This site is dedicated to raising questions and enhancing dialogue on how we VALUE practice-based Doctoral Programs. At a time in which the world is asking questions around systemic racism, it is important to reflect deeply around how a doctoral program can add value in re-shaping and reforming issues of structural inequities in the educational system.
There is a sense that the time is now that academia holds itself to account in challenging itself to enhance its focus on more meaningful social change.In his 2011 article, Wergin (p. 121) writes: “What we need is a new EdD, one that recasts decades-old wisdom in a twenty-first-century context.” He further suggests such a ‘rebooting’ of the EdD should be based on multiple principles including: “Education at all levels has an important emancipating, rather than indoctrinating, function and thus is a powerful tool for social change” (p. 121). Given the context of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, we think it is a good time to ask questions on the value-added of practice-based programs.
How do we actually value a practice-based program? How can evaluations help better incorporate a social-justice lens in practice-based programs? How can we learn from the journeys of recent EdD students? This site hopes to be a platform to voice and also to learn from your experiences in valuing academic programs.
Our view is that our theories of change of how practice-based programs make a difference to outcomes like emancipation and social justice are quite incomplete. We need to learn from students who have completed EdD programs to learn about how such programs can be further developed to be responsive to their circumstances/journeys. Such feedback will need to better understand the constraints and challenges in such journeys.
We believe that such a dialogue will surface useful knowledge of the heterogenous landscapes of change. Change is rarely linear or straightforward. There is a need to pay attention to the heterogeneous landscapes in which systems and organizations are located. Change rarely happens as a result of a single action. The actions were embedded in heterogeneous landscapes with multiple intersecting contexts. Your feedback will better understand such landscapes of change.