The Lived Experience of a Doctoral Student: The Process of Learning and Becoming

Authors

Betina Callary, University of OttawaFollow
Penny Werthner, University of Ottawa
Pierre Trudel, University of Ottawa

Abstract

The PhD experience is often a transition from student to future faculty member, which involves considerable learning and development (Glaze, 2002; Hockey, 2004). Using a lifelong learning perspective (Jarvis, 2009), the purpose of this article is to explore, through a reflective self-study, my process of learning throughout the PhD degree. In this qualitative self-study, I kept a detailed personal, professional, and academic reflective journal over four years and used the journal entries as data to explore the process of learning. The results reveal my ‘process of becoming’, moving from a beginner PhD student to an aspiring professor and new mother. The results are discussed in light of how I learned during the four years of the PhD, and how my lifetime of previous experiences influenced the learning that occurred.

Keywords

Learning, Reflection, Student, Mother, Coach, Experience

Acknowledgements

The researchers gratefully acknowledge financial assistance for this project from the following agencies: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and Sport Canada.

Publication Date

10-22-2012

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.46743/2160-3715/2012.1715

Recommended APA Citation

Callary, B., Werthner, P., & Trudel, P. (2012). The Lived Experience of a Doctoral Student: The Process of Learning and Becoming. The Qualitative Report, 17(43), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2012.1715