The Formation of Scholars E-Book

George E. Walker

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: JB-Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 410

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2008

Beschreibung

This groundbreaking book explores the current state of doctoral education in the United States and offers a plan for increasing the effectiveness of doctoral education. Programs must grapple with questions of purpose. The authors examine practices and elements of doctoral programs and show how they can be made more powerful by relying on principles of progressive development, integration, and collaboration. They challenge the traditional apprenticeship model and offer an alternative in which students learn while apprenticing with several faculty members. The authors persuasively argue that creating intellectual community is essential for high-quality graduate education in every department. Knowledge-centered, multigenerational communities foster the development of new ideas and encourage intellectual risk taking.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Foreword

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

Chapter 1: Moving Doctoral Education into the Future

The Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate

Mirror, Mirror

The Formation of Scholars

Overview of the Volume

Chapter 2: Setting the Stage for Change

A Short History of Doctoral Education in America

A Fifth Stage: Waves of Reform

Turning Resistance into Momentum

Back to the Future

Chapter 3: Talking About Purpose

Difficult Dialogues

Reflections on Purpose

Data Lenses and Windows

Better Designs for Better Learning

A Culture of Inquiry and Evidence

Chapter 4: From Experience to Expertise

Progressive Development

Integrative Learning

Collaborative Learning

Principles and Imperatives

Chapter 5: Apprenticeship Reconsidered

Apprenticeship With Defining Features

Conceptual Underpinnings

And a Final Story

Making Apprenticeship Work

Chapter 6: Creating and Sustaining Intellectual Community

The Importance of Intellectual Community

Characteristics of Intellectual Community

Activities that Foster Intellectual Communities

Intellectual Community and the Formation of Scholars

Chapter 7: A Call to Action

The Argument

Answering the Call

The Need to Pull Together

Unfinished Business

Remembering Why

Appendix A: Summary Description of the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate

Appendix B: List of Participating Departments

Appendix C: Overview of the Surveys

Appendix D: Graduate Student Survey

Appendix E: Graduate Faculty Survey

References

Index

Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 51 Vista Road, Stanford, CA. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The formation of scholars: rethinking doctoral education for the twenty-first century / George E. Walker . . . [et al.]; foreword by Lee S. Shulman.—1st ed.

p.cm.

“Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.”

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN 978-0-470-19743-1 (cloth: alk. paper)

1. Doctor of philosophy degree. 2. Universities and colleges—United States—Graduate work. I. Walker, George E.

LB2386.F67 2008

378.24—dc22

2007035493

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

Founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1905 and chartered in 1906 by an Act of Congress, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is an independent policy and research center whose charge is “to do and perform all things necessary to encourage, uphold, and dignify the profession of the teacher and the cause of higher education.”

The Foundation is a major national and international center for research and policy studies about teaching. Its mission is to address the hardest problems faced in teaching in public schools, colleges, and universities—that is, how to succeed in the classroom, how best to achieve lasting student learning, and how to assess the impact of teaching on students.

FOREWORD

Academics are very careful with words. The title of this book, The Formation of Scholars, embodies two key terms that call for explanation and interpretation. Why formation? Why scholars? The answer is that the juxtaposition of these two ideas captures the essential character of the work reported in this volume. Doctoral education prepares scholars who both understand what is known and discover what is yet unknown. They conserve the most valued knowledge of the past even as they examine it critically. They invent new forms of understanding as they move their fields ahead. Yet the more they understand, the heavier their moral obligation to use their knowledge and skill with integrity, responsibility, and generosity. They are thinkers and actors, intellectual adventurers and moral agents. The idea of formation, borrowed from religious educators, refers to the kind of education that leads to an integration of mind and moral virtue that we often call character or integrity.

