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Signature Pedagogies in Doctoral Education: Are They Adaptable for the Preparation of Education Researchers? Author(s): Chris M. Golde Source: Educational Researcher, Vol. 36, No. 6 (Aug. - Sep., 2007), pp. 344-351 Published by: American Educational Research Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30133810 Accessed: 10-09-2016 20:19 UTC

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Research News and Comment

Signature Pedagogies in Doctoral Education: Are They Adaptable for the Preparation of Education Researchers? by Chris M. Golde

This article describes two practices that can be considered signature

pedagogies of doctoral education, one in neuroscience (the journal

club) and one in English studies (the list). The practices are routinely

found in these and neighboring disciplines but are not found in other

fields. The journal club and the list share the goal of acquainting students

with the literature of a field, but apart from that, they are very different.

In addition to teaching students to work with the literature, they serve

other pedagogical goals, including socializing students into disciplinary

norms and identities. Thus they serve as windows into the underlying

culture of their home disciplines. This article considers the value of

adapting these practices into education doctoral programs and offers

suggestions for how to modify the practices to suit education.

Keywords: doctoral education; doctoral pedagogy; educational

researchers; graduate education; literature review

C ompetently working with or "knowing" the literature of

a field is important for scholarship in all disciplines, although it manifests somewhat differently in different

fields. All researchers and scholars work within particular tradi-

tions and build on, modify, or overturn that which has gone before. Learning the literature requires far more than simply read-

ing widely, regurgitating key phrases and findings, and genu- flecting to seminal researchers. It is integral to any scholarly investigation. For educational research,

to advance our collective understanding, a researcher or scholar needs to understand what has been done before, the strengths and

weaknesses of existing studies, and what they might mean. A researcher cannot perform significant research without first under-

standing the literature in the field. (Boote & Beile, 2005, p. 3)

Students of education must undertake the following (this list

is not exhaustive): Absorb the content of what they read, deter-

mine what is known and what needs to be known, identify important ongoing disciplinary debates, develop the judgment to discriminate between work of high quality and mediocre efforts,

extract useful information on which to build, juxtapose multiple

theoretical perspectives and explanations, connect research stud-

ies to one another, synthesize and reappraise others' work, and learn the stylistic conventions of written work, such as norms of

what to say and what to omit (Boote & Beile, 2005, 2006; Delamont & Atkinson, 2001; Kamler & Thomson, 2006;

Maxwell, 2006; V. Richardson, 2006). Learning to work with the literature, "to canvass and interpret the field and to construct her

version of its terrain," is also a form of "identity work" in which

the scholar positions herself and her own work in relation to the

field (Kamler & Thomson, pp. 28-29). Despite the fact that clear and persuasive writing is essential

to, and indeed an integral part of, research and scholarship (L. Richardson, 1998), writing well and with confidence, particu-

larly about others' work, is a challenge for many students in every

discipline (see, for example, Bolker, 1998). In education, students are expected to write "a substantive, thorough, sophisticated litera-

ture review" for their dissertations (Boote & Beile, 2005, p. 3), but too many students simply report on the literature rather than build

an argument based on the work that has come before theirs. "The literature is neither used to locate their studies, nor to advance an

argument about the state of the field in order to make the case for

their own work," say Kamler and Thomson (2006, p. 32)-two experts on doctoral writing. They observe that many students seem

unable to make a critique and take a stand, adding, "This is charac- teristic of diffident scholars who lack authority and who are literally

overwhelmed by the work of others" (p. 32). The problem may be

that many students are not asked to work with literature in the ways

that professional researchers do before confronting the dissertation

prospectus itself. These skills are "often neglected or taught inade-

quately" (Maxwell, 2006, p. 30). If the status quo is not working, then the question is how to

teach literature work more effectively. Simply adding a class on

literature reviewing or writing (see, for example, Rose & McClafferty, 2001)-helpful as that is-may be insufficient. More radical rethinking of the structures of education doctoral

programs might be in order. If working with the literature effec-

tively is crucial for every educational researcher, multiple oppor-

tunities to do so before the dissertation stage should be woven through the student career. How can this be accomplished? Practices used in other programs and fields can serve as sources of

inspiration.' This happens routinely in research and scholarship,

Educational Researcher, Vol. 36, No. 6, pp. 344-351 DOI: 10.3102/0013189X0730830 I

a 2007 AERA. http://er.aera.net

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when theories and methods from other disciplines and inquiry traditions are borrowed and adapted. The present article describes practices from other disciplines that could be fruitfully modified for the field of education.

