Abstract
This article shares insights from a review of dissertations produced by students in an EdD program in Educational Leadership at a public university in Connecticut. Program curriculum and learning experiences, built upon a social justice platform, prepare students to engage in scholarship and action to improve educational systems. However, retaining students’ focus on designing capstone projects that explore and seek to mitigate systemic injustice has been an ongoing challenge. To understand more about the impact of the EdD program’s vision of developing students’ capacities for systems transformation and social justice, program faculty conducted a document analysis of dissertations produced in the 15 years from program inception to the present, examining themes and trends that emerge from the focus areas, research questions, and research methods applied in dissertations. Document analysis revealed that, while earlier student dissertations tended to be more aligned with the educational policy cycle than with the program’s focus on social justice, more recent dissertations demonstrate a shift toward a stronger social justice orientation. As a member of the Carnegie Project on the Educational Doctorate (CPED) since 2018, this university’s EdD program engages in ongoing redesign to maximize impact on the field and to cultivate activism among program graduates who will lead systemic transformation in education. A conceptual framework for transcendent third-order change - cultivating systems leadership that transcends the limits of current paradigms and action, fosters collaborative engagement, and provides coherent structures for collaborative impact - is the foundation for this redesign.
Highlights
From its inception, the EdD program at Connecticut State University (CCSU) has been focused on developing transformational school leaders (Burns, 1978; Leithwood & Jantzi, 2000)
As a review of the research topics that students have pursued in their dissertations demonstrates, relatively few EdD candidates have investigated topics or problems of practice related to social justice, equity, or structural oppression in their own schools or districts, or at the level of state policies that perpetuate injustice
CCSU’s EdD program leadership and faculty have re-oriented the vision and intention of the program to be more explicit about its commitment to a new, and deeper, level of fundamental change that has the potential to address the burgeoning needs that are present: namely, a transcendent third order of change (Bartunek & Moch, 1987) as opposed to the conventional first and second orders of change often discussed in the best practice literature within the discipline of educational leadership
Summary
The EdD program at CCSU has been focused on developing transformational school leaders (Burns, 1978; Leithwood & Jantzi, 2000). Transformational leadership is generally regarded as the capacity to facilitate change in organizational behavior and culture; within educational settings, such change is oriented toward achieving goals that improve outcomes for students. This is casually thought of as challenging the status quo and inspiring new ways of seeing and being among organizational members. The problem with implementing this principle is that transformational leadership tends to produce responses to complex problems of practice, as opposed to solutions This is because the underlying system that created such problems in the first place tends to remain unchanged. As Tyack and Cuban (1997) have argued, the cycle of perpetual change associated with the history of school reform in the United States has contributed to very little actual substantive change to the underlying foundations of the system
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