This month, the Carnegie Project on the Educational Doctorate (CPED) brought together EdD program administrators and faculty from across the country to discuss innovations in doctoral education. (See http://cpedinitiative.org/consortium-members for a list of participating intuitions.)     

Rigor

    A recurring theme at the conference was the notion of rigor:  As students, faculty, administrators, and alumni, how do we define and articulate the rigor of our EdD programs to various stakeholders, particularly in light of the fact that an EdD is sometimes (quite inaccurately) viewed as "PhD-lite"?   

    Participants were in universal agreement that EdD and PhD programs should be equally rigorous, but that "rigor" must be defined differently for the two types of programs.  Both programs must challenge students to produce work that has impact. For a PhD program, this impact is mainly on an academic field, while for an EDD program, this impact is mainly on educational "problems of practice" in real world settings.  

     Many participants also defined PhD work in terms of depth -- doing a lot of work in a narrow sub-field of knowledge. By contrast, they defined an EdD in terms of breadth -- being conversant in the multiple fields that make up the education enterprise and being able to understand and communicate with many stakeholders to facilitate educational change.  

    We were all in agreement that those of us working within the EdD world know the rigor and value of our programs; we were also in agreement that educational organizations (K-12 schools, community colleges) place great value on the applied focus of our EdD degree. Our main challenge therefore is to explain our work to other students, colleagues, and administrators across the university.     

The Dissertation

   Attendees were in universal agreement that the "traditional 5 chapter dissertation" can be ill-suited to the important transformational research that our graduate students are doing.  EdD programs have been experimenting with various ways to address this mismatch:

• reclassifying the research as a "culminating experience" to allow more flexibility in terms of the final product;
• creating collaborative projects in which each student tackles a piece of larger educational problem;
• working directly with local schools which offer up a menu of research problems that need addressing;
• tweaking the format of the 5 chapter to better suit "action research," for example by including two findings chapters, one addressed to the field and another addressed to the site where the research was conducted; and,
• developing alternative presentation formats that are better suited to action research.

Signature Pedagogies

     The most intriguing discussion at CPED focused on questions of "signature pedagogy." What is unique about EdD pedagogy? What is "excellent" EdD pedagogy? What kinds of pedagogy could serve as a model for other EdD granting institutions that wish to improve their teaching?

    This discussion was exploratory; working groups developed lists of characteristics that set our pedagogy apart from that of other disciplines. As a starting point, groups offered the following traits of "good" EdD pedagogy:

• It is problem-focused; it teaches students to address real world problems rather than purely theoretical questions or gaps in scholarship.

• It focuses on "messy problems" - problems that are highly complex, involve many stakeholders, and defy simplistic description. Other academic fields tend to focus on problems that can be tightly defined: data sets can be easily "bounded" and variables can be isolated. By contrast, EdD programs focus on problems that are not clearly bounded; such problems involve a larger number of actors (past and present administrators, past and present teachers, family, community members, politicians, people in private enterprise) and a large number of contextual factors (demography, economics, political climate, ideologies). Effective EdD pedagogy trains student to address problems in spite of their messiness rather than artificially erasing this messiness.
• It involves working with different stakeholders; unlike a PhD which prepares students primarily to work with members of their own discipline, EdD pedagogy focuses on working with multiple disciplines and multiples stakeholders, both inside and outside of academia, and both inside and outside of educational institutions, especially stakeholders in the political and community arena.
• It is collaborative and interactive; it prepares students to solve problems through social interaction, communication, and sharing of knowledge.
• It is collegial; our students bring in rich funds of knowledge about professional practices and professional problems in specific real world educational settings. Good EdD pedagogy draws upon students' knowledge and treats students as a community of experts.
• It is contextualized; concepts, processes, and tools are always taught in applied ways. For example research tools are not taught in isolation, but rather by using those tools on real world educational problems.
• It focuses on impact; our guiding question is always, "How are these things that we're teaching going to produce a real-world impact on educational systems?"

    This rich discussion about pedagogy is just beginning; at this stage both teacher and students can offer valuable input to shape what we will ultimately define as "signature pedagogies" for the EdD field.