Doctoral experience and learning from a sociocultural perspective

Abstract

This article considers how and what doctoral students learn through teaching, student journal editing and academic career mentoring. It provides a grounded account of doctoral experience as a counter‐narrative to prevailing policy discourses that focus on products and overlook the doctorate as a personal and social learning experience. Sociocultural theory is used to emphasise forms of agency and relationships between learning, practice and students’ intentions. Students are presented as agentic in their purposeful engagement in particular activities, and in their response to challenges they encounter in those activities. Learning is described as embedded in particular practice contexts, culturally mediated and rooted in social interaction.

Keywords:

• doctoral education
• doctoral practices
• academic practice
• sociocultural perspectives
• doctoral study

Acknowledgements

The study was funded by the WLE Centre – a Centre for Excellence in Work‐Based Learning for Education Professionals at the Institute of Education (University of London). The author would like to thank Clare Brooks (Institute of Education) for her important contribution as critical friend in the analytical peer debriefing process. The article also benefited greatly from feedback provided by David Mills, Alison Lee, members of the Oxford Learning Institute’s writing group, and the anonymous reviewers.