Lessons From Other Disciplines

Disciplines differ in how research and scholarship are conducted,

how the research enterprise is organized and funded, what counts

as knowledge, and how knowledge claims are made and verified. Student demographics and students' post-PhD career paths also

vary (see Golde 8& Walker, 2006, for descriptions of six disci- plines). So it is not surprising that the normative ways and set-

tings in which students are taught differ from one field to the

next. Some practices for teaching students are so idiosyncratic, habituated, and completely embedded in a particular discipline that they can be called "signature pedagogies."

The term was coined by Shulman (2005) to describe "the char-

acteristic forms of teaching and learning. . . that organize the fundamental ways in which future practitioners are educated for

their new professions" (p. 52). Examples of signature pedagogies,

those "forms of instruction that leap to mind" (p. 52), include the

case dialogue method of teaching in law schools and bedside teaching on daily clinical rounds in medical education.

Signature pedagogies make a difference. They form habits of the mind, habits of the heart, and habits of the hand ... [They]

prefigure the cultures of professional work and provide the early socialization into the practices and values of a field. (p. 59)

That is what they do for students. For those of us on the outside,

signature pedagogies are windows into the cultures of their fields

that reveal professional values. Signature pedagogies share three

features: They are pervasive and routine; they entail public stu-

dent performance; and they are marked by uncertainty, visibility,

and accountability, which raise the emotional stakes. (Shulman,

2005, pp. 56-57) Signature pedagogies are not just intriguing oddities. They are

widespread across departments within a particular discipline, refined by time and practice, and they meet commonly under- stood pedagogical purposes. Arguably, signature pedagogies are adaptively suited-to borrow language from evolutionary biology--for the particularities of the scholarly enterprises in which they are found and therefore contribute to socializing stu-

dents into disciplinary norms and identities. In this article, I will describe two very different practices that

share a common overarching goal of teaching students to work with the literature in the field according to the demands and standards of the discipline. They can be considered signature pedagogies in their home (and neighboring) disciplines, one in neuroscience (the journal club) and one in English (the list). Of course, they are not the only activities that scholars in those fields

use for this purpose. And, as will be clear, these pedagogies serve

other purposes as well, making each practice particularly well suited to its discipline of origin. In the final section of the arti- cle, I will consider the adaptability of these practices for educa-

tion, where they seem to be unknown but might be adapted to

good effect.

Method

The practices described in this article came to my attention through the work of the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate (CID), for which I served as research director from 2001 to 2006.

Sponsored by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of

Teaching, the CID was an action and research project working in six disciplines: chemistry, education, English, mathematics, history, and neuroscience (see http://www.carnegiefoundation .org/cid for more information). An outsider vantage point gave Carnegie CID staff a comparative view of the six fields. The attention to signature pedagogies developed as we saw elements of doctoral programs that occur normally in one discipline but are unusual in others.

The research methods for this article are essentially observational.

Over the course of the CID we heard faculty and students make

passing reference to practices in their doctoral programs that all oth-

ers from the field immediately understood; but these were practices

with which the CID team was unfamiliar. Naturally, we began to ask more questions to tease out the essential features of these prac-

tices. The reader might imagine that we saw many signature peda-

gogies, but that was not the case.2 My discussion in this article is

limited to practices that had the express purpose of mastery of the

disciplinary literature. I interviewed faculty and graduate students

who were familiar with the practices and were articulate observers.

Several of them read and responded to a draft of this article. I also

reviewed the literature on the practices (journal clubs are well stud- ied in medical education circles) as well as dozens of handbooks and

Web pages that describe the practices in use. Extensive literature

reviews on doctoral education in English and neuroscience also pro-

vided background. It is from these sources that the cases below are drawn.

