Abstract:

Doctorate is the final stage of the academic achievements in almost all countries. The learning process is essential to accomplish this stage and it has a different meaning that the one it has in other graduate degrees. The main goal of the doctorate is to construct a “scientist” or a researcher, someone who knows how to deal, why the uncertainty and failure. But it's also someone who knows that knowledge is grounded in a certain culture, recognize that error is the other face of the knowledge coin and that advances sometimes are slow and take time. So a researcher must be, not only capable of constructing meanings, but also someone who is patient, resilient, creative and open mind.

A research related to the doctoral supervision in a Portuguese university was implemented in 2018. A questionnaire was constructed, validated and applied to doctoral supervisors and PhD students at Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL). We identified the supervision practices the analyzed what strategies and what proposal is made by the supervisor to the PhD students, to promote the learning process during the doctorate. From this data we perceived what type of learning process is inherent to doctorate in this supervisor population: the learning process is based on social interaction within the research community and with peers, in critical reflection and achieving learning outcomes, being a transformative learning. The teaching process takes a form of conversations that pretends to develop students´ reflections and helps the transformative process of learning and knowledge construction. The supervisors are more than an adviser or mentor or even coaches, they are mind developers that help students to reflect and organize thinking and to do their one research.

Keywords:

Doctorate, transformative learning, teaching process, knowledge construction, Researcher construction.