Congratulations to Dr Juan Fischer Rodriguez – CRADLE’s most recent PhD graduate!
7 December 2022
Dr Juan Fischer Rodriguez has completed his PhD journey with CRADLE and graduated in October 2022
Juan received a CRADLE strategic scholarship in August 2018 and since then has successfully completed research in the area of evaluative judgement.
His thesis title is ‘Evaluative judgement in undergraduate physics: A Practice Architectures perspective’. The thesis was overseen by supervisors Dr Joanna Tai, Professor Margaret Bearman and CRADLE’s Director Alfred Deakin Professor David Boud.
We congratulate Juan on a tremendous achievement.
Juan is currently writing papers for Q1 journals and working as a casual academic at Deakin University in diverse projects that include teaching, research, and learning design.
We asked Juan to describe the salient focus of the project and provide some reflections and highlights of his study experience.
My research project was an ethnographic study of undergraduate physics student practices that allowed me to explore how students learn through engaging in everyday practices and how they make diverse evaluative judgements of their own work under very concrete circumstances.
I argued that evaluative judgement needs to be understood in terms of what students do and not solely in terms of formative assessment design.
I do not think I am alone when I say that the PhD Journey forces us to rethink how we see ourselves and results in deep transformations. I started thinking that I knew what I was doing, and felt like that throughout a large part of my PhD, but slowly, I realised there there were too many things that I needed to learn in terms of research and my personal development. But at the end of the degree (not the learning journey), I also came out with the confidence that while my journey has barely started, I am equipped to face growing challenges. During my project, I got a better understanding of evaluative judgement and ethnography, but learning about the Theory of Practice Architectures was transformational. This theory resonated with me and expanded how I see the social world, so to me, it was not simply an intellectual tool, but a personal deep change. I am also very grateful of having met incredible academics and students throughout this journey.
I had the chance to present at a couple of online conferences, but attending the TPA Symposium in 2019 was a very good opportunity to meet other researchers using the Theory of Practice Architectures and get a better grasp of it. Conducting ethnographic research in a physics program was an amazing experience as I got the chance to “hang out” with students in the labs and learn a bit more about that amazing discipline… even when most of the time I could not understand the maths talk.
I am very passionate about teaching and learning in all of its forms and I want to pursue a career that involves some combination of teaching, research, and academic development.
Contact Juan
