[EAS]Rethinking the PhD
pjk
peter.kindlmann at yale.edu
Wed Feb 14 00:48:19 EST 2001
Mail*Link® SMTP Rethinking the PhD
Dear Colleagues -
This item speaks to a number of PhD issues that are easy enough to
observe, such as narrowness of scholarship and inadequate attention
to teaching how to teach, the latter reinforcing the former in the
next generation of academics.
An earlier, related mailing is at
http://www.yale.edu/engineering/eng-info/msg00745.html
As an administrative reminder, info about (un)subscribing to this
list can be found at
http://jove.eng.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/eas-info .
All best, --Peter Kindlmann
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(SM) LISTSERV
"desk-top faculty development, one hundred times a year"
STANFORD UNIVERSITY LEARNING LABORATORY (SLL)
http://sll.stanford.edu/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Folks:
There have been a number of studies recently on the re-examination
of the Ph.D. in the United States. The posting below announces a
very interesting new initiative by the Woodrow Wilson National
Fellowship Foundation to synthesize the results of these students
and to offer specific recommendations for action in three areas;
new paradigms, new practices, and new people. The study is funded
by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts. Further information
can be found at:
http://www.woodrow.org/responsivephd/
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis at stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Discussant On 25 Years Of Efforts To Improve Teaching And
Learning In Higher Education: A Retrospective And A Look Ahead
Tomorrow's Graduate Students and Postdocs
------------------ 1,703 words ------------------
THE RESPONSIVE Ph.D.
An Initiative to Improve the Doctoral Experience
in the Arts and Sciences
New paradigms, new practices, new people.
These are the major challenges - and opportunities - in a changing
landscape for PhD education. With a beginning grant from The Pew
Charitable Trusts, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship
Foundation is initiating an effort to sharpen the findings of
several recent studies and projects on doctoral education, many of
which have been sponsored by Pew, into recommendations for action.
With the cooperation of ten major universities, these
recommendations will be tested and innovations developed.
Because doctoral education spans many disciplines and because
practice differs greatly even among programs within a single
discipline, totalizing judgments concerning Ph.D. education in the
United States are often too general to be helpful. "A global model
attracting students worldwide," its defenders proclaim, with real
justice. "A bad fit between training and needs," its critics argue
with some reason. Both views are complacent, and complacency is no
virtue.
Even so, several recent studies conducted from varying perspectives
reveal a surprising level of agreement concerning the strengths
and challenges to doctoral education across the disciplines. Taken
together, the findings argue for achievable improvements in at
least three aspects, which we have codified broadly as three
"P's": paradigms, practices, and people. As the shapers of
doctoral education reflect on the enterprise of producing PhDs,
new questions have surfaced: Through what new paradigms can the
learning associated with the highest degree in academic
disciplines inform more fully the life of the nation? By which
new practices can the doctorate more perfectly represent
adventuresome research? And how can the increased involvement of
new people from a wide variety of backgrounds aid in the
diversification of the American intellect?
New Paradigms
Interdisciplinarity: Within the university, coexistence among
disciplines can sometimes be uneasy, especially as the promise and
praise of interdisciplinary learning and discovery challenges their
status as discrete organizations of knowledge. A clear
articulation of disciplinary definitions and forms of
interdisciplinary work - for instance, within a single individual
trained in multiple disciplines or in a working group of experts
from different disciplines; among arts-and-science disciplines or
between a liberal-arts discipline and a professional school -
remains to be undertaken. The project will seek to define those
practices in doctoral education that encourage adventuresome
research within and across disciplinary boundaries.
Scholarly Citizenship: If the goal of the doctorate is redefined
as scholarly citizenship, rather than only to replenish the
professoriate, its full potential for the educational and social
good can be realized and students can contemplate their career
options more creatively. While the PhD is already a powerful
professional credential within the academy, it deserves a broader
scope of influence in the world. For the scholar-citizen, the
doctorate's real power consists in both rigorous scholarship and
creative action throughout and beyond the educational realm. This
new paradigm recognizes the responsibility of doctoral education
to train a next generation of scholar-teachers as a centrally
important role of scholar-citizens; and it recognizes the need for
some self-referentiality in the ongoing life of the disciplines.
However, it challenges academic inquiry that is too exclusively
self-referential. Specializations do need to be well honed, but
also they need to understand more fully their value and potential
impact in spheres beyond the academic department.
New Practices
Professional Development: To build a culture supportive of a new
generation of scholar-citizens, doctoral students require more
thoughtful professional training, so as to consider more profoundly
the various opportunities for applying their learning in diverse
careers within and outside higher education. While intellectual
autonomy and the centrality of scholarship remain crucial, these
virtues become problematic when doctoral training fails to consider
real-world impacts. A surprising lack of real-world relations in
the physical sciences and engineering was emphasized in the 1995
COSEPUP Report and these concerns are particularly acute at the
doctoral level in the humanities and social sciences. The project
will encourage career planning offices and doctoral programs to
partner in addressing a wider array of career outcomes for
doctoral students. The project also will seek to promulgate
practices in doctoral institutions that create opportunities for
students to learn about, and test themselves in, a variety of
academic and non-academic sectors.
Pedagogical Training: While the research component of doctoral
education is strong, the quality of pedagogical training is uneven.
Data on the development of graduate students suggest they get little
help in learning to be educators - not only learning effective
classroom teaching, but putting together a course curriculum,
thinking strategically about introducing a discipline or making
connections among disciplines, or teaching to varied audiences. In
many disciplines, doctoral students teach what the faculty does not
want to teach. In others, teaching is the final resort for funding
if a student is not appointed to a research position in a faculty
lab. Finally, doctoral students often end up with little
understanding of the fuller higher education landscape, much less of
education in the schools, from which college students come. A
broader, more systematic approach to the preparation of doctoral
students as educators would respond to a national interest in
improving the quality of teaching and learning at all levels of
education.
