Digitally-mediated Doctoral Agency
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This document summarizes Andy Coverdale's research on how PhD students use social media to negotiate their academic practices and identities. The research uses an activity theory framework to examine PhD students' social media use across multiple, interrelated practice contexts during different stages of their doctoral studies. Key findings include that PhD students develop cultural artifacts like blog posts and tweets as agentic tools. They also exercise agency within and across figured worlds of different academic communities. However, participatory contexts provided by social media may only partially enable agency depending on levels of adoption and integration with other doctoral practices.
Digitally-mediated Doctoral Agency
- 1. Andy Coverdale School of Education | University of Nottingham Digitally-mediated Doctoral Agency: How PhD students are using social media to negotiate academic practices and identities ________________________________________________________ Losing Momentum? Current Challenges in Learning and Technology Department of Education | Oxford University 14 June 2012
- 2. Doctoral Agency ________________________________________________________ Human Agency The power of people to act purposively and reflectively, in more or less complex interrelationships with one another, to reiterate and remake the world in which they live. (Inden, 1990: 23) Human agency happens daily and mundanely (Holland et al, 1998) A cultural view of learning (Bruner, 1996) Construction of a conceptual system that organises a record of agentic encounters Performed through knowledge and skills acquisition in specific settings Interrelated with identity development Doctoral Contexts Socialisation and enculturation into specific fields of academic enquiry Transformation of identity Positionality locating oneself in the field Doctoral research cultures (inter)disciplinary, supervisory, departmental, peer group
- 3. Key Motivations for Research ________________________________________________________ What is doing a PhD? Holistic and authentic models of doctoral practice Key phases in doctoral study across multiple practice contexts Ecological perspective of social media Contextualised and situated approach The multiplicity, interrelatedness and transiency of social media practice PLE as an idealised and consensual conceptual model Profiling and sampling participants The reality of low adoption rates and lack of widespread use Inclusive approach to social media users and user contexts
- 4. Research Design ________________________________________________________ Participants Six PhD students: Different stages of PhD Humanities, Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Based in traditional Faculty and Doctoral Training Centres (DTCs) Data Collection 15-month data collection period: Logging all digital artefacts (blog posts, tweets etc.) Field notes Participant-reported accounts Three interviews with each participant (90-120 mins. per interview)
- 5. Analytical Framework ________________________________________________________ Activity Theory Social, cultural and historical perspective of doctoral practices Culturally-mediated, object-oriented activity systems Objects are emergent and partly shared, fragmented and contested Data Analysis Used as a descriptive analytical framework Multiple and interrelated activity systems Open coding and thick description Agency in Activity Systems Object-oriented interagency Development of cultural artefacts Figured worlds and genre knowledge
- 7. Cultural Artefact Development ________________________________________________________ Genre Studies Socio-cultural fork of Genre Studies (e.g. Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1993) Traditions of using tools rather than artefact categorisation Development of genre knowledge as cultural tools Figured Worlds (Holland et al., 1998) Historical, socially enacted and culturally constructed in recognised frames of social life Space of authoring (Bakhtin) mutual shaping of figured worlds
- 8. Key Findings ________________________________________________________ Developing Cultural Artefacts as Agentic Tools Purposes , contexts and stages of the PhD Agentic Contexts Agency exists within and across multiple and interrelated practice contexts Boundary crossing and interdisciplinary activities Peripheral and thesis-oriented work Loci of Agency Networked individualism vs. community development Relational agency (Edwards, 2008); Collective competency (Hakkarainen et al. 2004)
- 9. Key Findings ________________________________________________________ Privileged Insight Social media practices within and across figured worlds increase authenticity of agency Partiality of Participatory Contexts Social media practices within and across figured worlds increase authenticity of agency Agency may be partially realised in figured worlds with limited social media adoption Greater reliability when integrated with other doctoral practices Dominant parties, discourses and cultural practices Ambiguity of Participatory Contexts Interactive vs. broadcast metaphors of social media engagement Identifiable and imagined audiences
- 10. Thanks Andy Coverdale Blog: http://www.phdblog.net Twitter: @andycoverdale Supervisors: Gordon Joyes & Charles Crook