Respecting and Challenging the Candidate: Some Developments in Program Design

Abstract

Among the rhetoric about professional doctorates, much is made of the extent to which such programs value the knowledge that clients/candidates bring to academia. The professional doctorate is often sold as the doctorate that departs from elite understandings of academic apprenticeship and instead reaches out to new communities of knowledge, with their emphasis on the local and the pragmatic. Given this, institutions grapple with the actual delivery of such rhetoric. This paper explores ways of delivering on the promise for both respecting and challenging the knowledge that professional doctorate candidates bring to the program. It first considers the problem of 'practice-meets-research,' then it outlines one programmatic attempt to provide client/candidates with a genuine experience of respect-and- challenge and finally it considers pedagogic implications for professional doctorates