Conceptions of doctoral education: the PhD as pathmaking

Abstract

Our paper is a conversation with the implicit and explicit expectations of the academy, namely that as doctoral students we must achieve a high degree of intellectual autonomy and generate new knowledge. We contest the implications of this view of learners and learning – that learners are autonomous intellectual agents, that knowledge is a private possession, that cognition is an individual process, and that learning is a static and singular path. We propose instead an understanding of learning as pathmaking, which suggests a creative, richly textured, open‐ended, collaborative and passionate process through which new possibilities emerge. This paper comes out of our shared experiences of doctoral studies in Education. We began with initial conversations about our learning in an Ontario Faculty of Education, which then unfolded into a decision to write a paper together. Our process oscillated between individual writing, shared discussion, and analysis. After jointly identifying six keywords, each of us wrote a reflection about a different one – then we merged our individual reflections into a larger whole. The authorial voices in the paper vary between ‘I’ (representing individual reflections of six authors) and ‘we’ (representing the collective voice).