Page 25 - Innovative Professional Development Methods and Strategies for STEM Education

The Role of the Professional Doctorate in Developing Professional Practice in STEM Subjects

• A Programme Leader,
• A health scientist reflecting on Professional Doctorates in health within the UK, and
• An engineering academic reflecting on undertaking a Professional Doctorate.

In addition a series of extracts from student narrative accounts are included at the end of this section.

Programme Leader’s Reflections

One of the aims of the Professional Doctorate is to encourage candidates to adopt fresh approaches to
work issues and consider the workplace through what we describe as a ‘fresh lens’. We introduce them
to the idea that often solutions to problems within a profession can be found outside the boundaries of
that profession, and we encourage them to explore different disciplines and working environments. We
are assisted in this by the fact that our candidates are from a wide range of backgrounds, and all have
considerable experience within their particular profession, many having already made a significant
contribution to their field. As such, they bring with them a wealth of knowledge and experience that
we seek to utilize and share within each cohort. However, this fact also brings with it problems for the
type of transformational learning that we are trying to achieve with our programme. Profession-specific
training and education helps to prepare individuals for their chosen field by equipping them with the
requisite knowledge and skills that make them competent to practice. Throughout our post compulsory
educational system the focus is on discipline-specific knowledge, with little if any time devoted to in-
terdisciplinary or trans-disciplinary working. The disadvantage of this level of expertise is the potential
for what Baumard has termed ‘territorialisation’ (Baumard, 1999). That is, an individual’s knowledge
and therefore their strategic approach to their professional practice is bounded by the cognitive map
that they have created within that context, which can be a barrier to the creation of new knowledge in
different situations. In effect the learning cycle (Kolb, 1984) is orbited so many times that the patterns
and processes of thought become fixed and can cause problems with the systematic acquisition of new
knowledge which is required of a professional student.
This issue of territorialisation is perhaps a greater problem in the modern world than ever before;
few professionals will escape the impact of change over the course of their career. This could happen
gradually over time, for example in the case of engineering, which typically is associated with techni-
cal problem-solving and construction based on specialized knowledge, but is changing in nature due
to the advancements in technology (Olesen, 2001); or radically through political intervention. A par-
ticular driver for change is the trend for interprofessional working, seen most powerfully in the public
service professions. For example, since 2000 the National Health Service in the UK has been adopting
a modernization agenda, which is demanding more interdisciplinary working and the development of
new roles and initiatives demanding that staff cross traditional professional boundaries (Department of
Health, 2000, 2001, 2004).
This has informed our approach to the Professional Doctorate. We have developed a model to facilitate
the development of our candidates as reflective practitioners, who can work across territorial boundaries
of knowledge and seek solutions to problems from outside their established professional field (Sanders,
2010; Sanders et al., 2011) using techniques such as storytelling, metaphor and critical incident technique

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