Case I: The Journal Club Journal clubs are formally organized reading groups that discuss an

article found in the recent research journals. A single article is at the

heart of each journal club presentation and discussion; the articles

under discussion are ones deemed scientifically important. Journal

clubs are conventionally multigenerational; they include faculty

members, postdoctoral fellows, advanced graduate students, and

novice graduate students as equal participants. Journal clubs are organized around specialized themes. For example, some of the journal clubs offered through the Neuroscience Training Program

at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 2006-2007 acade- mic year were Axon Guidance; Behavioral Neuroscience; Neural Cell

Death and Survival; Cerebral Ischemic Damage; and Transmitters, Circuits, and Plasticity (University of Wisconsin-Madison Neuro-

science Training Program, 2006).

Journal clubs are a customary part of departmental life in most

biological sciences. Although they are not formal courses, journal

clubs are a well-understood mechanism for teaching and learn-

ing. Participation is generally expected. One of the University of Wisconsin journal clubs advertises that it "has met continuously

since 1985" (University of Wisconsin-Madison Neuroscience Training Program, 2006, "Hearing and Donuts," para. 1). In fact, many doctoral programs in neuroscience require participa-

tion in journal clubs (for example, the University of Pittsburgh Center for Neuroscience Graduate Training Program, 2006, "5.6 Journal Club," para. 1). Less formally, the head of a laboratory

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may expect students to participate in a laboratory-based or cross-

laboratory journal club. Journal clubs typically meet weekly for approximately an

hour. Each week a different person presents an article to the group, and all participants are expected to have read the article in

advance. The presentation is followed by general discussion. The process for presenting the articles is fairly standard:

Summarize the article. Locate it in the larger landscape of the field.

Describe the experiment in sufficient detail that the audience can

understand it without becoming overly wrapped up in the details.

Explain why the article is important. Critique the article: Do the

data and their analysis withstand scrutiny? Are there contradictions

or competing hypotheses? The discussion focuses on the big picture:

the article's strengths and weaknesses, how the article extends the

field, potential applications of the work, and what questions need

to be answered in light of the current findings.

Neuroscience programs often support a second kind of jour- nal club: broad introductory ones for students in their early years.

These are opportunities to read articles of historic importance and to learn the norms of journal clubs. (Such opportunities are

particularly valuable in neuroscience, as students come from dis-

parate undergraduate majors; broad introductory journal clubs are less common in more established bioscience disciplines.) Guidelines for making presentations are provided; these serve to

initiate members into the norms of journal clubs. Early journal clubs also build community among graduate students, a particu-

lar challenge for neuroscience programs whose students work in laboratories all over campus.

Feedback mechanisms can help presenters improve and often are

incorporated into journal clubs for which academic credit is offered.

In the University of Pittsburgh neuroscience program, all journal

club participants use a Student Journal Club Evaluation form to

evaluate presenters; the form includes 13 questions covering the pre-

senter's introduction of the topic, description of the topic, conclu-

sion, delivery, and overall quality of the presentation, concluding

with, "As a percentage, how much of the presentation could you

explain to others?" Students also benefit from a postpresentation debriefing with the faculty coordinator and another faculty mem-

ber who serves as an "outside expert" for that session.

Not all journal clubs are successful. Many of the weaknesses of journal clubs are like those of any optional small-group edu- cational activity, such as seminars or study groups. Journal clubs

can face the problem of declining attendance; initial enthusiasm

often wanes, particularly in the face of competing time pressures.

Participant learning suffers if participants do not prepare in advance, if articles are selected and appraised without clear crite-

ria, or if participants do not have guidance in preparing presen-

tations (Kahn, Dwarakanath, Pakkal, Brace, & Awonuga, 1999; Kahn & Gee, 1999). Sometimes a few participants dominate and others, particularly nonnative speakers or newcomers, remain silent. Some people are put off by the norms of heated scientific

discourse, which can seem aggressive and combative.

What Purposes Are Served by This Practice?

Journal clubs have three well-understood and commonly described purposes. (Of course, the purposes may be, in each par-

ticular case, more or less important and explicit.) First and fore-

most, all members of journal clubs, from the most seasoned

faculty member to the newest graduate student, use journal clubs

to keep up with the literature. This has been the primary goal of

journal clubs since they were invented in 1875 (Linzer, 1987). Journal clubs provide a forum for a collective effort to promote

awareness of current research findings.

