Understandings of Pedagogical Practice in Doctorates of Education
Understandings of Pedagogical Practice in Doctorates of Education
Dr Alexis Taylor Brunel University
Abstract
How teaching is experienced by university teachers in relation to Professional Doctorate Education has been under-explored. The paper presents the findings of a small-scale study supported by ESCalate funding concerning the identification of pedagogical practice in Doctorates of Education and the consequences of this for the student learning experience.
Introduction
This paper contributes to the Higher Education Annual Conference of Transforming the Student Experience and is located within the theme of Learning and Teaching. The session comprises an overview of the project and the presentation of the findings to date with time allocated for questions and audience commentary. The session is supported by this paper, which forms the basis of the final report to ESCalate and a subsequent article submission to an international-referred journal. The paper explores how university teachers involved in Doctorates of Education experience teaching, how this informs pedagogical practices undertaken and the consequences of this for the student learning experience.
Overview of Professional Doctorates
Over the last decade or so doctoral education in the U.K. has undergone a transformation, resulting in new routes, including, the new route PhD and doctorates by publication. Three external drivers for this can be identified. Firstly, an apparent dissatisfaction by government with arrangements for research training of the traditional PhD. Identified issues included the length of time PhD students took to complete, low completion rates, and the narrowness rather than depth of research training, raising questions about the lack of transferable skills into employment (Park, 2007). Secondly, a changing context for universities. In line with an international move in higher education universities in the U.K. have become part of the globalised knowledge market (Tennant, 2004; Usher, 2002) bringing an increasing emphasis on context-specific and problem-oriented knowledge creation. Consequently, this changing view of knowledge has encouraged universities to develop new provision for a range of emerging external partners. Thirdly, an enhancement of the professions has led to a consequent emphasis on higher level professional training and continuing professional development of practitioners. (For example, in relation to statutory education, it is a priority of the Government that within 5 years all those in the teaching profession will have at least a Masters qualification : DfCSF, 2007). This will impact in the long term on recruitment to the Doctorate of Education).
It was anticipated that the professional doctorate would address some of these issues, and, thus, the external context has provided a good opportunity for the growth of professional doctorates. As part of this changing picture professional doctorates have grown rapidly in the U.K. since the 1990s over a wide range of disciplines(UKCGE, 2002). The aim of professional doctorates is to develop the high level skills (usually senior) professionals need to deal with ‘real world problems’ (Robson, 2002) emanating from their own professional practice and contexts. As such this provides one clear way (among others : see Fink, 2006) in which the professional doctorate differs from the traditional PhD research degree - by moving beyond making a new contribution to knowledge to making a difference to professionals and professional.
The professional doctorate which forms the focus of this project - Doctorate of Education (EdD) - has the largest market (UKCGE, 2002). Presently in the U.K. Doctorates of Education are generally structuredinto a two-stage model. Stage 1 ‘Research Training’ Element (commonly known as the ‘taught’ element) taught by teaching teams to annual cohort of students, assessed through individual pieces of coursework and followed by Stage 2 an individual Research-Based Thesis undertaken with the support of two supervisors and assessed through the production of thesis and oral examination with external and internal examiners.
The Literature
There is a dearth of literature concerning professional doctorates, which, given their relative newness, is understandable. In the U.K. the growth of literature has been less quick than in other countieswhere they have grown in the same time-span as the U.K. (In Australia, for example, with the work of Malfroy, 2005; Malfroy and Yates, 2003;Maxwell, 2003; Neumann, 2002). In the U.K. studies to date have dealt with a number of separate areas. Thorne and Francis (2001) compared the traditional and professional doctorates and found that government recommendations for doctoral study took an homogeneous rather than a heterogeneous approach, especially in relation to students’ career positions.Doncaster and Lester (2002) explored the notion and development of capability with reference to a generic work-based professional doctorate.The nature of the impact of professional knowledge in the subjects of business, education and engineering was explored by Scott, Brown, Lunt and Thorne, (2004). Leonard, Coate and Becker (2004) examined the continuing professional and career development of doctoral students including those on professional programmes. Bourner, Bowden and Laing (2001) explored structural and developmental features although Lunt’s work (2002) suggested there was confusion about the aims and mission of professional doctorates. Heath’s study (2006)supported this by concluding that that variation in how Doctorates of Education are constructed relates to different values placed on knowledge which affects matters such as supervision. No studies have been found, however, which explicitly explore pedagogy in relation to professional doctorates. In particular, what is understood about pedagogy by university teachersworking on Doctorates of Education has been under-explored. The project contributes to this gap.
