Abstract:

The professional doctorate in education (EdD) is now becoming increasingly salient as part of the postgraduate teaching programmes in education departments at least in the English-speaking educational/academic scene. It is generally seen as a response to the need for an advanced and formalized mode of professional development that combines theoretical knowledge and an apprenticeship in work-related and impact-oriented research. This relative newcomer which has now been by and large mainstreamed into doctoral studies presents a number of issues and challenges for education departments, teaching staff as well as students and in some cases their employers as well. In the light of accounts and experiences of EdD students as well as my own experience in teaching and coordinating some aspects of the EdD programme in my institution, this paper will unpack and analyze the different types of pedagogic and organizational challenges and tensions attendant on both delivering and studying a professional doctorate, as well as reflect on their implications. I will argue that the EdD is traversed by five distinct, if in some ways overlapping, types of challenges that are related to: a) students’ own professional contexts, their previous educational backgrounds as well as their position – or positioning – as ‘untraditional’ students; b) students’ motivations for committing themselves to studying a professional doctorate and their expectations about the course which are often mediated by the pattern of funding for their studies in a higher education environment where tuition fees constitute a considerable investment on the part of students and/or their employers; c) the research and pedagogic profile of the host interdisciplinary department and the broader institutional context within which the department and the programme are embedded; d) the difference between academic research-based knowledge (i.e. propositional knowledge oriented primarily towards generalizable explanation and understanding) and practical knowledge (i.e. situated craft knowledge oriented towards problem-solving in response to unique, contingent and ‘messy’ situations on the ground within the professional context); e) the different organizational logics that govern academia and students’ workplace contexts. These challenges are also mediated by whether we are talking about international students located outside the UK in terms of their professional contexts or domestic students located within the UK. I will then draw out and reflect on the implications for the pedagogy and the organizational practicalities of designing and delivering a professional doctorate in education and education-relevant professional studies, with a view to conceptualizing a professional doctorate with a greater degree of integration and synergy between different pedagogic approaches more responsive to student needs and to the delicate and multi-faceted task of delivering a doctoral programme that seeks to reconcile the distinct and potentially conflicting aims of research training and research capacity-building for professionals in educational or education-relevant occupations, transmission of interdisciplinary research-validated knowledge relevant to students’ professional contexts, apprenticeship in actual work-based or at least work-related research and facilitating the development of the self-reflexive, creative and theoretically informed professional qua researcher.