Second, journal clubs teach many of the forms of sharing and

evaluation of scientific findings. Students learn the written conven-

tions for presenting science by reading articles and seeing what is

well received and what obfuscates. They practice presentation skills:

organizing a talk, speaking to others, sharing the appropriate level

of detail, and creating effective PowerPoint slides. Journal clubs also

model how to discuss and critique work. Students learn to ask good

questions, to respond to questions, and to disagree with others- even professors. They learn to appraise research, develop confidence

in their own judgment, and, when selecting an article, determine

what constitutes important work.

Third, journal clubs cross disciplinary and organizational boundaries. They are often interdepartmental or "interlab." Researchers in a medical school, a veterinary school, and a school

of arts and sciences might share an interest in a particular brain

function. Journal clubs establish connections across organiza- tional boundaries that might otherwise be obstacles to advancing

knowledge. When people come together, the resulting conversa- tions can build bridges and establish trust.

How Is This Practice Suited to Neuroscience?

Why do all scientists, from advanced faculty to new graduate stu-

dents, use journal clubs to stay current? Because journal clubs are

a particularly efficient and effective way to help participants meet

the three goals described above. The biological sciences have sev-

eral distinguishing features to which journal clubs are particularly well suited.

First, this is an era of "fast science." Emerging findings make

it into print very quickly; the time to publication is short (weeks

or months rather than years). New information must be acquired,

evaluated, and incorporated into ongoing work as quickly as pos- sible, but the vast quantity makes it nearly impossible to do so. Consequently, scientists must always be aware of new findings and have the judgment to select relevant information from the torrent of available data. Moreover, colleagues who communicate

precisely and concisely are valued. All of these skills are taught in journal club.

Second, there are clear frontiers of knowledge. There is a con-

sensus about what constitutes "important work" so it is possible

to determine which articles are of high priority.

Third, science is conducted in communal and relatively democratic ways. Scientists argue about ideas. The lively intel- lectual debates during journal club mimic the collaborative yet competitive culture of the laboratory.

Fourth, the norms of science must be navigated and negotiated.

In principle, findings are freely shared so that others may replicate

them and build on them. In reality, scientists are in competition

with one another. Therefore, authors must decide when to present

their science to others, garnering credit but possibly relinquishing

competitive advantage. They must determine how much informa-

tion is needed for publication and when to withhold some data for

the next article or proposal. Scientists also frame their questions and

findings to align with the political priorities of grant making and

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publication. These choices become visible when an article is discussed.

Finally, important problem areas evolve, and they do not always map well onto existing organizational units. Likewise, journal clubs often cross organizational boundaries. Insights from

people in other fields or with different training can be critically important. The website for the Bioinformatics Journal Club at

the University of Tennessee says, "This is a rapidly changing... topic area that can use insights from those with different types of

training; the instructors and the students all should learn from each other" (University of Tennessee Bioinformatics Journal Club, 2003, para. 4).

These five features of neuroscience, and indeed of most biolog-

ical sciences, help to explain why journal clubs are such a wide- spread practice. They are an effective and efficient tool for helping

senior scientists keep up with the literature, and they are equally

important as a pedagogical strategy for training new scientists.

Case 2: The List

The discipline of English makes use of a very different mecha- nism for ensuring that students know the literature of the field.

The list is the group of works or texts that forms the basis of the

comprehensive or qualifying examination for a doctoral student in English studies.3 Exams are usually administered in the 2nd or

3rd year. The list is long, typically containing 60 to 100 works. One work might be a collection of poems, a novel, a theoretical

work, or a group of secondary sources. The examination based on the list of works demonstrates that the student has "mastered the

field."

After this demonstration of breadth and mastery, students are

expected to develop an idea (project) that they will pursue for the

dissertation. The dissertation project builds on the specialty reflected in the list. (English studies scholars describe themselves

as working on "projects," not "problems." A project has a larger

scope than a set of research experiments, and its goal is reaching

understanding by developing an argument rather than arriving at

a solution to a problem or an answer to a question.)

