| Affiliations: | |
| Project Leader: | Ambyr Rios ambyrrios@tamu.edu Teaching, Learning & Culture |
| Faculty Mentor: | Dr. Radhika Viruru, Ph.D. |
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Meeting Times:
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Flexible based on needs of research team
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Team Size:
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2 (Team Full)
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| Open Spots: | 0 |
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Special Opportunities:
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Research team members will have the opportunity to work closely with two Department of Teaching, Learning and Culture faculty on a project with conference presentation and publication goals.
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Team Needs:
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We are looking for a diverse group of individuals to work with both qualitative data obtained from writing groups, interviews, and surveys and quantitative data obtained from Likert Scale responses. Students with an interest in educational issues or writing are highly encouraged to apply. There is also an opportunity for a WebGIS project or programming project within the scope of the research study. Experience with Excel is a plus, though not required.
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Description:
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Universities worldwide have observed an increasing diversity in the population of doctoral students (Odena & Burgess, 2017; Pare, 2018). The students in the online Ed.D in curriculum and instruction are no exception and in fact represent a wide variety of backgrounds: 40% of the 80 students in the program are first generation college students; 12.5% are African-American and 20% are Hispanic; 72.5% are female and 44% are over the age of 40. It is therefore more important than ever that their voices be heard and honored as we reconceptualize what writing means in a professional doctorate. As Pare (2018) has noted, the process of writing, particularly as related to a dissertation or it’s equivalent, is deeply tied to issues of identity and voice and agency and is reflective of the author’s “identity, authority, agency, voice, ideology, intersectionality, epistemology, culture, race, language, community, mental health, creativity, and more” (p. 2). Thus the imposition of an inflexible structure or of academic conventions far removed from the writer’s realities can serve to disenfranchise non-traditional doctoral students. The students in the online Ed.D. in Curriculum and Instruction thus are in a unique position at Texas A&M University as they bring both a wealth of real world experience as well as a rich diversity of perspectives to the university. This study therefore attempts to honor those perspectives and to bring them to the table, to discover what writing means to them and how their ideas about writing can be incorporated into defining what writing in a professional doctorate should be. A review of the professional literature on doctoral education shows that many programs across the world now incorporate the use of writing groups to aid doctoral students acquire writing competencies (Kumar & Aitchison, 2018). Writing groups have been found to positively impact “writing proficiency, higher-order thinking skills, motivation and confidence” among doctoral students (de Caux, Lam, Lau, Hoang & Pretorius, 2017, p. 465). This study too will incorporate the use of writing groups. The following research questions guide this study (1) How do students in a professional doctorate in education perceive writing? (2) Does the use of writing groups in an introductory professional doctoral course help students discover their own voices as writers?
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