Approach
The project was designed within a phenomenological and descriptive/interpretive paradigm. The project occurred in 3on-going Stages. Stage 1 comprised a contextual background and extensive literature search and review and Stage 2 was a search and analysis of publicly available documentation and web-sites of a number of Doctorates of Education. Stage 3 was a micro-level investigation in a small number of institutions with contrasting characteristics and contexts and different approaches to the Doctorate of Education. Relevant documentation relating to the specific Doctorate of Education programmes (for example, handbooks) was collected and semi-structured interviews were undertaken with programme leaders and university teachers working on the Doctorate of Education. Each interview had key focusing questions:
- the structure and organisation of the Doctorate of Education as a whole, including the content of, and approach to, the Research Training Element;
- university teachers’ experience of working on the Doctorate of Education;
- what university teachers think helps a student on the Doctorate of Education to learn to become a ‘researching professional’ (Bourner, Katz and Watson, 2000); and
- university teachers’ understanding of what learning to research meant to them.
The analysis of the interview transcripts was supported by information gleamed from Stage 1 and Stage 2, and aimed to identify generalised opinion on the part of the university lecturers as a group and so the interview transcripts were analysed as a complete data set through an iterative process using an open-coding framework. The analysis showed 2 broad approaches to pedagogy labelled as Acquisition and Holistic Development.
Acquisition
TeachingHere, teaching concentrates on information about research and the skills and craft of undertaking research. Information from a conceptual and/or empirical perspective about research studies (especially if it links to university teachers’ areas of expertise) is transmitted to students. This equates with ‘knowledge’about research and its outcomes. Teaching also focuses on giving practical knowledge of research techniques and developing an understanding of the process by which knowledge is generated; that is, on developing and constructing the knowledge of how to do research. As university teacher 4 said,
I think they learn partly from our taught sessions. They get a range of principle research methodologies presented to them [which] seems to be quite important really because [of] giving them common taught or common experience
Organisation of Teaching The teaching programme is usually organised according to individual sessions linked to themes and according to the areas of expertise of individual university teachers/researchers (internal and external to the university). The ‘taught’ element is treated as preparation for the end product of the research thesis. The university appears to take central place as the site for the teaching and the professional setting is perceived as where students implement and demonstrate the application of the knowledge they acquire at university. The making of connections with the professional context and practice is left up to students through the process of application, although beyond this, research and professional practice are not deliberately connected to an obvious degree. Professional practice is seen as busy and pragmatic and the research training at the university provides the benefit of distance from that practice. This is summed up by university teacher 6 who said,
All the time it’s this tension between giving them information but at the same time insisting this is your doctorate…
Teaching Activities Preference is for teaching to be presented in an organized and structured way through individual lecturers. Usual activities include the use of PowerPoint, students taking notes and listening in class and asking questions. The university sessions are supplemented by directed reading and structured activities to be carried out between sessions in students’ professional setting which develop these skills in action.Feedback and guidance on students’ research activities are provided through individual tutorials with specified supervisors who are experts in the subject of students’ research area, and who may, or may not be, involved in the teaching programme. Group tutorials and workshops are included as well as individual sessions with supervisors.
Holistic Development
TeachingTeaching focuses on critical consideration about the principles and practice of, and also critical engagement with, generic professional practices and generic research methods; that is, on educational issues, on research on these, as well as on developing students’ competence to use and do research. The focus is on knowledge that is created and used by practitioners in the context of their own personal professional practice. In this way knowledge is viewed as contextual and research as the vehicle by which this contextual knowledge is constructed. Moreover there is a critical consideration within the teaching about what students ‘say’ about their learning about and through research. Teaching includes criticalconsideration of the complexity students experience as they progress through the Doctorate of Education and as they try to make sense of their changing identity. Teaching provides variation to students to develop conceptually, and thus, change themselves. Thus, as university teacher 7 said,
…it’s deeply about identities professional and practitioners rather than another identity or looking for a gap in the literature, or looking at a particular issue.
Organisation of Teaching The teaching is usually planned by a core team with dedicated responsibility for the programme as a whole. The planning takes account of connections within the programme - for example, between the research training element and the thesis, between the ‘taught’ element and assessments, between what the students are ‘taught’ and the research students undertake in their workplace and between the university teaching and the professional context. Process and product facilitate each other. The focus is on the interaction between teaching and learning, and the inter-personal relationship between university teacher(s) and the student (s).
Teaching ActivitiesThis process of development is deliberately included into the teaching strategies, most obviously seen inthe content of the formal teaching curriculum, teaching techniques and coursework assessments. The content of the ‘taught’ element is clearly connected between sessions by teachers, and also in planned directed study activities. Teaching activities are underpinned by what students have to say. For example, critical engagement with research literature, asking students to bring in research studies they had found themselves for extended discussion with peers and university teachers, group tutorials and on-line discussion.Deliberately built into the formal teaching sessions are student presentations of their inquiry work and subsequent peer discussion. Students are also encouraged to take initiative - for example, setting up student workshops on their own (individual and group) research. Importantly,evaluations by students of their own learning (beyond course evaluations) are used routinely so that students consider critically how they are developing professionally and personally as they learn about research, how to do research and as they undertake research in their professional context. Coursework also includes developmental reflective activities. Interim workshops between the formal taught sessions and between the different stages of the thesis are planned into the programme. This keeps the ‘cohort’ feel to the programme (albeit with a changing cohort) but also focuses on student change throughout the duration of the programme.
