Abstract
Rethinking doctoral education requires that faculty members in academic departments discuss and take action in three arenas: aligning programmatic structural elements with desired outcomes; deliberately shaping the departmental culture; and rethinking the one-on-one apprenticeship pedagogies that are the heart of doctoral education. By improving the quality of the educational experience, students will learn more and develop further.
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Notes
A cogent critique was offered by Ronald G. Douglas, then Executive Vice President and Provost at Texas A&M University, at a Workshop on Actions for the Mathematical Sciences sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. “For people who view the profession as a kind of priesthood, is appealing to reduce numbers by keeping out all but the most worthy. However, there might be several negative consequences to such an approach. First, there would be the terrible human waste of labeling a large group of our most talented people as failures and choking them out…. Second, while Darwinian selection … [seems to be] a fair way to choose those who succeed, the playing field is often not as level as many would like to believe. In many cases, it’s as though someone taught some of the animals how to use weapons and accepted the outcome of which animals survived as having been dictated by nature (Board on Mathematical Sciences 1997, p. 43).”
This is by no means the only aspect of doctoral education that is implicit, rather than explicit. A large national survey of doctoral students found that many of the expectations were not clear to students (Golde and Dore 2001). Drilling down on one element, Lovitts identified the features of a high quality dissertation, discipline by discipline, because too often expectations are a game of “guess my rule” (Lovitts 2007).
References
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Lovitts, B. E. (2007). Making the implicit explicit: Creating performance expectations for the dissertation. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.
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Golde, C.M. The formation of scholars: insights of the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate. GeoJournal 80, 209–213 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-014-9575-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-014-9575-5