Anyone in English studies who is asked to describe the list has-

tens to point out that it has undergone a fundamental shift in the

past two decades.4 At one time there was a single list for all stu- dents, composed of the classics of British and American literature

("from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf"); the works were understood

to represent "genius" (Guillory, 1991, p. 52). Today's English doctoral students typically are expected to

pass one or more "field exams," each of which encompasses a smaller subset of the literature. Students and faculty members

work together to define an individual list for each field, which is

shaped to the students' interests and emerging expertise. Students

make active choices of exclusion and inclusion in creating their lists. As stated in the Duke University English Department's graduate studies handbook, "you should expect to play a very active role in formulating the questions you bring to texts" (Duke

University Department of English, 2006, p. 7). Although more constructed and negotiated than in the past, the lists are still rel-

atively standardized in their own way. The theme of each list is

usually dependent on a prior conceptual construction of a recog- nizable subfield, such as romanticism or feminist theory, that already exists in the discipline. Thus the works selected must not

only be deemed "major works" but also reflect the student's own position in the field.

What does it mean to display "mastery"? The process of prepa-

ration for the comprehensive examination is a period of intensive

reading and usually stretches over several months, if not an entire

year. Usually the examination is oral, lasting 2 to 3 hours, and the examiners are a committee of faculty members. The examination

can be on any aspect of the works on the list. It is more than an advanced Jeopardy quiz on authors, dates, plot points, and characters, although students would surely know all of those. The questions are broad and conceptual: Discuss this dynamic, compare and contrast, and the like. Emerging scholars must demonstrate that they "know" the literature. This includes understanding the broad contexts in which works are located and

understanding the evolution of the literature and of its themes and ideas.

The reading list-based examination is persistent but certainly

not perfect. The shift from "comprehensive" lists to tailored lists

risks a loss of historical context and breadth, driving students too

quickly to preparing for the dissertation (Delbanco, 2000). As a result, students may lack a sufficiently broad foundation on which to base subsequent projects or on which to ground their teaching.

Even with focused lists, the intensive reading period can extend for many, many months. This makes it all too easy for stu-

dents to disappear from the department and lose the benefit of

interactions with faculty members. The structure of, and stan-

dards for, evaluating the examination itself are highly variable among programs and individual students' committees. As a result, for some students, the examination itself can seem more

like arbitrary hazing than an authentic intellectual discussion.

What Purposes Are Served by This Practice?

Three purposes are served by the creation of and examination on the list. First, students must self-define and defend their location

in the field. To do so, they must enter into the discourse and commentaries surrounding the works of literature that have grown and evolved over time. Mastery of the list(s) is one step

along the way toward definition of a professional identity, which

has instrumental purposes in terms of getting a job but, more important, is about entering into a disciplinary community. The examination is "the bridge between coursework and the disserta-

tion," according to the English Department handbook from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Mastering core knowledge "makes possible productive engagement with other scholars in the field (at lectures, conferences, on e-mail discussion

groups, in print, at job interviews)" (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of English, n.d., "The Special Field Examination," para. 1).

Second, the list and the examination on the list are explicit

preparation for the dissertation. It is the public foundation on which the dissertation is built. Quoting from the Brown University Department of English (n.d.) description of the qual-

ifying examination,

It is important to remember that the qualifying examination is pre-

liminary to the dissertation and not to be confused with your disser-

tation proposal .... Through the examination process, you will ideally

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develop the kind of familiarity with the methods and materials of your

field that you will need to wage a specific argument that earns the

respect of those now at the forefront of your chosen field. (p. 8)

Third, the development of the list is intimately related to the ability to teach within a broad area of the discipline. "Your exam should also help to make you a confident and fearless teacher,"

states another handbook (Duke University Department of English,

2006, p. 7).

How Is This Practice Suited to English?

Creating and defending a list is an important step in every English

doctoral program because it helps students to meet the three goals

just described. These goals are relevant for English, the quintes- sential humanities field.

One feature that sets humanities scholarship apart is that it remains fundamentally solo work. Contributions to literature and

analysis spring from the imagination of the individual. The list is

particularly at home in a discipline that requires a scholar to under-

stand a wide swath of the field. Another defining characteristic of

the humanities is that knowledge builds slowly over time. The con-

tribution that a scholar makes to the discipline is not understood in

terms of advancing the frontiers in the same way as in the scientific

enterprise. Instead, scholarship involves conceiving new under-

standings and juxtapositions. One needs broad and deep founda- tional knowledge to enter the conversation.