When I first began working in teacher education, I was admonished by insiders never to use the phrase “teacher training.” Training implied mindless, routine practice more appropriate to an assembly line than to a classroom. It also reinforced the rampant behaviorism that dominated the fields of teacher preparation and teacher evaluation. The correct term was “teacher education,” which more aptly captured the fundamentally intellectual, strategic, and thoughtful functions associated with teaching. I took this instruction to heart. Indeed, when I delivered my presidential address to the American Educational Research Association in 1984, I concluded my remarks with a revision of Shaw’s “Those who can, do; those who cannot, teach,” changing it to “Those who can, do. Those who understand, teach.” Teaching must be understood as an intentional act of mind for which a rich educational experience is necessary. Yet this move may not be enough.

In recent years, my colleagues and I at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching undertook our comparative studies of education across the “learned professions” of law, engineering, the clergy, teaching, medicine, and nursing. In parallel, we initiated the study of doctoral education that is described and analyzed in this book. We recognized early on that doctoral education could be examined as a form of professional preparation. Those with PhDs are prepared both to know and to do. Holders of the PhD are prepared to profess their disciplines and their fields of study, not only to understand them deeply but also to take upon themselves the moral responsibility to protect the integrity of their field and its proper use in the service of humanity. We found the term formation—used extensively in the field of religious education and the preparation of clergy—to be particularly appropriate for describing this integration of the intellectual and the moral in preparing for the many roles of the scholar—discovery and synthesis, teaching and service. Thus we had evolved from training to education and from education to formation.

The PhD is the monarch of the academic community. It is the very highest accomplishment that can be sought by students. It signals that its recipient is now ready, eligible, indeed obligated, to make the most dramatic shift in roles: from student to teacher, from apprentice to master, from novice or intern to independent scholar and leader. The PhD marks its holder as one charged to serve as a steward of the discipline and profession. If this language sounds mildly ecclesiastical, it is no accident. We do not choose the language of “formation” or “stewardship” capriciously. The doctorate carries with it both a sense of intellectual mastery and of moral responsibility. That the entire process concludes with all members of the community dressed in religious robes and engaged in an act of ordination of the novice by the master with a priestly hood is no accident.

So is the PhD to be understood as just one more learned profession, the academic parallel to engineering, law, or medicine? Not really. I remember my surprise at the scheduling of commencements at my alma mater. When completing graduate study at the University of Chicago, I saw that the undergraduate commencement was to be held on Friday, when all of the baccalaureate degrees would be awarded—including the degrees of MD and JD. The graduate commencement for recipients of master’s degrees and PhDs was scheduled for the following day. When I expressed my confusion over this placement of the medical and law degrees, I was informed that both of these degrees were inherently “undergraduate.” Indeed, we regularly refer to the four years of medical school as “undergraduate medical education.” Outside the United States, the first medical degree has traditionally been the Bachelor of Medicine; only recently has the first law degree changed from an LLB to a JD, without any alteration in curriculum requirements or standards. These degrees did not prepare their recipients for lives of scholarship and teaching. True graduate degrees are special.

What accounts for the mystique of the PhD? It is the academy’s own means of reproduction. In a Darwinian sense, the academy invests most heavily in its own means of reproduction and sustainability. The denouement of the doctorate, the dissertation, is not only a piece of original research intended to set its writer apart from all who preceded her. It is also a celebration of the scores of scholars on whose shoulders any piece of individual scholarship rests. Even as the candidate writes the dissertation—the contribution to knowledge, the evidence of scholarly innovation and invention—the text is peppered with footnotes and references, citations and bibliographies, acknowledgments and attributions. Each of these bears witness to every scholar’s debt to her predecessors in scholarship. References and footnotes also acknowledge the work of contemporaries who live in the same professional and disciplinary community as the candidate, or in a closely neighboring field of study. Scholarship is a social and communal activity. Thus candidates give recognition to the continuing presence of their extended intellectual community as the scaffold that supports and sustains their research work, whether present in the teachers and colleagues of one’s own program, or ever helpful in the whispers, hints, proof texts, and challenges of scholars long dead but still audible through their published work. It is also why, we argue in this volume, nothing is more critical to the quality of a doctoral program than the character of the intellectual community created by its teachers and students.

