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Doctoral Students’ Experiences of Feeling (or not) Like an Academic
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Sarıkaya, Esma McAlpine, Lynn Amundsen, Cheryl |
| Copyright Year | 2017 |
| Abstract | ABSTRACT Aim/Purpose This paper examined the balance and meaning of two types of experiences in the day-to-day activity of doctoral students that draw them into academia and that move them away from academia: 'feeling like an academic and belonging to an academic community;' and 'not feeling like an academic and feeling excluded from an academic community.' Background As students navigate doctoral work, they are learning what is entailed in being an academic by engaging with their peers and more experienced academics within their community. They are also personally and directly experiencing the rewards as well as the challenges related to doing academic work. Methodology This study used a qualitative methodology; and daily activity logs as a data collection method. The data was collected from 57 PhD students in the social sciences and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields at two universities in the UK and two in Canada. Contribution The current study moves beyond the earlier studies by elaborating on how academic activities contribute/hinder doctoral students' sense of being an academic. Findings The participants of the study generally focused on disciplinary/scholarly rather than institutional/service aspects of academic work, aside from teaching, and regarded a wide range of activities as having more positive than negative mean-ings. The findings related to both extrinsic and intrinsic factors that play important roles in students' experiences of feeling (or not) like academics are elaborated in the study. Recommendations Supervisors should encourage their students to for Practitioners develop their own support net-works and to participate in a wide range of academic activities as much as possible. Supervisors should encourage students to self-assess and to state the activities they feel they need to develop proficiency in. Future Research More research is needed to examine the role of teaching in doctoral students' lives and to examine the cross cultural and cross disciplinary differences in doctoral students' experiences. Keywords doctoral education, academic culture, workplace learning, doctoral students' academic activities INTRODUCTION Doctoral students have experiences that affirm or strengthen their feelings of seeing themselves as academics as well as experiences that result in not feeling like an academic. The affirming experiences, from our perspective, provide a sense of progress since doctoral work is emulating academic work wherein doctoral students themselves increasingly feel drawn into an academic community. Such feelings are representative of experiencing a positive academic climate, which is seen to be influential in doctoral success (McAlpine & Norton, 2006; Solem, Hopwood, & Schlemper, 2011; Solem, Lee, & Schlemper, 2009). When individuals feel themselves as valued, needed, and involved they also feel they belong to a community. Sense of belonging is seen as an important element in maintaining and sustaining one's relationships with others and acknowledged as a basic human need (Hagerty, Williams, Coyne, & Early, 1996). It is defined as "the experience of personal involvement in a system or environment so that persons feel themselves to be an integral part of that system or environment" (Hagerty, Lynch-Sauer, Patusky, Bouwsema, & Collier, 1992, p. … |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.28945/3727 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://ijds.org/Volume12/IJDSv12p073-090Emmioglu3050.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.28945/3727 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
