Students' perspectives on impacts of the PhD process : the PhD as the acquisition of intellectual virtues (original) (raw)

idea of PhD students as knowledge workers or “super-technicians” (Pearson et al., 2009, p. 100), its predominantly descriptive nature also limits its potential in providing deeper insights into students’ experiences during the doctoral education undertaking. This highlights the need for research that conceptualises the different and diverse elements of the doctoral education experience as a complex, interrelated range of activities and further, the need for a framework that recognises how all these elements and processes contribute to enabling the production of a skilled, resourceful and competent PhD graduate. 3.3 Theorising the PhD experience There is also a paucity of research that theorises students’ experiences of the PhD process, although more recent research is contributing to this gap by providing accounts of the doctoral experience that move beyond descriptive accounts. Haggis’s (2002) research with eight PhD students in the UK, for example, is amongst the small number of a...