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Volume 12, 2017

Accepted by Editor Holly Sawyer │Received: October 16, 2016│ Revised: February 23, March 29, 2017 │ Accepted: April 26, 2017. Cite as: Emmioğlu, E., McAlpine, L., & Amundsen, C. (2017). Doctoral students’ experıences of feelıng (or not) lıke an academıc. International Journal of Doctoral Studies, 12, 73-90. Retrieved from http://www.informingscience.org/Publications/3727

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DOCTORAL STUDENTS’ EXPERIENCES OF FEELING (OR NOT) LIKE AN ACADEMIC

Esma Emmioğlu* Gaziosmanpaşa University, Tokat, Turkey [email protected] Lynn McAlpine Cheryl Amundsen

University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada

[email protected] [email protected]

* Corresponding author

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 col- lection 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 aca- demic activities contribute/hinder doctoral students’ sense of being an academ- ic.

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 im- portant roles in students’ experiences of feeling (or not) like academics are elaborated in the study.

Recommendations for Practitioners

Supervisors should encourage their students to develop their own support net- works and to participate in a wide range of academic activities as much as pos- sible. Supervisors should encourage students to self-assess and to state the ac- tivities they feel they need to develop proficiency in.

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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 doc- toral 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 experienc- es, 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, Wil- liams, 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. 177). Based on this definition, doctor- al students’ sense of belonging to the academia is closely related to feeling as an integral part of the academia and, therefore, feeling themselves to be academics. Throughout their education, doctoral students will have positive experiences that make them feel as an insider of an academic community, which might make them feel like academics. However, doctoral education can also be a bumpy road; experiences that disrupt or reduce students’ feeling like an academic or belonging to an academic community are also to be expected and, on the positive side, may develop resilience and provide use- ful insights into academic work and academia as a workplace. However, if there are too many chal- lenging or negative experiences, these may lead individuals to disengage (McAlpine & Amundsen, 2011).

Billet (2002) defines the workplace as an environment in which individuals learn key elements of their practice. Workplace learning takes place by participating in everyday work activities or guided learning strategies, and, therefore according to Billet (2002), there is no separation between engaging with work and learning. In this study, we think of academia as a ‘workplace’, doctoral studies as ‘aca- demic work’, and engaging with academic work as ‘workplace learning’. Our aim was to understand students’ experiences of learning and engaging with academic work that prompted feeling or not feeling like an academic/belonging or not belonging to an academic community and their explana- tions of these feelings.

Qualitative studies of doctoral experience often draw on retrospective recall of earlier events (e.g., Cotterall, 2015; Lepp, Remmik, Karm, & Leijen, 2013; O’Meara, Knudsen, & Jones, 2013). However, in this study, we wanted to capture the influence of day-to-day experiences over time. In an earlier study (McAlpine, Jazvac-Martek, & Hopwood, 2009) on which this study builds, we reported the use of weekly activity logs to capture the day-to-day challenges and difficulties as well as the significant experiences reported in 84 logs completed by 23 education doctoral students in two institutions in Canada. In this analysis, we focus on log questions related to feeling like an academic or not feeling like an academic/belonging or not belonging to an academic community. The results demonstrate the formative role of cumulative day-to-day activities in contributing to positive experiences of belong- ing and feeling like an academic; generally, many reported activities lying outside the formal aspects of the doctorate. Yet, at the same time students reported tensions in the very sorts of activities they often found significant and positive in feeling like an academic or belonging to an academic commu- nity. Solem et al. (2011) used a modification of our weekly activity log to analyzed 285 logs from 53

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Master’s and PhD geography students in 9 institutions in the U.S. Again, it was often the informal activities not directly related to their programs that students reported engendered a sense of belong- ing, though such events could also create anxiety. This analysis, in comparison to previous studies, drew on a much larger pool of weekly activity logs, a broader range of disciplines, and logs from two universities in Canada and two in the UK. Our goal was to see the extent to which the findings in the previous studies were challenged, corroborated, or modified. In this study, we investigated the fol- lowing research questions:

• What kind of activities do doctoral students report make them: o feel like an academic and feel they belong to an academic community? o not feel like an academic and feel excluded from an academic community?

