Choosing My Own Adventures: A Short Story of My Doctoral Journey

Pithouse-Morgan, Kathleen

Abstract

In my doctoral research, I studied my professional learning in action by teaching three graduate teacher education courses at a South African university. I took a narrative self-study stance toward research and pedagogy to explore my lived experience as a novice teacher educator. In this chapter, I present a short story of my doctoral journey and my consequent academic path. I describe how I played with visual and language arts-based approaches to develop alternative forms of data representation in my doctoral thesis. And I highlight how my doctoral research supervisor’s support was integral to my arts-based research explorations. Then, I illustrate how, as an outgrowth of my doctoral study, I have cultivated a substantive portfolio of scholarship that engages the power of poetic inquiry as a literary arts-based mode for researching and performing professional learning. To close, I consider the implications of my story. As a doctoral supervisor now myself, I am heedful of the possible longstanding impact of my responses to my students’ work. For other supervisors, I offer my story as an exemplar of the value of nourishing students’ creativity in their doctoral research adventures.

• Online Publication Date: Oct 12, 2020
• Publication Date: Sep 20, 2020
• Deposit Date: Sep 22, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 27, 2022
• Publisher: Brill Academic Publishers
• Pages: 27-35
• Book Title: The doctoral journey : international educationalist perspectives
• Chapter Number: 2
• ISBN: 9789004396371
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004444287_003
• Keywords: arts-based research; doctoral journey; doctorate; education; higher education; narrative; poetic inquiry; self-study; teacher education
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/9898143
• Publisher URL: https://brill.com/view/book/9789004444287/BP000015.xml