An Emerging Framework for the EdD Activist

Abstract

Increasingly, Ed.D. programs are challenged to produce graduates with the skills and expertise needed to create and foster change in the various educational environments in which they serve. Promoting, and more importantly, preparing the Ed.D. Activist is a theme that was addressed during the October 2019 convening of the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) hosted by the University of South Carolina. As part of the opening convening, the U of SC faculty assisted with surveying the more than 65 CPED-informed programs in an effort to construct a potential framework to guide both new and existing programs within the consortium. The resulting framework highlights two potential profiles for the Ed.D. Activist, 12 considerations that programs should examine, four primary outcomes, and five quality indicators. The framework is representative of the data collected from more than 200 participants and provides a broad, but foundational framework for engaging more deeply in the work of promoting activism amongst Ed.D. graduates.

Interdisciplinary Doctoral Education and Strategic Management in Crises

“…Contemporary lenses now frame the two as being equal but different and having an inherent degree of overlap, which before now was largely ignored or overlooked. This is usually linked to misconceived perceptions of relative quality of the two programmes with the Prof Doc often being denigrated as a poor runner up (Becton et al, 2020). This originally stemmed from the difficulty HEIs had in establishing the metric evaluation of systematised knowledge and the academic rigour underpinning it.…”

Review of The Reimaginers: Education Activists and Promises of Change

“…This activism also led to the introduction of Black and Puerto Rican studies programs. The message for adult educators in higher education is that student and faculty activism (Becton et al, 2020) is essential, especially in times of budgetary constraints and top-down policy making.…”

Consensus Is a Journey

“…Program-wide conversations leading up to, during, and following the convening acknowledged examples of surface-level or late-stage social justice connections in our students' DiPs while highlighting how some students enter the program predisposed to engage in equity work. By surveying our CPED peers during a convening session, we developed a tentative framework for meeting students where they are and promoting their growth as EdD-activists (Becton et al, 2020), yet the lack of data from our own program troubled us. As facilitators of the session that gave rise to the CPEDwide framework, we saw a need to ask ourselves the same questions we had posed to others to determine what EdD-activism 50 means to us and for our program.…”