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 internationalreferred 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).
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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 structured into 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 counties where 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
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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 teachers working 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 3 on-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
Teaching Here, 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
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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
Teaching Teaching 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
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constructed. Moreover there is a critical consideration within the teaching about what students
‘say’ about their learning about and through research. Teaching includes critical consideration
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 Activities This process of development is deliberately included into the teaching
strategies, most obviously seen in the 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.
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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 and
facilitating understanding, conceptual change and changing as a person can be identified in
Holistic Development. It could be argued that the 2 different approaches identified in this
present study demonstrate a simple and a more complex understanding 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 further approaches 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 individual
student and demonstrated through the thesis, viva and award.
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Holistic Development appears in contrast. Again, the aim for student learning appears 2-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, then in 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, the Acquisition approach 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 present project 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 in Acquisition) to promoting learning (as Holistic 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
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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…wholeperson nature of learning’. (Wood’s study (2000) with Doctorate of Education students also
supports this notion when it found that learning to research was congruent with learning as
related to a change in one’s own person).
This underlines the need to reflect critically on the pedagogical rationale underpinning
Doctorates of Education and to treat pedagogy as problematic. Some questions this might
raise are :

how is the student learning experience understood and approached ?

what are some of the key experiences that promote and support an holistic
developmental approach to student learning ?

how is teaching and the teaching context organised to develop an holistic
developmental approach to student learning ?

what are the implications for the structure of the programme and teaching methods ?

what counts as ‘curriculum’ for Doctorates of Education ?

what does the ‘taught element’ mean to those who are working on the programme ?

what are the implications for research supervision arrangements, assessment and the
vive voce examination ?
Implications
Two implications are identified. Firstly, for the present structural arrangements for Doctorates
of Education. The present two-stage structure indicates a number of ‘separations’, which bring
both a conceptual and practical confusion about the pedagogical philosophy underpinning the
Doctorate of Education. The Research Training (or ‘taught’) element appears as a separate
stream in preparation for the research element. This two-stage structure necessitates a
separation of assessment - between the assessment for ‘taught element’ (through separate
pieces of coursework or compilation into a portfolio) and assessment for the ‘research’
element (through traditional viva), where the successful assessment of the ‘taught’ element
normally acts as a progression to the Stage 2. In consequence this brings a separation also
between external examiners for each element, and raises the issues of where the learning
outcomes for the whole programme are demonstrated and assessed. This has a consequence
of possible separations of Doctorate of Education teams into those involved in either the
‘taught’ element or those involved in the ‘research’ element; that is between those involved in
‘teaching’ and those involved in ‘supervision’.
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This leads to the second implication, which is for arrangements for developmental activities for
those involved in Doctorates of Education. A ‘learning on the job’ approach may not be
sufficient and staff development might be best served by proactive deliberate management of
induction and in-service activities. This would mean the setting up of development activities
where :

the different starting points of members of the teaching team in terms of qualifications,
experience, and professional expertise were taken into consideration. For example, do
those who have come through the Doctorate of Education route (of whom there is a
growing number) differ in their approach to teaching to those that have come through
the PhD route ?
Do those who are recognised as ‘expert researchers’ in their
institutions have a different approach to pedagogy on the Doctorate of Education to
those who are considered ‘expert teachers’ ?

implicit theories that are held about the Doctorate of Education and the critical aspects
of pedagogy can be confronted; and

differences in understandings can be managed effectively so that tensions and any
discrepancies in pedagogical philosophy and practice can be negotiated.
Underlying such staff development is the principle that university teachers as individuals and
teams are learners as well as teachers. In this way understanding of student learning and
thinking about the pedagogy that underpins this will be enhanced.
Conclusion
It must be emphasised that this was a small-scale project and no generalisations can be
claimed. The descriptions above must remain provisional and further work is necessary. For
example, an in-depth prospective study involving a number of different data collection
methods with Doctorate of Education teams working in different single contexts will be useful
to see whether the findings identified in this present study stand up.
However, the ‘framework’ identified above may be useful to those working on Doctorates of
Education (and other professional doctorates) in different contexts and who are also thinking
about pedagogical practices which might contribute to student learning. This project has
shown that the Doctorate of Education is a significant educational undertaking; and, thus,
there is a need for the pedagogical aspects to be considered more overtly. Teaching does not
automatically ‘turn into’ student learning. University teachers and teams of university teachers
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are at the heart of this reflection. This study has made a small start to acknowledging the
complexity of this issue.
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