Connections

Francisco Varela

Rowhea Elmesky

Penny J. Gilmer

Catherine Milne

 

TEACHING

Teaching and learning at the doctoral level should be characterized by autonomy, flexibility, reciprocal roles between teacher and learner, continuous learning and high motivation. My perspective is that doctoral education in the United States has too much required coursework and that core courses are an unnecessary deterrent to high quality doctoral education. At the doctoral level students should come to class to participate in ongoing dialogue in which they have been immersed prior to class and will continue after class. Doctoral students should be avid consumers of literature and make connections to their interests and goals for the doctoral program and scholarly career. Ideally, course syllabi would be collaboratively produced and flexibly enacted so that issues that arise during enactment can be pursued without the concern that in-depth scholarly discourses are tangential. It goes without saying that courses are to serve students and there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all curriculum at the doctoral level.

The in-class components of a doctoral course should be cotaught and all participants should engage in dialogue for which they are prepared by their educational experiences and in-depth study undertaken prior to class. The amount of talk should be distributed among the participants equitably over time although it is acknowledged that some topics will align to a greater extent with the expertise of some students rather than others.

I'm a great believer that doctoral level courses should involve significant amounts of writing, widespread use of databases for identifying relevant resources to inform learning, review of others’ work, and coparticipation in a variety of activities designed to afford learning to support scholarship. The course is a safe place for trying out new technologies and for producing new culture to support scholarship. For example, it is becoming commonplace for institutions to undertake telephone interviews with shortlisted candidates rather than bringing them onto campus. This allows institutions to shortlist as many as 10 candidates before narrowing the field to about 6 who might be invited for an interactive videoconference using Skype. Recently a University followed up a Skype interview with a lesson enacted using Skype. Accordingly, it is important that doctoral students now become proficient in the use of technologies involving videoconferencing and uses of video in college-level instruction. One assessment activity that I use in each of my courses involves the production of a podcast and from now on I will also include Skype exit examinations and a Skype lesson with the class. It is important that graduate-level classes prepare students for their careers and scholarly activities such as those I have described are becoming increasingly important.