New People
Diverse Populations: Graduate study in the arts and sciences lags
behind other professional pathways in attracting and developing the
full potential of a healthy number of people of color. Although the
percentage of minorities making up the nation's population and
entering our colleges and universities as undergraduates is on the
rise, professors standing at the front of the class remain largely
white and, in some disciplines, predominantly male. In English, as
one example, the number of African American PhD graduates seems
frozen at about 3.5%, no greater than 30 years ago. The number rises
slightly in the social sciences and falls again in the physical and
life sciences and mathematics. The lack of role models for students
often means that lack of diversity perpetuates itself, and ultimately
renders learning provincial, as new studies on the intellectual
benefits of diversity have shown. Student retention at earlier
stages of education is of course a crucial part of the solution, but
doctoral programs must do their part to develop new recruitment and
retention strategies to ensure role models for future students, and a
cosmopolitan vibrancy for their disciplines.
Diversifying the American Intellect: Many students of color have
expressed interest in bringing their learning to bear upon social
realities. Now, unfortunately, they frequently perceive they can
achieve their goals better by pursuing an advanced degree in one of
the professional schools or by entering directly into a career after
college. To attract more students of color to the doctoral degree,
graduate education must not seem a closed club, but instead an open
door to new influences in method, knowledge base, and outcome.
Engaging with new paradigms, new practices, and new people cannot
happen successfully without developing truly synergistic partnerships
among people from a broad array of institutions and sectors within
and beyond the academy. To make a more public outcome for doctoral
learning viable, the circle for decision-making on the PhD needs to
involve more active partnerships - a fourth "P" in the overall
framework - to supply perspectives on the doctorate from all relevant
constituencies, in other words, from the producers of PhDs as well as
from the various consumer groups that utilize PhDs: two- and
four-year colleges, educational associations, K-12 education,
corporations, cultural institutions, government agencies, nonprofits,
and private foundations.
For The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, these
challenges represent excellent opportunities for framing a richer
purpose and a richer population for the doctorate. With initial
funding from The Pew Charitable Trusts, Woodrow Wilson is launching
an 18-month initiative as a planning stage for longer-term efforts to
help doctoral programs create a more responsive PhD. In
collaboration with a distinguished group of leaders in graduate
education, including an Advisory Council and a Task Force,
approximately 10 research universities will be selected as pilot
sites for a series of retreats and public forums on creating a more
responsive PhD. These and other activities will give doctoral
students, faculty and administrators in the arts and sciences a means
of engaging with diverse leaders of the PhD consumer sectors on
implementing the most recent recommendations for improving the
doctorate.
The Foundation program will benefit greatly from the Preparing Future
Faculty programs organized by the Council of Graduate Schools and the
American Association of Colleges and Universities; they have begun
the work of exposing graduate students to differing faculty roles
across colleges and universities. Woodrow Wilson will also
collaborate with the complementary and timely Carnegie Foundation for
the Advancement of Teaching initiative on doctoral education, led by
George Walker under the general guidance of Lee Shulman. We expect
as well major collaborations with the Council of Graduate Schools,
the Association of Graduate Schools, and the Association of American
Universities, whose leaders are playing a major role in shaping our
work.
In undertaking this initiative, the Foundation inherits a
significant amount of progress from the Re-envisioning the PhD
Project (http://depts.washington.edu/envision) led by Jody Nyquist
at the University of Washington, which culminated in a national
conference in April, 2000. That landmark conversation featured
several of the most recent studies on doctoral education and
invited representatives from all sectors of society to articulate
their concerns and their willingness to engage in partnerships.
The conference also pointed the way to a new future for the PhD by
showcasing promising practices in doctoral education, examples of
innovative experiments ranging from cross-disciplinary
dissertation retreats, doctoral internships in businesses and civic
organizations, multiple mentoring strategies, instructional
exchanges between different kinds of educational institutions, and
more - all aimed at creating more versatility for the doctorate.
These practices and other changes in the landscape of the doctorate
invite us to rethink educational policy at the core. Through an
initial stage of Woodrow Wilson Roundtables and Regional Retreats,
the Foundation will help to bring the national conversation begun at
the Re-envisioning conference to an individual, institutional level
of creative planning and translation of ideas into bold actions. Our
goal is to create collaboratively a set of guidelines for improving
doctoral education, to help PhD programs make these promising
practices - especially those that enable the doctorate a richer
purpose and population - regular features of A More Responsive PhD.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Check back periodically for more developments, including active links
to informative resources for faculty, administrators, doctoral
students
and others. We welcome your suggestions. Please email Bettina
Woodford, Program Officer for the initiative, at Bettina at woodrow.org
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation webmaster at woodrow.org
CN 5281, Princeton NJ 08543-5281 Tel: (609) 452-7007 Fax: (609) 452-0066
---------------------------------------------------------------------
TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR LISTSERV is a shared mission partnership with the
American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) http://www.aahe.org/
The National Teaching and Learning Forum (NT&LF) http://www.ntlf.com/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note: Anyone can SUBSCRIBE to Tomorrows-Professor Listserver by sending
the following e-mail message to: <Majordomo at lists.stanford.edu>
subscribe tomorrows-professor
To UNSUBSCRIBE to the Tomorrows-Professor send the following e-mail
message
to: <Majordomo at lists.stanford.edu>
unsubscribe tomorrows-professor
-------------------------------------------------------------------
-++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==
This message was posted through the Stanford campus mailing list
server. If you wish to unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the
message body of "unsubscribe tomorrows-professor" to majordomo at lists.stanford.edu
More information about the EAS-INFO
mailing list