We at the Carnegie Foundation elected to devote five years to the study of the PhD and its possible futures because we felt strongly that the academic profession bridges past and future in the context of each individual doctoral program. The doctorate as an institution provides the stability and tradition that renders scholarship a human activity that transcends generations, cultures, and contexts. It is both a paragon of innovation and a defender of the faith. The doctorate is both transformation and impediment; it preserves what is enduring, but can also paralyze—hardening categories and freezing traditions into empty rituals. The best doctoral programs attempt to discover the “sweet spot” between conservation and change by teaching skepticism and respect for earlier traditions and sources while encouraging strikingly new ideas and courageous leaps forward. As readers of the late Thomas Kuhn can aver, scholars are evaluated and rewarded by how faithfully they labor within the existing paradigms, but they are celebrated and venerated for scientific revolutions that shatter old paradigms and create new ones.

Also decided, unlike most previous studies of the doctorate, to treat doctoral education as domain- and field-specific, not as a generic activity at the all-university level. Both scholarship and teaching in any field reflect the character of inquiry, the nature of community, and the ways in which research and teaching are conducted in that particular discipline or disciplinary intersection. We therefore elected to distribute our efforts across a set of fields selected to represent the full extent of the academic enterprise.

This kind of work is complex and labor intensive. Working across six fields—chemistry, education, English, history, mathematics, and neuroscience—demanded the efforts of a remarkably diverse and multitalented team. Since I write both to introduce the volume and, as president of the Foundation, to express my gratitude to my colleagues, the scholars who made this work possible, I conclude by turning to them and acknowledging their creative leadership.

Leading the team was George Walker, a theoretical physicist by training and scholarship, who served for many years as graduate dean and vice president for research at Indiana University. A national leader in graduate education, George has been an energetic and charismatic leader of this work. Coaxing him to leave Bloomington to come west and lead this project was no small challenge. Fortunately, he is a lifelong San Francisco Giants baseball fan, which made the “pitch” far easier than it might have been.

Chris Golde began her academic career at Stanford University with a pioneering dissertation study of the complexities of doctoral education and continued this work as a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin. As director of research for the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate (CID), she coordinated the several research functions associated with the effort and was a central figure in designing the many convenings that brought together participants both within and across disciplinary communities.

Laura Jones, trained as an anthropologist and archaeologist, joined the project to add strength to the research and convening programs of the CID. Andrea Conklin Bueschel, a higher education scholar with special interest in the unique role of community colleges, was a key member of the team.

Pat Hutchings, vice president of the Foundation, coordinated the final critical stages of writing this book, leading its transformation from a rich and varied array of insights and hypotheses into the tightly argued and gracefully presented monograph we have before us.

The project was counseled by a wise advisory committee chaired by Donald Kennedy, former president of Stanford University and editor-in-chief of Science during the entire period of the study.

I am particularly grateful to the hundreds of faculty members and doctoral students from more than forty institutions that participated in the work over its five-year lifetime. They were the engines of reform, the experimenters as well as the experimented-upon. If this work makes the future impact that we intend, it will be through their efforts, past and future.

Doctoral education is a set of experiences that incorporates training, education, and formation. It is a process led by faculty and brought to life by students. It is the key experience upon which the future of global higher education rests. We hope that this volume will support the many ways in which the formation of scholars can be effected through the transformation of graduate education.

Lee S. Shulman

Stanford, California

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate (CID) and this resulting volume are products of much hard work, commitment, and the dedication of many, many people. The CID team was particularly fortunate to have had the opportunity to work closely with and benefit from the talent of many staff members. Amita Chudgar and Kim Rapp were research assistants for the CID, contributing important ideas, analysis, and feedback. Sonia Gonzalez, Leslie Eustice, Ruby Kerawalla, Tasha Kalista, Emily Stewart, and Lydia Baldwin all provided invaluable administrative support to the project, not only ensuring that the trains ran on time, but doing so with good cheer and great skill.

