The Role of Theory in Supporting EdD Students to Identify Problems of Practice (Poster 4)

• In Event: Scaffolding for Local Change-Making: Innovative EdD Supports Across Contexts

Abstract

To meet the unique challenges today’s EdD students face, including recent political campaigns seeking to control knowledge through book and idea banning, our educational leaders and teachers must learn to think and lead amidst these restrictions, outside the boundaries of eurocentric western logics. This paper examines ways to supporting scholar-practitioners to engage in a critical and complex perspective of education and the world while assisting them to identify their problems of practice, link to them scholarship, and bridge research gaps with a practical theoretical approach.

Identifying a systems approach to organizing and understanding the problems of practice disrupts dominant Eurocentric ways of knowing, instead allowing for a pluriverse of ontoepistemologies that center marginalized ways of knowing. Critical posthuman scholarship (Braidotti, 2013/2019) facilitates this shift by decentering the notion of the human as the central actor in the world, and instead, offering the unit of assemblage, or multiplicity, or collective, as our central referent (Strom & Martin, 2022). An assemblage refers to a set of elements—humans, things, ideas, physical settings, and so on—that come into composition and produce something (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). In this way, agency is distributed across the assemblage (including nonhuman and nonhuman elements), rather than belonging to or solely enacted by the humans in the situation (Bennett, 2009). Therefore, the focus is not on the individual but the relation between the individual/subject and the other elements of the multiplicity (Strom & Viesca, 2021).

“I had never thought about it that way!” First year doctoral students frequently voiced this sentiment in the fall of 2023 as they read and discussed Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) book, The Posthuman. Faculty were embarking on a Carnegie Project on the Educational Doctorate (CPED)-aligned redesign of the EdD program, resulting in many programmatic changes. As faculty groups collaboratively examined and built coursework for this redesign, an important conversation arose regarding the role of theory in an EdD program and its relation to the problem of practice, which frames the dissertation. The problem of practice typically emerges from students’ work/life experiences and is related to a real-life problem they are experiencing in their worlds. When EdD scholar-practitioners encountered theories in our program, they tended to resist applying them to their problems of practice.

To address this issue, we worked with EdD scholar practitioners to systematically scaffold the co-constitution of theory and practice and engagement with the concept of praxis. Central to this convergence in thinking about practice and theory was our engagement with critical posthumanism (Braidotti 2013/2019; Strom & Viesca, 2021), which involves a set of important shifts in worldview. This paper describes and demonstrates how we used three scholar-practitioner shifts to support EdD students to integrate theory with practice in the identification of their problems of practice. Ultimately, this work can inform other EdD programs to assist their students as they grapple with the specific issues arising from combinations of pandemic, politics, educational conditions, and more in our current historic moment as they develop their program of practice and become practitioner scholars.

Author

• Laura Edwards, Northern Kentucky University