Conceptualising an integrative doctoral curriculum

Le résumé fourni par la source

Much research into the doctorate has focused on changing pedagogies and proposed various versions of a shift from an apprenticeship-based model, culminating in the 'thesis as product', to a training-based model, culminating in the development of skilled researchers and advanced practitioners. However despite this trend, the doctorate is still grounded in expectations of disciplinary stewardship and many new-style PhDs are in reality hybridized apprenticeship/training models characterised by 'mixed' pedagogic systems of considerable complexity. Our qualitative investigation of the pedagogical underpinnings of a new integrative industry-collaborative doctoral program in biodevices led us to a reconsideration of integrative doctorates from the under-investigated perspective of curriculum design. We used an Activity Theory framework to capture the complexities of the learning environment of this PhD in Technology Innovation and the associated methodology led to our characterisation of its curriculum as the 'instrument' in the educational activity system. In our exploration of both tacit and explicit understandings of the doctoral curriculum among the academics who had designed the program, we were particularly interested in how the following components of the program interact: • Coursework in entrepreneurship and product design • Traditional supervised doctoral research • Industry-collaborative research training • Training in other transferrable skills This paper discusses some of the challenges involved in conceptualising a new doctoral curriculum, particularly in terms of representational, integrative and emergent features, and demonstrates various benefits that have accrued in this case from stakeholder discussion around such issues.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.