Autobiography reflecting on academic leadership and management and doctoral supervision: from childhood to academia

Abstract

My academic leadership journey was challenged by multiple factors, ranging from underprivileged households, poor school, inadequacy of academic writing skills, heavy university loads, and full-time job responsibilities. My academic journey influenced my supervision. It was marred by delayed completion of academic projects and throughput. The primary objective of this autobiography is to reflect on my lived experiences of academic leadership and management, and doctoral supervision journey using Ubuntu Pedagogy. This autobiography is undergirded by an interpretive paradigm, adopting a qualitative case methodology to unpack my lived experiences in academic and postgraduate studies and supervision. I used a mental map to reflect on my lived experiences and revisited my previous diaries, notes, and reflexive reports to compile this autobiography. The research findings reflect a limitation and impediment to doctoral students’ success caused by changes from a well-resourced research environment to a constrained one. I strongly believe in a (modified) one-to-one peer learning approach, as shaped and influenced by my lived experiences from childhood on one-to-one peer learning, as the best method of supervision pedagogy. I recommend that universities should improve the research environment and research provisioning. Furthermore, supervisors should be capacitated and encouraged to adopt Ubuntu Pedagogy in their doctoral supervision journeys.