Welcome to the Labyrinth
During the Doctoral Seminar 1 which was held at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, one of the additional opportunities was a labyrinth walk, which many of my classmates completed, but I did not. I regretted this missed opportunity, so during the Doctoral Seminar 2 experience held at Brock University in St. Catherine's I was excited to read that there was a recently created labyrinth on campus. I contacted the PhD coordinator to connect me to the individuals who provided a guided walk in this new labyrinth. As I engaged in this personal labyrinth walk, I was struck by the relevance of this physical and reflective experience as a metaphor for my PhD journey.
When I applied and was accepted into the Joint PhD program, I considered how I would capture the story of this journey. I knew it was going to be a long process, with many forgotten moments that I wanted to capture along the way. As I was familiar with blogging, and was aware of others in my personal learning networks who blogged through their PhD process, I started a new blog site titled Step By Step on January 3, 2018 with a few posts about First Steps. It's an explicit connection to how a labyrinth is experienced - step by step.
This comprehensive portfolio captures my journey, step by step, into the center of the labyrinth, the center of the PhD experience. This journey is one of becoming - an academic, a scholar, a writer, a researcher, - of becoming literate in my field of study. Saldana (2016) suggests the "products we create embody who we are ... the environments we establish for ourselves may also embody who we are" (p. 61). This labyrinthine portfolio is an embodiment of not only the steps I have taken, but my reflexivity within these PhD spaces, places, and experiences. After the completion of my courses, I began to research into the labyrinth as a metaphor and practice, not only for the PhD odyssey, but for my journey into academia. Through reading and reflecting, I see how this metaphor is a relevant visual, physical, and metaphoric image for my PhD experience.
Comprehensive portfolios and dissertations are documents that are traditionally linear, bound into a sequence of chapters that lay out a research argument and defence of that argument. There is no right order or clear path to constructing this portfolio. Despite the fact that the purpose of this portfolio is not the same as the purpose of a dissertation, I will nonetheless attempt to identify a clear map to guide the way (Kilbourn, 2001).
In this part of the pathway into the comprehensive portfolio, I will explain how the labyrinth is representative as an overarching metaphor for academic and scholarly work. This is followed by an exploration of a labyrinth experience from a Joint PhD student perspective. I will conclude with a constructed labyrinthine pathway through the Joint PhD program which will metaphorically end in the centre of the labyrinth. This comprehensive portfolio stories my time and experiences as a PhD student as it also ends in this centering and centered moment, before I begin the outward journey toward the completion of my research and dissertation experience.
References
Saldaña, J. (2016). The coding manual for qualitative researchers. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Kilbourne, B. (n.d.). The art and structure of a first paragraph. Teachers College Record, 2001.