• How do doctoral students explain why these activities make them: o feel like academics and feel they belong to an academic community? o not feel like academics and feel excluded from an academic community?

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND “To know is also to feel one’s own knowing – to realize and identify oneself as a knower.” (Neumann, 2006, p.383)

As stated by Green (2005) “doctoral education is as much about identity formation as it is about knowledge production” (p.153). Since Green made this statement, there has been an abundance of research on doctoral student identity (e.g., Barnacle & Mewburn, 2010; Cotterall, 2015; Holley, 2009; McAlpine, 2012; McAlpine & Amundsen, 2009) and academic identities (e.g., Churchman & King, 2009; Harris, 2005; McLean, 2012; Smith, 2010; Watson, 2011). However, there has been little atten- tion paid to how everyday experiences may strengthen or reduce students’ feelings of feeling like an academic or belonging to an academic community. We frame this analysis through the notion of workplace learning.

The workplace learning literature derives from social constructivist and cognitive learning theories. In his early work, Billet (1996) compared these two perspectives and discussed how social and personal aspects of learning complement each other in explaining workplace learning. He stated that these two perspectives could not provide a basis for explaining workplace learning on their own, but they to- gether provide the basis for understanding workplace learning. The social worlds of individuals pro- vide norms, practices, and purposes for learning and the personal worlds provide individuals’ cogni- tive experiences such as what people know and how they make sense of their experiences (Billet, 2009). Based on this view, Billet’s later work (i.e., 2001, 2006, 2010) mainly focused on three themes to explain the mechanism of workplace learning: workplace affordances, subjectivity, and agency.

Workplace affordances, which are the guidance and the readiness of the workplace to afford oppor- tunities for individuals to participate in work activities, are documented as the key determinants of the quality of workplace learning (Billet, 2001). From the perspective of doctoral students, this could be understood as a more positive or more negative academic climate (Solem et al., 2011). However, it is recognized that the affordances of the workplace alone cannot guarantee rich learning outcomes, it is also necessary to account for whether and how individuals decide to engage with workplace activi- ties. This directs us to the other themes in Billet’s framework: subjectivity and agency. Subjectivity is defined as the “personally premised construction and projection of conceptions, procedures and sense of self as directed by individuals’ agency and intentionality” (Billet, 2010, p. 4).

The concept of agency does not have a universally agreed upon definition. However, the meaning of agency has often been associated with “active striving, taking initiatives, or having an influence on one’s own life situation” (Etelapelto, Vahasantanen, Hokka, & Paloniemi, 2013, p. 46). From Billett’s perspective (Billet, 2006; Billet & Somerville, 2004), there is a close, reciprocal and interdependent relationship between individuals’ sense of identity and their learning, and this relationship is based on

Doctoral Students’ Experiences of Feeling (or not) Like an Academic

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the intensity of individual agency (e.g., intentionality, subjectivity, identity) and the intensity of social agency (e.g., using the kinds of affordances that are provided).

Empirical studies support the assumptions of the workplace learning perspective when applied to the context of doctoral education. For example, workplace affordances such as a support network (i.e., support provided by supervisors, peers) are related to a stronger sense of belonging and academic self concept. Being praised by supervisors or other academics or receiving recognition and approval at a public conference may influence a doctoral student’s self-validation of themselves as academ- ics/researchers (i.e., Curtin, Stewart, & Ostrove, 2013; Mantai, 2015). Dialogue and collaboration with others provides reassurance for doctoral students (Foot, Crowe, Andrus Tollafield, & Allan, 2014), adds to the perception of a positive learning environment, and is related to students’ persis- tence in studying (Pyhältö, Stubb, & Lonka, 2009) and personal commitment (Martinsuo & Tur- kulainen, 2011).