Good work in the humanities is judged by its completeness, sub-

tlety, and insight. Doing work quickly, beating others to the punch,

is less important than getting it right and being thorough. The

humanities emphasize the written word, so scholars value nuance

and elaboration. Although articles and conference papers (carefully

crafted narratives that are read aloud in their entirety without over-

heads or PowerPoint slides) are used to work through ideas in progress, the result of a project is typically a book. This process requires time and a mature perspective developed by the careful examination and reexamination of the works at hand.

The humanities maintain a clear sense of the appropriate sequence for student work. Extensive undergraduate and gradu-

ate course work build the foundation-a foundation that is pub- licly defended before students begin the dissertation project. Clearly, these features are emphasized in the deliberate and time- consuming process of mastering the works on the list.

Finally, English departments are financially supported in large

part by the efforts of graduate students and faculty members who

teach. Scholars and faculty members are expected to have the ver-

satility needed to teach a wide range of courses. The ability to address a broad range of texts is tested in the list defense.

Can Education Usefully Adapt These Practices?

Before turning to the field of education, two more points should be

made. First, not only do journal clubs and list-based examinations

advance discipline-specific versions of knowing the literature, but

each serves several other purposes as well. This is not unusual in doc-

toral education; many program elements serve several pedagogical

purposes. Indeed, the forthcoming volume on doctoral education

by the Carnegie Foundation CID team argues that all program ele-

ments ought to be scrutinized and, when possible, reconfigured to

promote student formation along several dimensions simultane- ously (Walker, Golde, Jones, Bueschel, & Hutchings, 2007).

Second, the reader certainly has seen how journal clubs and the examination on the list help to shape the professional identi-

ties of neuroscientists and English scholars, respectively. To return to Shulman, the implicit structure of these practices trans-

mits professional attitudes and values (Shulman, 2005, p. 55). One neuroscientist described journal clubs as an avenue for sci- entists to "learn to play well together." These practices are forms

of legitimate peripheral participation, in which novice practi- tioners engage in authentic practice even while they are develop-

ing a professional identity, gradually moving to more central community membership (Lave & Wenger, 1991). This is one of the most important, if generally implicit, purposes of doctoral education, instilling the "values and intellectual leanings" of the

guild in its newest members (Cronon, 2006, p. 330). I have argued that journal clubs and list-based examinations are

adaptively suited to the knowledge structures and conventions of

their disciplines. Their stability (they must be doing something

right) makes them enticing, but wholesale adoption of these prac- tices in the field of education may not be wise or feasible. Education

is different from the humanities or the laboratory sciences, and these

practices are not likely to flourish in a new setting without modifi-

cation. Education is a multidisciplinary field; it spans areas allied

with the humanities (philosophy of education) and areas akin to the sciences (mathematics and science education). But most domains of

education research and study are part of the social sciences, featur-

ing yet another set of knowledge structures and practices that some-

times seem like hybrids of the humanities and the sciences. Further

complicating matters, most education graduate students are markedly different from their English or neuroscience counterparts.

Coming to school in midcareer, education graduate students often

are older, have complex and demanding home and work lives, and

enroll on a part-time basis, making the adoption of new ways of

interacting especially challenging (Eisenhart & DeHaan, 2005; Golde & Walker, 2006, pp. 245-249; Labaree, 2004, pp. 83-108).

One question is whether either of these practices could be adapted into education doctoral programs to good effect. The answer may well be yes, because work at the highest level of the field,

whether for the PhD or the EdD, requires knowing and working

with the literature. The subsequent question is how to adapt these

practices to take advantage of their strengths and minimize their

known weaknesses. Instituting either or both of these practices into

a doctoral program, even in a revised form, demands a reallocation

of faculty and student time and energy. In conducting this thought

experiment, recall the key features of signature pedagogies: They are

pervasive and routine, they entail public student performance, they

have high emotional stakes, and they socialize students into disci-

plinary norms (Shulman, 2005, pp. 55-57).

Adapting Journal Clubs

What utility could journal clubs have in the field of education? Searching widely for relevant research findings and building on

them are necessary skills for all researchers. To do so is particularly

challenging in education, one of the highly interdisciplinary learn-

ing sciences that draw from many literatures (Eisenhart & DeHaan,

2005). Journal clubs are a useful tool for searching out, sharing, and

evaluating new findings. The current emphasis on "scientifically

based educational research" demands that new researchers develop

familiarity with emerging work.