Discussion
One factor underlying the two different approaches towards pedagogy in this present study is the variety of ways in which teaching is understood and approached. A number of international research studies (for example, Samuelowicz and Bain, 2001; Akerkind, 2004) show that university teachers have qualitatively different conceptions of teaching. These range through imparting information, transmitting structured knowledge, student-teacher interaction, facilitating understanding and conceptual change and changing as a person. The last category is usually advocated as the ultimate aim of higher education. Scholars (e.g. Prosser and Trigwell, 1999) have also found an empirical relationship between university teachers’ views of teaching and students’ learning, in which a more complex view of teaching is regarded as producing high quality learning outcomes among students where learning is seen as a gradual process of deepening understanding of the connections between various concepts and transference to new contexts.
In this present project this range is evident. The imparting of information, the transmission of structured knowledge, and student-teacher interaction can be seen in Acquisition andfacilitating understanding, conceptual change and changing as a person can be identified in Holistic Development.It could be argued that the2 different approaches identified in this present study demonstrate a simple anda more complexunderstanding of pedagogy for Doctorates of Education. However, this was a small-scale project and care must be taken not to claim too much. It is possible that furtherapproaches can be discerned; for example,Acquisition might be separated into ‘pedagogy orientated by knowledge about research’and ‘pedagogy orientated by knowledge about how to do research’. Further analysis is being undertaken to see if this holds.
Another important factor underlying the two different approaches towards pedagogy in this present study is the consequences for student learning and its outcomes. In Acquisition the aims for student learning appears 2-fold. Firstly, students learn to know what ‘research’ ‘looks like’. Consequently students are kept up-to-date about what research is occurring and what it is saying. Secondly, students learn to understand the research process so that they develop competence about using research and about doing research. As a result of both of these, students learn how to research themselves and how to use the research strategies to undertake research in their own professional context. The doctoral qualification is seen as an important outcome in its own right and the emphasis is on the completion of each student’s personal and individual research, which is seen as an academic undertaking by the individualstudent and demonstrated through the thesis, viva and award.
Holistic Developmentappears in contrast. Again, the aim for student learning appears2-fold. Students learn to ‘do research’, which is seen as an intervention, undertaken for the specific purpose of understanding and improving students’ own professional practice in students’ own professional contexts. Firstly, the transactional nature of the Doctorate of Education is evident; that is, to enable students to “do things better” in their professional setting, to reflect on their individual practice and to try out alternatives. Secondly, students learn to develop professionally, but also personally, and to acknowledge their changing identity as they progress through the Doctorate of Education; thus, the transformational nature of the Doctorate of Education.The experience of the Doctorate of Education assists in articulating and developing previously held tacit knowledge and thinking to a high level around the chosen area of research. The emphasise is on the process of construction of the student as a ‘researching professional’; that is, having increased confidence in their own thoughts and decisions, and of being able to understand the alternative viewpoints of others; of taking the initiative with their research; of being able to work in different ways with different people; and of transferring their learning as researching professionals into different contexts; and in doing all this establishing for themselves a new identity. The Doctorate of Education is viewed as successful if it has resulted in the obtaining of the qualification, but, moreover, for its transformative impact.
Essentially, thenin Acquisition the focus is on the university teacher, what is to be taught and the tangible outcome of the doctoral qualification; and in Holistic Development, the focus of teaching is the student, and how the process of teaching develops students holistically as individuals as well as the tangible outcome of the doctoral qualification. Two issues are raised. Firstly, theAcquisitionapproach might imply that the traditional PhD concept of doctoral enterprise as the production of the ‘independent, autonomous scholars’ as opposed to the ‘holistically developed practitioner’ still continues. In turn, this raises the question of what is the essential distinctiveness of Doctorates of Education. Effectively, whether the focus of the Doctorate of Education is on the product (thesis) of work or the process of the work (Park, 2007).
What the two approaches identified in this presentproject show is that Doctorates of Education are valued for their transformative - as well as transactional and transmission – capacity. Essentially, transformation involving moving beyond a set of knowledge and skills (seen inAcquisition) to promoting learning(asHolistic Development). What is advocated here is that – as well as learning about and how to use research and undertaking research - pedagogy should focus on teaching which enables students to make sense of the process of change as they develop a new identity as a researching professional; that is, a clear-cut pedagogic philosophy which takes a ‘student- learning focus’ (Prosser and Trigwell, 1999) or moving beyond ‘knowing that’ or ‘knowing how’ into what Hagar (2004) calls ‘organic…whole-person nature of learning’. (Wood’s study (2000) with Doctorate of Education students also supports this notion when itfound that learning to research was congruent with learning as related to a change in one’s own person).