Using positioning theory and narrative to explore doctoral students’ developing understandings about theory in educational research

ABSTRACT

Doctoral students' ability to understand, use, and build on theory in educational research is a critical aspect of their learning to be successful scholars. Unfortunately, there is a paucity of work that explores the voices of graduate students articulating their experiences as they learn about theory. Using Positioning Theory to frame their work, the authors of this paper examined doctoral students' evolving understandings of theory and its uses in educational research. This work has important implications for concrete ways that senior faculty can work with doctoral students to foster their understanding of theory and its uses in educational research.

KEYWORDS:

• Doctoral students
• learning
• theory
• positioning theory
• scaffolding

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As scholars, we are aware of critiques of autoethnography (see Atkinson and Delamont 2006; Delamont 2009) . For example, Delamont (2009, 59), argues that autoethnography ‘ … cannot fight familiarity.’ We argue, however, that because we engaged critically with others in our collaborative autoethnography research group, we ‘saw’ our own evolving thinking/understandings about theory in ‘new’ ways. Delamont (2009, 59) also argues that ‘ … research is supposed to be analytic and not merely experiential.’ Regarding our work, and as depicted in Appendix A as well as our write-up in the Findings section of our paper, we analyzed the doctoral students’ narrative writing (Florio-Ruane 2001), and we engaged in the theoretical analysis of data (see our analysis using of modes of positioning drawing on McVee, Baldassarre, and Bailey 2004). In short, there are a host of different approaches to autoethnography (see Hughes and Pennington 2017), and the critiques Delamont (2009) has expressed about some kinds of autoethnography may have merit for some types of autoethnography. However, we have been careful in our own work to articulate the specific ‘type’ of autoethnography we use in our work (i.e. collaborative autoethnography) as well as our own critical, systematic, and analytic goals for our work (see Hughes, Pennington, and Makris 2012, 209).