Thus both personal factors, appreciation of the value of academic work and individual commitment, and external social factors, such as an institution’s readiness to provide support and feedback as well as challenges, are important for understanding how doctoral students learn to do academic work, begin to feel like academics, and feel they belong to an academic community.

METHOD

PART ICIPAN TS This study draws from a longitudinal research program that began in 2006-07. Volunteer participants from two universities in Canada and two in the UK were recruited through e-mails and a snowballing procedure and were followed for a 3-5 year period using multiple data collection methods. University Research Ethics Board approval was gathered from each university before the data collection. Initially data was collected in the social sciences and beginning in 2010, also from the STEM (Science, Tech- nology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. Overtime, individuals in the roles of doctoral student, postdoc and pre-tenure faculty have participated, often moving from one role to another and from one institution to another during their participation in the research. This analysis drew on a sub-set of the broader dataset resulting in 457 logs from 57 (35 female and 22 male) doctoral students from two universities in Canada and two in the UK (Table 1).

Table 1. Distribution of participants and logs by country and field

CANADA UK TOTAL

Social sciences 16 students

154 logs

16 students

117 logs

32 students

271 logs

STEM 8 students

67 logs

17 students

119 logs

25 students

186 logs

Total 24 students

221 logs

33 students

236 logs

57 students

457 logs

R ESEARCH DESIGN & DATA COLLECTION This study used a qualitative research design as we aimed to understand doctoral students’ experienc- es from a naturalistic perspective and to capture the meanings of doctoral students’ experiences by analyzing the data inductively (Bogdan & Biklen, 1998). The logs (open-ended, short answer, and tick off) are submitted by participants via e-mail four to six times each year. Participants are asked to de- scribe their activities during one week, with the suggestion that they use the present or previous week after receiving the log as a reference. While the logs are structured and take about 15 minutes to

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complete, they allow a degree of flexibility in terms of the kinds of experiences that participants discuss and the ways that they represent these experiences textually (Alexander, Harris-Huemmert, & McAlpine, 2013).

In this study, we looked specifically at the responses to two questions posed on every activity log. Each question included two parts, a description of the experience and the meaning it held for the student:

• If there was a significant event or experience in which you felt like an academic or felt that you belonged to an academic community, please tell us about it. Why was this event or expe- rience important?

• If there was a significant event or experience in which you did not feel like an academic or felt that you were excluded from or not part of an academic community, please tell us about it. Why did this experience make you feel this way?

This binary representation of [not] feeling like an academic or [not] belonging to an academic com- munity was chosen since we were seeking to understand what day-to-day events might have pivotal positive and negative meaning. In order to provide the reader with a better idea of an individual’s experiences, we included only the participants who had provided two or more logs and from these participants, we selected those with responses to at least one of the questions above. The resulting data involved 457 activity logs provided by 57 students.

DATA ANALYSIS The unit of analysis, as noted above, in the current study was the experiences reported, not the indi- vidual. However, we do report some overall individual findings (e.g., number of students who re- ported positive only experiences). The analysis was facilitated by using MAXQDA, a qualitative data analysis software. In order to describe the meaning of our participants’ responses to these two ques- tions, we used a qualitative content analysis method, which is defined as “a method for describing the meaning of qualitative material in a systematic way” (Schreier, 2012, p. 1). The details of the analysis method are described below.

1. We gathered students’ responses to the first part of each of the two questions under two main themes: “feeling like an academic/belonging to an academic community” and “not feeling like an academic/excluded from the academic community”.

2. We listed doctoral students’ activities that made them feel like academics/belonging to an ac- ademic community under main theme 1: feeling like an academic.

3. We listed doctoral students’ activities that made them not feel like academics under main theme 2: not feeling like an academic-excluded from the academic community.

