The disembodied apprentice : reflections on doctoral exchange

This presentation explores my experience as a full-time on-campus doctoral candidate involved in an international postgraduate exchange. My doctoral work, concerned with the use of networks as a policy mechanism to understand and manage risk for young people, is being completed within an ARC Linkage Project. As such, my doctoral journey is undertaken collaboratively with an industry partner and alongside a community of academics. This stands in contrast to the more common experience of the part-time off-campus Education doctoral candidate largely isolated from an academic community and interacting, to a greater or lesser extent, with only a principal and/or associate supervisor. Lave and Wenger's (1991) theory of legitimate peripheral participation explores the nature of situated learning, moving the focus from the observation and imitation that occurs between the master/apprenticeship to the learning that occurs within the community of which the master forms a part and in which learning occurs as access to practice. The idea of communities of practice is further developed by Wenger (1999) to include both questions of practice, including meaning, community, learning, boundaries and locality and questions of identity including identity in practice, participation, modes of belonging, identification and negotiability. My doctoral process as a disembodied experience of situated learning within a community of practice was highlighted by the opportunity to witness aspects of the academic apprenticeship of higher degree students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That comparative experience provides new understandings about the distinctive model of research training that constitutes my academic apprenticeship within Australian higher education.