The word academy is like a label spread around the world. As legitimate peripheral learners in academia, doctoral students aim for a full member or a master member in the whole community of practice. Doctoral students are living in the space- between old-timers and new-timers; between novices and seasoned scholars; between fully online and face-to-face learning. It is intriguing to delve into doctoral students’ social learning space with a more holistic view as our minds, formal and informal learning contexts, and online and offline environments constitute each other.
Is loneliness the nature of doctoral students’ learning space? In fact, I have found there is a coexistence of solitude and cooperation in the doctoral journey. In the digital era, when various new technologies expand the connectedness and networks expand connectedness and networks, I feel the role of social learning in doctoral learning is getting more critical. From the perspective of the theory of social constructivism (Vygotsky, 1978), knowledge is constructed within social activities and learning takes place in the daily interactions with others. Learners create and negotiate meanings through different activities in an active and inquiry-based way. Learners jointly co-create their reality and develop the professional knowledge body with multiple perspectives. Furthermore, according to social learning theory (Bandura, 1977), humans learn through observation, interactions, and modelling as we are social animals.
Nevertheless, doctoral learners’ social learning seems to be unique. We do not have fixed schedules like undergraduate and master’s students do. We spend much time doing our study alone. It does not mean social learning does not happen among students. Instead, doctoral students’ social learning happens in a specific way, which can be explained by the concept of situated learning from the theory of community of practice (Wenger, 1998). I am finding it useful to consider doctoral students as a group of legitimate peripheral learners in academia. Beyond our individual projects and outside some core skill and required classes in the early stage, as doctoral students we seek wider support from different layers and types of communities of practice within and outside academia. The networks are supporting us intellectually, socially, and emotionally, having great influences on our whole doctoral learning trajectories. The social connections play an important role in our identification with the scholarly community, facilitating our mental wellbeing. In addition, the social space has become a part of a hidden curriculum embedded in their doctoral learning.
From the Wengerian view, learning is doing. In the dynamic learning process, doctoral learning shapes our identity as doctoral students. Through legitimate peripheral participation, doctoral identity is a kind of ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994) since we are already a member of academia to some degree but have not achieved our full goals yet. This in-betweenness reflects the ambiguity of doctoral students’ status as a trainee or an apprentice. I analyse doctoral students’ learning experiences as a contextualised social phenomenon, and our legitimate peripheral participation identifies how we grow from newbies/novices to seasoned researchers by situated learning within multiple layers of practice. The communities in which doctoral students participate in can be institutional, culture-based, language-based, and common interest-based. These connections help us produce knowledge together, get socialised, and cultivate a sense of belonging and a doctoral persona. However, every community of practice required maintenance for sustainability. Overcoming diverse obstacles together in the academic odyssey relies on regular and meaningful connectedness. Support systems may not always be a defaulted part of the pedagogy offered, but we can be active in creating the social networking opportunities we need.
With portable technologies as a conduit for virtual communities of practice, doctoral students’ identity formation and belonging development become more expansive, fluid, and dynamic. Throughout education, we are traversing the spectrum of experiences that include identification and belonging’, ‘dis-identification’, and ‘dis-belonging’. This nonlinear socialisation unfolds within the regime of knowledge and happens when we cross boundaries to approach other landscapes of practice where boundaries are considered a learning asset. In the realm of doctoral education, there exists a decoupling of teaching and learning, implying that the act of learning is not soley a direct outcome of instructional efforts.
References
Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall
Bhabha, H.K. (1994). The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity.UK: Cambridge University Press
Date: October 16, 2023