4. We used the coding frame developed in the McAlpine et al. (2009) study and used in another study (Solem et al., 2011) to categorize the activities. The coding scheme was a good fit for this analysis and we wanted to be able to compare the findings. We first tried out this coding frame by analyzing the logs of four participants (46 logs). In this coding scheme, doctoral students’ activities are categorized into two groups: doctoral-specific activities and general academic activities. Doctoral-specific activities are experienced only by doctoral students by virtue of being a student in a doctoral program (e.g., coursework). General academic activi- ties are engaged in by any academic, including doctoral students (e.g., conference presenta- tion). These two categories were further divided into three groups with regard to the formal- ity of the activity: formal, semi-formal, and informal activities. Formal activities are visible el- ements of academic work; they are structured and documented activities one might put on a CV (e.g., submitting a journal article, teaching). Semi-formal activities are also planned, pub- lic, and structured but are not associated with particular benchmarks for the individuals in- volved (e.g., meeting academics, attending conferences). Informal activities are unstructured

Doctoral Students’ Experiences of Feeling (or not) Like an Academic

78

and undocumented, and they are not public or visible to the extent of formal and semi- formal activities (e.g., conversations with peers, reading).

5. We modified McAlpine et al.’s (2009) coding frame by adding new codes after analyzing the logs of 24 more participants (265 logs).

6. After we reached a 100% agreement with the coding scheme, the first author of the study analyzed the rest of the participants’ logs (29 participants, 146 logs) and somewhat revised the coding scheme again (see final coding scheme in Table 2, activities printed with bold are added to the coding framework of McAlpine et al., 2009).

Table 2. Coding scheme of doctoral students’ academic activities

Doctoral Specific Formal Semi-Formal Informal

 teaching often as a teach- ing assistant

 submitting a dissertation or thesis

 coursework  being invited to an in-

stitutional process  submitting funding appli-

cation  attending an interview

 research related activities (e.g., working as an RA)

 meeting with supervisor(s)  meeting with peers (e.g.,

for research)  attending someone else’s

oral defense  meeting with committee

members  organizing a student

seminar/conference

 writing dissertation/thesis  other doctoral specific

reading & writing  comprehensive exam

related tasks  conversations with peers

General Academic Formal Semi-Formal Informal

 submitting a journal article  job offer/submitting appli-

cation  conference presentation  being invited to engage

in academic activities  submitting a conference

paper  winning a prize

 meeting with academics (e.g., for joint writing)

 attending a semi- nar/workshop

 non-conference presentation  conference attendance  meeting non-academics  acting as a consultant

 conference organization

 writing  reading literature  doing research (not

limited to reading & writing)

 social gatherings with academics

 conversations with academics

 job application work  conversations with

non-academics  reviewing work  getting rejections to

academic papers

7. To analyze the second part of each of the two questions explaining why the reported event or experience was significant, we reviewed and clustered the log responses related to a) posi- tive experiences and b) negative experiences, in order to develop a parsimonious coding scheme that represented the perceived meaning of these activities (Table 3).

Emmioğlu, McAlpine, & Amundsen

79

Table 3. Coding scheme of the meanings of positive and negative experiences

Meanings of Positive Experiences Meanings of Negative Experiences

Self-recognition Lack of self-recognition

Recognition by others Lack of recognition by others

Making a contribution Not making a contribution

Helpful for learning things Not spending time on academic work

Advancing career profile Lack of progress

Institutional barriers

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

COM PARISON OF DIFFEREN T T YPES OF ACADEM IC ACTIVITIES AN D POSIT IVE AN D N EGATIVE EXPERIEN CES Two key findings stand out in comparing the frequency of type of academic activities (See Table 4). First, general academic activities were more frequently reported than doctoral specific academic activ- ities, whether positive or negative. Second, except for doctoral specific experiences that lead to posi- tive feelings, semi-formal and informal academic activities were more frequently reported than for- mal academic activities, both positive and negative. Both findings support the two earlier log studies (McAlpine et al., 2009; Solem et al., 2011).

