What Doctoral Studies and Dissertations Can Be

• In Event: 33.047 - Diving In: Bill Ayers and the Art of Writing Into the Contradiction

Abstract

This paper is a reflection on Bill Ayers as a co-creator of the Ph.D. program in Curriculum Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and as a mentor to doctoral students. It utilizes arts-based inquiry and a creative textual approach in order to bring the experience of Bill’s teaching to life. Its central contradiction juxtaposes the student-centered pedagogy of the ‘Bills’ at UIC with other conceptions of the ‘rigor’ (a word the author usually connects to rigor mortis) of doctoral studies. It is a drama, and a preview from the author is below:
Prologue:
I learned a great deal from over two decades of working with Bill Ayers – as we learned together from and with well over a hundred doctoral students, whose dissertations one of us chaired and the other served as a committee member. This is my version of a fictionalized example of the kind of doctoral experience we tried to create.
Characters:
Faculty Member (FM): most likely me, Bill Schubert, or could be Bill Ayers, or Bill Watkins, but most probably a fictionalized composite of the three of us and more. After all, we are each named Bill, so to call the faculty member Bill would seem to fit, though I just settled for FM, meaning faculty member.
Potential Student (PS): no particular student; rather, a fictionalized composite of hundreds of doctoral students with whom we worked in Curriculum Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago for the past quarter of a century or more. Without giving away too much of the plot, PS is later transformed into AS, Actual Student.
Setting:
Faculty office in a college of education in a big urban university, strewn with papers and books, most of which can be easily found by the professor, and no one else.

Author

• William (Bill) H. Schubert, University of Illinois at Chicago