The Carnegie Foundation is a highly collaborative setting and many additional colleagues played major roles in the work as well, providing support, critical feedback, generous collaboration, and contributions to everything from convenings to manuscript suggestions. In particular, Mary Taylor Huber, Gay Clyburn, and Sherry Hecht read drafts of this manuscript several times and gently guided its direction. And of course Lee Shulman’s influence on the work was front and center throughout, as it is in all of the work of the Foundation.

We are also fortunate to have many colleagues beyond Carnegie who have influenced the work of the CID and therefore shaped this volume. The essayists who provided initial “grist for the mill” for each discipline helped provoke and encourage our participants—and us—to consider ideas and directions that were in many ways “unnatural acts.” Their work, collected in Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education, is an important foundation for this book. We have also benefited from the input of many people who contribute daily to graduate education, including graduate deans, staff members of disciplinary societies, interested observers who participated in our convenings, and funding agencies. We are also grateful to our anonymous external reviewers for their helpful comments.

The Atlantic Philanthropies was Carnegie’s major financial partner in this work. We are grateful to them for several decades of support of graduate education and our work in particular.

In addition, our advisory committee offered crucial and thoughtful advice throughout the project. The committee was chaired by Donald Kennedy, president emeritus and Bing Professor of Environmental Science and Policy emeritus, Stanford University, and editor-in-chief of Science magazine. The other members were Bruce Alberts, former president of the National Academy of Sciences and professor of biochemistry and biophysics, University of California, San Francisco; David Damrosch, professor of English and comparative literature, Columbia University; Michael Feuer, executive director of the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Research Council; Phillip Griffiths, professor of mathematics and former director of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University; Dudley Herschbach, Baird Professor of Science in chemistry, Harvard University; Stanley Katz, professor of Public and International Affairs and director of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at Princeton University; Joshua Lederberg, Sackler Foundation Scholar and professor emeritus, Rockefeller University; Kenneth Prewitt, Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs, Columbia University; Robert Rosenzweig, president emeritus of the Association of American Universities; Henry Rosovsky, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor emeritus, Harvard University; Lee S. Shulman, president of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; and Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools.

We are also grateful for the support of the disciplinary and professional societies that represent the six CID disciplines. They have provided multiple opportunities for us and our campus participants to share the work of the CID—at conferences, in newsletters and journals, and in meetings with leadership. In many ways, they are one of the keys to ensuring that the excellent work begun by campuses in the CID continues and becomes part of their regular discussions and activities.

The American Chemical Society (ACS)

The American Educational Research Association (AERA)

The American Historical Association (AHA)

The American Mathematical Society (AMS)

The Association of Departments of English (ADE)

The Association of Neuroscience Departments and Programs (ANDP)

The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS)

The Modern Language Association (MLA)

The Society for Neuroscience (SfN)

Finally, none of the work of the CID would have been possible (or nearly as much fun) without the tremendous investment of time, energy, and imagination of our campus participants. The graduate students, faculty, and staff of the CID departments were the project. Their hard work was what made the CID successful. Their challenges, struggles, and successes taught us about what, in fact, is possible in doctoral education. Their collaborative spirit and willingness to take risks provided a valuable response to the many indictments of graduate education. Their commitment to improving the education and lives of doctoral students was the greatest reward. It is to them that this work is dedicated.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

George E. Walker is currently vice president for research and dean of the University Graduate School at Florida International University. From 2001 to 2006, he served as senior scholar and director of the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Dr. Walker is a theoretical nuclear physicist who obtained his undergraduate education at Wesleyan University, his graduate education at Case Western University, and his post-doctoral education at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and at Stanford University. Most of his scholarly career was at Indiana University, where he was vice president for research and dean of the Graduate School for many years. He was twice honored by physics graduate students with the “Outstanding Contributions to Graduate Education” award, and by his peers through election as a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He led the establishment of a Nuclear Theory Center at Indiana University. He is also chair of the Physics and Advanced Technology Directorate Advisory Committee, and chair of the Nuclear Division Advisory Committee, both at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In addition, he is a member of the National Advisory Board of the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL). Among many other boards, Walker has served as president of the Association of Graduate Schools of the Association of American Universities, as chair of the Board of the Council of Graduate Schools, and as member of the National Advisory Board of the National Survey of Student Engagement. He is coeditor, with Chris M. Golde, of Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education: Preparing Stewards of the Discipline—Carnegie Essays on the Doctorate (2006).

