A. Susan Jurow
Assistant Professor
Education
University of Colorado at Boulder
249 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309
susan.jurow@colorado.edu
Abstract
How do we prepare doctoral students in education to learn the skills and practices as well as the habits of mind associated with doing excellent research? This is a pressing question for doctoral education and until recently the “pedagogy of research” (Walker, Golde, Jones, Bueschel, & Hutchings, 2008) used in preparing students for the doctorate had not garnered systematic attention. As the founders of the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate (CID) note, “[m]ost graduate faculty care deeply that their students learn how to ask good questions, build on the work of others, formulate an effective and feasible research design, and communicate results in ways that matter. But these outcomes are often more hoped for and assumed than designed into instruction” (ibid, p. 4). In this project, I – along with my colleague, Margaret Eisenhart – focus on how the enactment of the School of Education’s qualitative research sequence contributed to developing students’ identities as qualitative researchers who “learned by doing” in an emerging community of practice. In so doing, I aim to address the gap in the field of education’s understanding of the pedagogy of doctoral research.
Five years ago, a new qualitative research sequence was initiated as part of a major revision of the entire School of Education doctoral program that occurred during our participation as a Partner Department in the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s Initiative on the Doctorate. The qualitative research sequence was not redesigned with only this “identity” goal in mind, but it was one goal that shaped how I and my co-instructor in the sequence (Eisenhart) approached our teaching of these courses. Using a social practice theory of identity and learning (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner & Cain, 1998; Lave & Wenger, 1991), which claims that learning involves “becoming” a different kind of person as one gains new knowledge and skills, I will interrogate (a) the efforts of the sequence faculty to design a pedagogy of research in the qualitative sequence that would foster the development of students’ identities as researchers and (b) the efforts of students in 2 cohorts of the sequence (2006, 2007) to develop these identities.
References
Holland, D., Lachicotte, W., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University.
Walker, G.E., Golde, C.M., Jones, L, Bueschel, A.C., & Hutchings, P. (2008). The formation of scholars: Rethinking doctoral education for the twenty-first century. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.