Abstract
This essay documents the lessons learned from the transition to teaching research methods courses and advising EdD doctoral students online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This discussion is set against the backdrop of developing a new fully online EdD Program in educational leadership for social justice at the institution, wherein the online transition due to COVID-19 offered an opportunity to assess effective pedagogy, student community and engagement, and workload expectations. In our analysis of the transition to teaching online, we applied Hammond’s (2020) framework, which highlights design elements that promote agency for independent learning. We overlay the realities of teaching and advising adult students who are working full-time and managing home-life responsibilities in addition to pursuing their EdD degree. Unresolved questions and future directions for the culturally responsive and socially just online Education Doctorate are explored.
Highlights
As professors at a CPED-affiliated institution, we have taught qualitative and quantitative research methods courses in our fully face-to-face, cohort-based, EdD program for the past 10 years
Together with our students, who were simultaneously enrolled in doctoral studies while teaching and leading K-12 schools and working as university student affairs practitioners, we were thrust into a place of collective uncertainty: the familiar spaces and routines of school replaced with stopgap solutions for distance learning
While we would argue there is no good time for a global pandemic, the timing of our university’s switch to online instruction and, in particular, the lessons learned about what equitable, inclusive, and student-centered education needs to look like under these conditions, was serendipitous given our plans to launch a fully online EdD program in January 2021
Summary
The EdD program highlighted in this essay focuses on educational leadership for social justice. In alignment with CPED, which encourages high quality, rigorous practitioner preparation with a strong background in educational theory and recent research to inform one’s practice, this program attempts to prepare students for their DiP focused on “a persistent, contextualized, and specific issue embedded in the work of a professional practitioner, the addressing of which has the potential to result in improved understanding, experience, and outcomes” (CPED, 2019, n.p.). This journal is supported by the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate: A Knowledge Forum on the
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