Chris M. Golde is associate vice provost for graduate education at Stanford University. From 2001 to 2006, she served as senior scholar and research director for the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Before joining Carnegie, she was a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research and writing have focused on doctoral education, particularly the experiences of doctoral students and doctoral student attrition. She is the lead author of At Cross Purposes: What the Experiences of Today’s Doctoral Students Reveal About Doctoral Education, the 2001 report of a national survey funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts (www.phd-survey.org). She is coeditor, with George E. Walker, of Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education: Preparing Stewards of the Discipline—Carnegie Essays on the Doctorate (2006). She holds a PhD in education from Stanford University.

Laura Jones is an applied anthropologist practicing in the areas of archaeology, public history, heritage preservation, and community planning and outreach. Her geographical areas of research interest are California and Oceania. Currently she holds the position of director of Heritage Services and University Archaeologist at Stanford University. She was senior scholar and director of the Community Program at the Carnegie Foundation from 2000–2006. In addition to publications in anthropology, she is the author of an upcoming article giving a comparative view on educational practices in the sciences and the humanities, “Converging Paradigms for Doctoral Training in the Sciences and Humanities,” to appear in Changing Practices in Doctoral Education. She holds a doctorate in anthropology from Stanford University.

Andrea Conklin Bueschel is currently senior program officer with the Spencer Foundation. She formerly served as research scholar with the Carnegie Foundation, where she worked on the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate and the Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges projects. She has conducted research and written on policy links and disjunctures between K–12 and higher education, with a focus on the high school to college transition, especially for students who hope to be the first in their families to attend postsecondary education. In addition, she has served as researcher and managing director for an educational consulting firm, and has held various administrative posts in higher education. She is coeditor of the forthcoming New Directions for Community Colleges volume Policies and Practices to Improve Student Preparation and Success. Dr. Bueschel has a PhD in education from Stanford University.

Pat Hutchings is vice president of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, working closely with a wide range of programs and research initiatives. She has written widely on the investigation and documentation of teaching and learning, the peer collaboration and review of teaching, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Recent publications, both drawing from Carnegie’s work, include Ethics of Inquiry: Issues in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (2002) and Opening Lines: Approaches to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (2000). Her most recent book, The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons (2005), was coauthored with Mary Taylor Huber. She holds a doctorate in English from the University of Iowa and was chair of the English department at Alverno College from 1978 to 1987.

CHAPTER 1

MOVING DOCTORAL EDUCATION INTO THE FUTURE

Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.

—Will Rogers1

AS YOU READ THESE WORDS, some 375,000 men and women are pursuing doctoral degrees in institutions of higher education in the United States. Most are young adults—many with family commitments, and some juggling careers as well—but PhD programs are also populated by the occasional octogenarian and precocious teen. Some are in their first semester of work; others have been toiling for twenty years. Over 43,000 will graduate this year from the 400-plus institutions that offer the degree.2

Many of those who receive PhD’s will assume positions of leadership and responsibility in arenas that directly shape the lives we lead. A remarkable number of Nobel laureates from around the world received degrees at U.S. universities. Four of the ten most recent secretaries of state have been doctoral degree holders, as are five of the six current members of the Federal Reserve Board, and numerous world leaders. PhD’s develop life-saving medical interventions, shape social programs and policies, and turn their talents to entrepreneurial ventures in the global economy. Approximately one-half of those who receive doctorates this year will join the ranks of college and university faculty who educate today’s undergraduates, some of whom will become teachers themselves, in the United States and beyond, shaping the futures of our children and grandchildren. And some will prepare new PhD’s, so the effects of doctoral education ripple out across nations and generations.