- Research Background

Socialization in graduate school is the gateway for doctoral students to become researchers. It is the process by which doctoral students acquire academic knowledge, skills, research training, and values, which are necessary for entry into faculty positions (Weidman et al.,2001). The disciplinary characteristics have an important impact on the socialization experiences of doctoral students (Gardner,2010). Though much research has paid attention to the socialization among traditional disciplines, such as history, chemistry, biology, and engineering doctoral students (Gardner,2007,2010; Golde,2005; Kim,2018), the experience of doctoral students majoring in pedagogy has not received enough attention from scholars. The post-exogenous development pattern and the dispute over the legitimacy of the discipline coexist in Chinese pedagogy, which further proves this impression (Hou, 2001). Nonetheless, pedagogy has shifted from humanities to social science since the 20th century introduced into China, and now it is developing towards comprehensive science (Wang, 2012). Different from traditional disciplines, the discipline of pedagogy has a multidisciplinary foundation, a non-unified research paradigm, and diverse student backgrounds, and now it has formed 10 sub-disciplines. Furthermore, findings of a large-scale survey on doctoral students in China show that 92.9% of doctoral students in pedagogy would seek academic positions at universities after graduation, while less than 50% of their peers in science and engineering disciplines (e.g. 38.4% in chemistry; 47.7% in physics) would make the similar choice; even for doctoral students in other social sciences, the willingness to start an academic career is less strong (e.g. 66.7% in philosophy, management is 61.4%) (Zhang, 2009). Against this background, for doctoral students in pedagogy, the process of academic socialization becomes an important journey for them to the academic career, which deserves further exploration.

- Literature Review

The socialization of doctoral students in graduate school is a dual socialization process, which means as “freshmen” at the doctoral level, students are expected to acquire the profession-oriented ability and achieve identity transformation; as potential academic faculty, they need to prepare for their future academic career. Current research has mainly formed two theoretical perspectives. One is structural functionalism, which believes that socialization is a perception and internalization for individuals from values and norms of organizations, emphasizing that the organization unidirectionally dominates individual behavior (Bess,1978; Bullis & Bach,1989); the other is symbolic interactionism, which holds that socialization is a two-way interaction between individuals and organizations, which means individuals are not only affected by organizations, but also have an impact on organizations in turn as well (Austin,2002). Weidman et al. (2001) have constructed theoretical frameworks to divide the academic socialization of doctoral students into four stages. Lovitts (2005), Baker and Lattuca (2010), as well as other researchers have enriched influencing factors and developmental stages from different angles, clarifying the influencing factors, like personality and ability, relationship network, department, and discipline culture, etc. However, with the increasing enrichment of related research, these theories have been unable to adapt to recent advances in doctoral education. It is necessary to point out that, scholars in western countries pay much attention to the topic of how to motivate doctoral students’ academic interests in the context of rising dropout rates, while in eastern countries, like China, the focus is on how to reduce postpone graduation and improve the quality of doctoral students (Yang, 2021).

- Research Questions

Since doctoral students in pedagogy are more likely to seek academic positions after achieving the degree, the empirical research aims to explore the supports and obstacles in their academic socialization process, and investigates two research questions: First, how are doctoral students in pedagogy socialized into the academic world? Second, what are the key factors affecting their academic socialization?

Since socialization is a dynamic process of development, which is characterized by complexity and situational, this study mainly adopts a qualitative method. Analytical induction emphasizes the information richness and typicality of the first case, and is suitable for maximum-purpose sampling (Chen, 2000). To obtain diverse and dynamic information, this study interviewed two groups of people: senior doctoral students and junior faculty members in pedagogy respectively. The reason for concluding two groups are as follows: first, to demonstrate the heterogeneity, this study interviewed senior doctoral students who have strong determination in entering academic careers in pedagogy, but currently have limited academic activities, and this study also includes young faculty members lately starting their academic career, who have a high degree of awareness and recognition in the peer group as an example, they are more active in participating in various academic activities. Since the author is a Ph.D. candidate in pedagogy, such an "insider" identity helps her to enter the research field smoothly, regarding identifying and contacting the interview candidates. Meanwhile, the author is also aware of the negative impact of her "insider" identity, and tries to remain objective. Altogether, five senior doctoral students and five young faculty members participated in the interviews, who are distributed in 6 sub-disciplines of pedagogy (e.g. Higher Education, Principles of Education, etc.). Among the 10 respondents, two of the respondents had accumulated a period of work experience before starting their doctoral studies, three of the respondents had interdisciplinary backgrounds. Furthermore, this study also collected personal logs (including 5 training programs and institutional regulations, and 4-course syllabuses) of the four respondents, to better understand and verify the respondents’ experiences. After the interviews, all data are transcribed and analyzed by MAXQDA2018. Based on the rules of the grounded theory, this study divides the coding into two main phases. After importing all documents into the MAXQDA 2018, the author, in the first phase (open coding), analyzes the documents and creates new codes (e.g. “Exclusive small groups”, “Perfunctory courses”, “supervisor-supervisees (research) group tradition”, “atomized individual”, etc.). In the second phase (axial and selective coding), the author focuses the coding to define the most significant higher-level codes (e.g. “building a community of peers”, “matched supervisor- doctoral student interaction”, “Exclusivity department culture”, etc.).

- The Forming Mechanism and Four Types of Academic Socialization (1) Mechanism: academic socialization is a process in which individuals achieve knowledge (discipline-specific knowledge, academic knowledge, and tacit knowledge) and capital accumulation (academic ability, and resources) through interaction with the surroundings (institution, culture, etc.), which becomes a journey transferring from “freshmen” to “professional” in pedagogy. (2) Types: according to the degree of knowledge acquisition and the degree of capital accumulation, the academic socialization of doctoral students can be divided into four types: self-construction, self-exploration, actively follow, and accept discipline. The former two have a better understanding of knowledge and form independent thinking, while the latter two are still in the stage of familiarity. Furthermore, the main difference between “self-construction” and “self-exploration”, “actively follow” and “accept discipline” lies in the transformation of knowledge to research publications, and the access to academic-related support from supervisors and peers. - Structural isolation affects the realization of academic socialization (1) Supervisors provide an institutional guarantee for the socialization of their doctoral students. At the same time, consciously or unconsciously, the social relationship with the supervisors as the core can be established and reproduced, which has a deeper impact on students than that of classroom instruction. Furthermore, compared with the research interests, the matching of supervisors’ supervisory styles with their students' learning styles is the key factor affecting the socialization of doctoral students. (2) An open and fair department culture is conducive to positively mobilizing the enthusiasm and initiative of students, promoting peer communication, which even becomes an alternative to supervisors’ support, and plays a positive role in helping doctoral students relieve academic pressure, dealing with negative emotions, providing academic information, etc. (3) Increasing the career access thresholds and more challenging publishing environment have become obstacles that restrict doctoral students in pedagogy from completing academic socialization.

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