals arising in postgraduate learning within South African and other higher education environments.
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Grossman, E. (2018). Alternative Research-Related Spaces in Postgraduate Research Training. In: Erwee, R., Harmes, M., Harmes, M., Danaher, P. (eds) Postgraduate Education in Higher Education. University Development and Administration. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0468-1_10-1
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