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Researchers must also be able to frame meaningful yet man- ageable research questions. Although the ability to ask good ques-

tions is vital, formal attention is rarely paid to teaching this skill,

and in some cases research problems are simply assigned. One strategy for learning what constitutes a good question is to see examples and evaluate them. Journal clubs are one of many set-

tings in which this can happen.

But the benefits of introducing journal clubs could be far- reaching, because they could advance several other goals particular

to the field ofeducation. Journal clubs would expand students' con-

ception of what constitutes "expected student behavior" beyond

attending classes and completing course assignments. They would connect faculty and students with shared interests and thus promote

productive intellectual communities in schools of education, where

all too often students interact only with the peers in their cohort

group. Most important, journal clubs would help socialize students

into the norms and values of the profession by immersing them in

an ongoing conversation about what matters in education research

and practice. Foregrounding and modeling scholarly argument and

debate could help combat education's culture of affirmation, in

which students may be reluctant to say anything that could be per-

ceived as unsupportive or critical.

Research on journal clubs with medical residents shows that "factors associated with high attendance and longevity [of the journal club] include mandatory attendance, availability of food,

and perceived educational value by the program director" (Alguire, 1998, p. 351). Emphasizing public performance (with the high emotional stakes that it entails) requires that every stu-

dent present regularly and get feedback. Developing a rubric for

teaching the appraisal of article quality can increase the quality of

article selection and help students learn to assess research (Burstein, Hollander, & Barlas, 1996). Incorporating such adap- tations would be fairly simple and would help journal clubs suc-

ceed, becoming part of the departmental culture.

Journal club meetings would need to be strategically sched- uled to make them available for students who are on campus only

part-time while still including faculty members to preserve the

clubs' essential multigenerational character. The format is flexi- ble in time and place; a journal club could meet on Saturday mornings in a coffee shop or as a Thursday evening brown-bag dinner before class. For cohort-based programs, incorporating students from several cohorts in a topic-based journal club-say,

on the superintendency, on classroom-based research, or on com-

munity college leadership-could expand students' horizons and provide occasions for other kinds of peer mentorship. Given that

education research is not a "fast science" field, a journal club could focus on key debates in a narrowly defined area, classical works in education, or provocative articles from other disciplines.

Adapting List-Based Examinations

The demand for specialized focus must be offset by attention to foundational breadth. Some education faculties have reorganized

their curricula to include common core courses required of all students regardless of subfield; examples are the University of Southern California, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Colorado (see summaries of their work at http://gallery.carnegiefoundation.org/cid). Although faculty and

students at many other schools of education may wish to define

such a core, political obstacles might necessitate an interim strat-

egy. The middle road of negotiated lists-including classics of the

field, not just texts germane to the dissertation project, and defined by the student and gatekeeping faculty experts-can establish an important shared foundation. Surely there is much

that is desirable in expecting all students to read Dewey, Thorndike, and Vygotsky (or whatever the correct list is!). The goal is not for students simply to read more, and more widely, but

to read strategically. As Maxwell (2006) argues, "there may be extremely relevant theories, findings, or methods in other fields

or disciplines" (p. 29). Therefore, faculty guidance is essential as

students craft a broad, reasonable, and appropriate reading list. Studying for list-based exams can drive students to isolate them-

selves, so the process must be structured to keep the intensive read-

ing period to a reasonable duration. Retreating from the community

is especially counterproductive for education researchers, who rou-

tinely pursue team projects and publish coauthored articles. The

skills of collaboration should be encouraged rather than inhibited.

Requiring study groups, perhaps facilitated by advanced students

who have passed the exam, would be a useful corrective.

The list is driven by a vision of the scholar in conversation with the major theorists and critics in his or her specialty. To reveal that sense of connection, the list-based oral and written

examinations need to be wisely structured. For instance, imagine

an examination asking students to summarize persuasively the assumptions of their subfields for scholars in other areas or to defend a syllabus for a course on their topic. In any case, the exams should be collectively designed, administered, and moni- tored; faculty should debate and work together to develop appro-

priate questions and formats for the examination. In doing so, they can assess what students know while avoiding the problem

of examinations' being disconnected from the dissertation, and skirting the danger of great variation in standards and expecta-

tions among individual advisors.