Table 4. Frequency of the each type of positive and negative experiences by activity

Formal Semi-formal Informal Total Positive Experi- ences leading to Feeling like an Academic

Doctoral specific 72 58 38

356 General academic

43 72 73

Negative Expe- riences leading to not Feeling like an Academic

Doctoral specific

2 3 6 25 General

academic 2 6 6

A closer look at the difference between experiences that engendered positive or negative emotions, shows that of the 381 experiences reported in total, positive experiences leading to feeling like an academic or belonging to an academic community were reported 356 (93%) times. In contrast, nega- tive experiences leading to not feeling like an academic or being excluded from (or not part of) an academic community were reported only 25 (7%) times. That is, the positive experiences were re- ported about 14 times more frequently than the negative experiences, indicating that our participants were more likely to have experiences leading to positive feelings on a regular basis than negative, although still experiencing the ups and downs of the academic world.

Table 5 provides a finer grained analysis of the number of students and logs reporting the academic activities by different types of experiences. For instance, even though overall general academic activi- ties were more frequently reported than doctoral specific academic activities, it is notable that the doctoral specific formal activity of teaching as a teaching assistant was the most frequently reported positive log experience of all, supporting Bieber and Worley’s (2006) assertion of the importance of teaching as an academic activity for doctoral students.

Doctoral Students’ Experiences of Feeling (or not) Like an Academic

80

Participants also reported frequently meeting informally with academics other than their supervisors and, though less frequently, also meeting with peers and non-academics. Collectively, these interac- tions demonstrate extensive informal networks of support (Austin, 2002; McAlpine & Amundsen, 2011; Sweitzer, 2009).

Table 5. Activities by positive and negative experiences

Type of Activity

Only Positive Experiences (frequency of the experience/ students/ log s)

Both Positive a nd Neg a tive Experiences (frequency of the experience/ students/

log s)

D oc

to ra

l s pe

ci fic

Fo rm

al

Teaching as a TA (43/14/20) Coursework (positive: 5/5/5, negative:1/1/1) Submitting funding application (3/1/1) Submitting a dissertation or thesis (positive:

9/8/9, negative:1/1/1) Being invited to an institutional process (9/4/4)

Attending an interview (3/1/1)

Se m

i-F or

m al

Meeting with peers (e.g., for research) (12/4/5) Meeting with committee members (7/3/3) Attending someone else’s oral defense (6/4/4)

Meeting with supervisor(s) (positive: 15/11/15, negative:1/1/1) Research related activities (e.g., working as an RA) (positive: 16/9/16, negative:1/1/1) Organizing a student seminar/conference (positive: 2/1/2, negative:1/1/1)

In fo

rm al

Comprehensive exam related tasks (9/6/9) Writing dissertation/thesis (positive: 11/5/11, negative:4/3/4) Other doctoral specific reading & writing (10/6/10, negative:1/1/1) Conversations with peers (positive: 8/8/8, negative:1/1/1)

G en

er al

A ca

de m

ic

Fo rm

al

Submitting a journal article (17/13/17) Job offer/submitting application (positive: 12/8/12, negative: 1/1/1)

Submitting a conference paper (3/3/3) Conference presentation (positive: 6/5/6, negative: 1/1/1)

Being invited to engage in academic activities (4/3/4)

Winning a prize (1/1/1)

Se m

i-F or

m al

Meeting non-academics (6/5/6) Acting as a consultant (4/4/4) Conference organization (1/1/1)

Meeting with academics (e.g., for joint writing) (positive: 21/17/21, negative: 3/3/3) Attending a seminar/workshop (positive: 17/13/17, negative:1/1/1) Conference attendance (positive: 11/11/11, negative:1/ 1/1)

Non-conference presentation (positive: 12/10/12, negative:1/1/1)

In fo

rm al

Writing (17/11/17) Conversations with academics (10/8/10) Conversations with non-academics (3/3/3) Reviewing work (2/2/2)

Reading literature (positive: 12/11/12, nega- tive: 1/1/1) Doing research (not limited to reading & writing) (positive: 12/7/12, negative: 2/2/2) Social gatherings with academics (positive: 10/10/10, negative:1/1/1) Job application work (positive:6/4/6, nega- tive: 1/1/1)

Getting rejections (positive: 1/1/1, negative: 1/1/1)

We found that most of the part

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