Toward strengthening the preparation of teacher educator-researchers in doctoral programs and beyond

Lin, Emily; Wang, Jian; Spalding, Elizabeth; Klecka, Cari L.; & Odell, Sandra J.(2011). Toward strengthening the preparation of teacher educator-researchers in doctoral programs and beyond.Journal of Teacher Education,62(3), 239-245.

People seek doctorates in teacher education for many reasons, and their career agendas and goals are widely varied. All education doctorates are not created equal. Some of us do aspire to be researchers whose work will inform and transform policy on a broader level, and I admire those people and rely on their work as a resource. Many of them have impressive research agendas that stretch over many years; they publish and present prolifically and win grants and other awards, and generally have a deep passion for contributing to the knowledge base in teacher education. I follow the work of several such researchers with great interest, and I respect and value what they do. However, not every teacher educator with a doctorate shares a passion for research in and of itself. Not all of us are at institutions where there are large amounts of financial and other support to be a researcher. Some of us are at small institutions (by choice) and have not done much “pure” research since we completed our dissertations, and even those dissertations felt like a hurdle to be gotten through so we could do what we really wanted to do—teach and mentor preservice and practicing teachers. It ought to be possible to “serve two masters” and focus both on the research and on the teaching, but in practice, it is more often one or the other, and in smaller teaching institutions, the students and our teaching will always take priority. In the end, we will focus on what we feel most rewarded by, and we will gravitate toward positions in institutions that reward us for doing the things we care about. The things we are most passionate about will always end up filling our time, and the ones we care less about will be lower on the agenda. With only one lifetime per person, it would be wasteful to do anything else.

Perhaps, as is suggested in a few places in this editorial, we really do need two different kinds of education doctorates, to serve candidates with differing passions and goals. Although there have been efforts recently to distinguish between PhD and EdD degree programs (the work of David Imig and the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate comes to mind, and is cited in this editorial), those two degrees in most places are indistinguishable these days. Even that distinction, with EdDs focusing on educational “products and practices” (p. 243) and PhDs focusing on more “traditional” kinds of research, does not account for the candidates who really are primarily interested in teaching (doing it at the same time as they are studying it) and in teaching teachers, and primarily seek doctorates as a way of entering the world of college level (often undergraduate) teacher education. Where does Boyer’s “scholarship of teaching” fit on the continuum of doctoral programs? Could there be more than two kinds of scholarship, with none of the choices “better” or “worse” than any of the others? Couldn’t there be a world where many kinds of contributions were valued? I’m afraid that running through the discussions of the issue of doctoral preparation in educational research is a hierarchical thread, with some kinds of doctoral programs being implicitly (or even explicitly) seen as more valuable and important than others. Those who think the more traditional forms of scholarship are better will bemoan the horrible state of education research today, and its “lack of rigor.” They will write about how badly doctoral programs are preparing teacher educators to do the kinds of work that they value most highly. I happen to think that what I do with preservice and practicing teachers on a daily basis, in my classroom and “out in the schools” is just as important in its way, and has just as much impact, as the work that internationally known researchers do, even though my work is not displayed on so large a stage. My own doctoral program, now two decades past, was in many ways a disappointment, as it did not really prepare me well to be a traditional researcher, but it did not prepare me well to go in any other direction, either. The fulfillment I’ve found in working as a teacher educator has come largely through my own study and hard work . Perhaps that will always be the case if we are to be lifelong learners, but I still wonder if a program that truly meshed with my goals, rather than trying to be all things to all degree candidates and not really focusing on any one thing well, could have given that growth process a better start.