Rethinking Doctoral Education

Neither practice is a panacea, of course, but together, journal clubs and list-based examinations could help doctoral students learn to work with the literature with the ease and sophistication

of mature practitioners and professionals. And many additional elements could be introduced to meet that goal. Careful study of

professional education shows the value of pedagogies that require students to perform publicly with appropriate support and feed-

back and to do so early and often. It is vital for education doc- toral programs to adopt, adapt, and develop more sophisticated pedagogies to help students learn.

Literature work is not the only aspect of doctoral education in

need of attention. The starting point could be to focus on a pro-

grammatic element (qualifying examinations) or a desired outcome

(the ability to conduct credible research). In any case, what is needed is to approach the doctoral program in a spirit of inquiry.

Through the CID we asked several questions: What are the goals of the doctoral program? What knowledge, skills, and habits of

mind are graduates expected to attain? Do current practices serve

those goals? Would other strategies be more effective? These ques- tions prompted rethinking in the departments participating in the

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CID. Many found it useful to search far and wide, even in unre-

lated disciplines, for adaptable practices.

It is also important, perhaps more so for education than for any other discipline, that new pedagogies and program elements

be treated as educational experiments. They must be carefully assessed and the resulting knowledge shared with those in the field so that good ideas can travel and ineffective pedagogies can be avoided.

In the CID we learned that changing a doctoral program is not

easy. But it is important. Even a partial list of the forces buffet-

ing universities-shifting disciplinary paradigms, shrinking pub-

lic investments, rapidly changing workplaces for graduates, and demands for accountability-reminds us that complacency is not an option. Even more important, we learned that change is pos- sible and that scholars in other disciplines are important col- leagues in the effort.

NOTES

The other members of the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate team-George Walker, Andrea Conklin Bueschel, Laura Jones, and Kim Rapp-were instrumental in the development of these ideas. Carnegie President Lee S. Shulman provided inspiration, guidance, and early forums for my thoughts. Neuroscientists Richard Clarke and Rebecca Jakel; English studies scholars Eric Clarke, Amy Montz, and David Laurence; and Carnegie scholars Rose Asera, Bridget O'Brien, Mary Taylor Huber, and Andrea Conklin Bueschel gave feedback on drafts of

this article. Margaret Eisenhart offered encouragement at a critical moment. An early version of the article was presented at the 2005 annual

meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Montreal,

on a panel that included Lee S. Shulman, Michael Feuer, and Peter Bergethon. Three anonymous reviewers vastly improved this article with

their thoughtful comments and ideas.

'This is the thinking behind the extensive Promising Practices data- base maintained by the University of Washington. It began as part of the

Re-envisioning the PhD project, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts (http://www.grad.washington.edu/envision/practices/index.html).

2Research rotations, often used in the laboratory sciences to help 1st-

year students match with a research laboratory and adviser, might also

be categorized as a signature pedagogy. We describe apprenticeship as the signature pedagogy of doctoral education in The Formation of Scholars (Walker, Golde, Jones, Bueschel, & Hutchings, 2007).

3Terminology varies locally; exams can be called general, preliminary,

comprehensive, qualifying, field, or area. Examinations might be oral, writ-

ten, or a combination, and there may be more than one examination.

4Several forces converged to prompt this evolution. First, the list itself

was under attack for not being inclusive on one hand and (by postmod-

ernists) for being overly predetermined on the other (Guillory, 1991).

Second, the shift was a response to the continuous expansion of the field-which now includes literatures in other languages and texts from

other media, such as film. Another force was the increasingly tight aca-

demic job market, which pressured students to professionalize and spe- cialize earlier to be more competitive. Finally, the humanities are under

considerable pressure to reduce the time to degree, which is longer than

in the social, physical, or biological sciences.

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AUTHOR

CHRIS M. GOLDE is associate vice provost for graduate education at Stanford University; 450 Serra Mall, Building 310, Room 110, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305; [email protected]. This article was written while she was a senior scholar and research director for The

Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Her research interests include doctoral

student attrition, the experiences of graduate students, and doctoral pedagogies.

Manuscript received August I I, 2006

Final revision received July 17, 2007

Accepted August 6, 2007

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