Enabling intellectual leadership in precarious times: the contribution of the professional doctorate

Parr, Elizabeth, Lord, Janet ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3957-9529, Rayner, Stephen M and Stenhouse, Rachel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2534-569X (2024) Enabling intellectual leadership in precarious times: the contribution of the professional doctorate. In: Intellectual Leadership, Higher Education and Precarious Times. Bloomsbury Publishing, London, pp. 139-158. ISBN 9781350291805 (hardback); 9781350291836 (ebook); 9781350291812 (ebook)

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Abstract

This chapter explores higher education as a site of developing professional intellectual leadership. By this we mean the opportunities for professionals (e.g., law, social work, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, business) to undertake postgraduate doctoral projects. Here we focus on educational professionals who have undertaken a part-time Doctorate in Education (EdD), whereby study has been combined with full time employment. The EdD programme requires educational professionals to undertake independent primary research that is original and makes a contribution to a research field. In addition, the EdD interplays research methodology, methods and analysis with professional identities, practices and agendas, and as such it challenges educational professionals to critically reflect on their daily practices, and intellectual leadership within and beyond the organisation where they are employed. Such intellectual leadership is required to engage with the purposes of education, as well as the design of the curriculum, assessment, and pedagogical practices, and increasingly the focus is on organisational prowess within a competitive market. Undertaking doctoral work is therefore risky for educational professionals in a number of ways: first, it requires the individual to engage in learning that may challenge accepted professional strategies and tactics within the organisation; and second, such learning may make people vulnerable within performance management processes, and so their employment and livelihood could be in danger. Precarity therefore operates in two ways; it is both a productive change process through enabling the professional to think and do otherwise, but it is also deemed to be potentially inefficient because such learning interrupts the high stakes delivery agendas that educational services are required to comply with. We will therefore examine what it means for educational professionals to seek to develop intellectual leadership—at a time when it is not required to operate in the market—in two main ways: first, we will contextualise the issues through examining recent empirical research into the development of professional doctorate student identities, the impact of professional doctorates on organisational change and the imperative of critical reflexivity as a leader negotiating the roles of practitioner and researcher. Second, we will present and use a series of vignettes from our experiences as EdD graduates, where we will examine the complexity, challenges, location and practices of intellectual leadership. The analysis of these stories highlights the relational nature of intellectual leadership and the complex relationship between the roles of leader, practitioner and researcher. Our contribution by sharing these narratives is to show how doctoral study enabled us both to welcome the challenges and to embrace the risks of intellectual leadership.