This volume looks at graduate education, specifically the doctorate, through the lens of adult education practice. Students in doctoral programs are, after all, adults. Building on principles of adult learning, the authors provide examples of academic excellence achieved through the incorporation of best practices in adult education, including: practical suggestions for democratically negotiating the curriculum, best practices for nurturing responsible action for social justice, ways of encouraging collaborative and noncompetitive learning and research, and support in shifting paradigmatic assumptions beyond the Eurocentric frame. This is the 147th volume of the Jossey Bass series New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education. Noted for its depth of coverage, it explores issues of common interest to instructors, administrators, counselors, and policymakers in a broad range of education settings, such as colleges and universities, extension programs, businesses, libraries, and museums.

"This volume ... explores the emergence of the nontraditional doctoral degree, the characteristics of the nontraditional doctoral student, faculty concerns, program innovation, and unique programs at four institutions. Both scholars and practitioners will find it an interesting and engaging introduction to the topic."--Publisher.

Reimagining Adult Education as World Building offers a new way of thinking about adult education by re-envisaging how adult education works. It explores how the process of world building, or the invention of a new world or a set of concepts, can be translated into actual and feasible action when turning towards complex, real-life problems. Cultivating contexts where adult educators can become change agents, who recognize that the individual and community are intricately entangled, demands that educators grow new capacities, make new tools, develop thicker networks, and cultivate intentional links amongst each other to foster ecologies of transformation. This book shows how educators can create an ecology or environment for transformative thinking where students can learn to collaborate and use world building tools to create new responses to current issues. It begins by explaining the philosophical underpinnings of world building and the tools that translate pragmatic imagination into scaffolds for individual and collective capacity building. It also illustrates how the worldbuilding protocol makes a difference in adult learning and how this pedagogical tool introduces the ecological approach to adult education. Each chapter explores a practical case study, showing how learners have applied worldbuilding tools to complex challenges. Showing how to apply the world building protocol in a classroom setting, this edited collection will be valuable to Adult Education scholars, researchers, practitioners, and learning facilitators.

This groundbreaking book explores the current state of doctoral education in the United States and offers a plan for increasing the effectiveness of doctoral education. Programs must grapple with questions of purpose. The authors examine practices and elements of doctoral programs and show how they can be made more powerful by relying on principles of progressive development, integration, and collaboration. They challenge the traditional apprenticeship model and offer an alternative in which students learn while apprenticing with several faculty members. The authors persuasively argue that creating intellectual community is essential for high-quality graduate education in every department. Knowledge-centered, multigenerational communities foster the development of new ideas and encourage intellectual risk taking.

This book tells the story of Fielding Graduate University, an institution that started a radically innovative doctoral program in the 1970s, and initiated many changes that have been widely adopted ever since. Fielding's founders, a colorful group of publicly engaged scholar-practitioners, were visionaries intent on creating a new kind of educational experience for adults. They were utopians who set out to realize a mission of social change and comprehensive institutional innovation. Now that the learning model of this pioneering program has moved into the mainstream of higher education, Fielding's story is particularly pertinent today. Increasingly, questions are being raised about how doctoral education should be delivered, and whether traditional programs are equipping their graduates with the knowledge and competencies they need to succeed. Fielding's experience, which is vividly captured in this highly readable account, offers a lens and a mirror for many people in higher learning who are engaged in institutional innovation and in redesigning doctoral education for the 21st century.

"Re-imagining Doctoral Writing explores doctoral writing within a context where doctoral education is undergoing enormous transformation. Despite the importance attributed to doctoral writing for developing scholars, we have a limited understanding of the extent to which conceptualizations of doctoral writing are shared or contested, how ideas of doctoral writing have shifted over time, or where imaginings of the future of doctoral writing might take us. Drawing on historical studies that show how understandings of doctoral writing and doctoral writers have changed over time-as well as considering how doctoral writing has changed as we have moved into the 21st century-the contributors to this volume pursue these areas and explore what might happen if we begin thinking about doctoral writing without imagining a vast absence in front of us. By proceeding from a place in which doctoral writing is seen as a rich and increasingly deep area of scholarship, this book offers tools and approaches that expand and enliven conceptions of what doctoral writing might become and how it might be researched"--

This book attempts to re-imagine the purpose of the doctorate, which has historically been used to prepare leaders who will work to improve the sciences (social and physical), humanities, and professions, while articulating curriculum as a living shape where students, faculty, and institution melded in a humanist and creative process.