Transformative Doctoral Research Practices For Professionals

The purpose and impact of the professional doctorate – or EdD (Doctor of Education) – has long been debated. What should it be? Who should do it? Why is it worth doing? How should it be taught? What makes the EdD distinctive, unique and worthwhile? Internationally, at the level of program development and provision, universities are increasing the range of transformative professional doctorate practices while recruiting larger numbers of students from a wider range of professions. Transformative Doctoral Research Practices for Professionals offers unique insight into the teaching, learning, thinking and doing of doctoral education. In the form of a collaboratively authored volume this book offers the first institutional-specific collection that focuses on doctoral research practices. It showcases: the practices of researching professionals at different phases and stages of a five year doctoral journey; the imperative of reflexivity as one moves from practitioner to researching professional and scholar; and the placing of ‘practice’ at the centre of a doctoral program specifically designed for professionals. This book shares the lived-through debates, deliberations, challenges and experiences of a group of professional (practitioner) doctoral students, their supervisors and lecturers. The critical perspectives and examples explored offer a wealth of insights on the distinct practices and unique journeying of professional practitioners embarking on professional doctorates. This volume invites you to reflect on and enter into dialogue with your peers and professional learning and research communities about the distinctiveness of the professional doctorate. /div

Order your digital inspection copy here. Sharp and focused, this book provides the need-to-know information on how to design and implement a good, high quality research project. Oriented around real-world application, it emphasizes the aspects of research most relevant to conducting practice-based research. Assuming no prior knowledge, but appropriate for experienced learners, it builds knowledge at a sustainable pace. It offers readers: - A no frills guide to methodology and the theory of conducting research - Strategies for communicating complex ideas - Insight into common impact-driven methods like action research, case study, and mixed methods - Ways to develop systematic research projects within the boundaries of everyday working life - Ample opportunities to test and apply newfound knowledge. With streamlined advice tailored specifically to support research in professional contexts, this book is the essential toolkit every researcher who is embarking on a practice-led project needs.

The interest and demand for online terminal degrees across disciplines by professionals wishing to conduct research and fulfill doctoral degree requirements at a distance is only increasing. But what these programs look like, how they are implemented, and how they might be evaluated are the questions that challenge administrators and pedagogues alike. This book presents a model for a doctoral program that bridges theory, research, and practice and is offered completely or largely online. In their described program model, Kumar and Dawson enable researching professionals to build an online community of inquiry, engage in critical discourse within and across disciplines, learn from and with experts and peers, and generate new knowledge. Their program design is grounded in the theoretical and research foundations of online, adult, and doctoral education, curriculum design and community-building, implementation, and evaluation. The authors, who draw on their experience of implementing a similar program at the University of Florida, not only share data collected from students and faculty members but also reflect on lessons learned working on the program in diverse educational contexts. An important guide for program leaders who wish to develop, implement, and sustain an online professional doctorate, An Online Doctorate for Researching Professionals will also be a valuable resource for higher education professionals seeking to include e-learning components in existing on-campus doctoral programs.

An outcome of international conferences on the professional practice doctorate has been a continuing conversation amongst scholarly practitioners focused on addressing challenges and issues being encountered concerning in the number and variety of professional practice doctorates in the twenty-first century. These conversations have resulted in a proliferation of programs utilizing a variety of pedagogical models focused on practicing professionals undertaking research and development in the workplace. Grounded by critical friend theory, contributions from scholar practitioners in Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, Israel, New Zealand, USA, and Wales address trends and themes in international professional practice doctoral programs. These include how knowledge is produced, organized, developed and used; doctoral program design; program capstone models; insider- outsider collaborative research partnerships; and collaborative ways to work across national boundaries in different settings.

Postgraduate research has undergone unprecedented change in the past ten years, in response to major shifts in the role of the university and the disciplines in knowledge production and the management of intellectual work. New kinds of doctorates have been established that have expanded the scope and direction of doctoral education. A new audience of supervisors, academic managers and graduate school personnel is engaging in debates about the nature, purpose and future of doctoral education and how institutions and departments can best respond to the increasing demands that are being made. Discussion of the emerging issues and agendas is set within the context of the international policy shifts that are occurring and considers the implications of these shifts on the changing external environment. This engaging book acquaints the readers with new international trends in doctoral education identifies new practices in supervision, research, teaching and learning enables practitioners of doctoral education to contribute to the debates and help shape new understandings questions the purposes of doctoral study and how they are changing considers the balance between equipping students as researchers and the conduct of original research Including contributions from both those who have conducted formal research on research education and those whose own practice is breaking new ground within their universities, this thought-provoking book draws on the expertise of those currently making a stimulating contribution to the literature on doctoral education.

In trying to juggle the various priorities of doctoral study, many individuals struggle. From gathering data, preparing papers and organising projects, to the less obvious difficulties of time management and personal development, doctoral researchers are heavily tasked. In addition to this, those undertaking practitioner research face the complication of negotiating a less traditional research setting. As a guide to this ongoing, often neglected aspect of doctoral research, the authors of this innovative book explore in detail the challenges faced by doctoral researchers conducting practitioner research today. They show that the special nature of this research and the conditions in which the professional researcher works raise questions about producing new knowledge at work through research. This affects everything: relationships with practice; ethics; the ways that they are taught and supervised; the genre of the thesis; all place practitioners in situations which may not methodologically align with conventional approaches. In this book the authors take the opportunity to explore these themes in an holistic and integrated way in order to develop a sense of methodological coherence for the practitioner researcher at doctoral level. In doing so, the authors argue for what is possible, suggesting that universities should critically examine practitioner doctorates to accommodate new forms of knowledge formation. As an invaluable guide through doctoral research, this book will be essential reading for both doctoral researchers and supervisors alike, as well as practitioner researchers working in professional settings more generally and those engaging in policy debates about doctoral research.

Examining recent changes in the once stable genre of doctoral thesis and dissertation writing, this book explores how these changes impact on the nature of the doctoral thesis/dissertation itself. Covering different theories of genre, Brian Paltridge and Sue Starfield focus on the concepts of evolution, innovation and emergence in the context of the production and reception of doctoral theses and dissertations. Specifically concerned with this genre in the humanities, social sciences and visual and performing arts, this book also investigates the forces which are shaping changes in this high-stakes genre, as well as those which act as constraints. Employing textography as its methodological approach, the book provides multiple perspectives on the ways in which doctoral theses and dissertations are subject to forces of continuity and change in the academy. Analyses of the 'new humanities' doctorate, professional doctorates, practice-based doctorates, and the doctorate by publication contribute to understandings of new variants of the doctoral dissertation genre. The book paves the way for a new generation of doctoral students and asks, 'what might the doctorate of the future look like?'.

Provoking the Field invites debate on, and provides an essential resource for, transnational arts-based scholars engaged in critical analyses of international visual arts education and its enquiry in doctoral research. Divided into three parts--doctoral processes, doctoral practices, and doctoral programs--the volume interrogates education in both formal and informal learning environments, ranging from schools to post-secondary institutions to community and adult education. This book brings together a global range of authors to examine visual arts PhDs using diverse theoretical perspectives; innovative arts and hybrid methodologies; institutional relationships and scholarly practices; and voices from the field in the form of site-specific cases. A compendium of leading voices in arts education, Provoking the Field provides a diverse range of perspectives on arts enquiry, and a comprehensive study of the state of visual arts PhDs in education.