Page 26 - Innovative Professional Development Methods and Strategies for STEM Education

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

to help them break free of the ‘mental grooves’ (Thera, 1997, cited in Weick & Sutcliffe, 2006) that can
often constrain their development as professional learners. The programme is underpinned by a module
of Reflective Practice through which we start the process of development of enhanced reflexivity through
activities that engage candidates in interprofessional dialogues and critical enquiry.
One of the key problems that we have found since the programme started more than seven years
ago is that many of our professionals have great difficulty in being properly reflective because lack an
ability to see alternative perspectives; it seems that their strength is also their weakness; the depth of
their knowledge about their own profession seems to form a barrier to understanding and empathizing
with others, and creates a resistance to new learning. Atherton (1999) has found that such resistance to
learning in professional learners is symptomatic of a situation where the learning is ‘supplantive’ rather
than ‘additive’, i.e. where we are trying to change existing knowledge systems. The greater the emotional
investment in beliefs or practices, the greater the disturbance caused by efforts to change them; it is not
unreasonable to assume that our professional learners, because of their expertise and success, have a
strong investment in the practices that have been successful for them, and our efforts to challenge these
create a significant destabilization for them. The management of de-stabilization is the most difficult
and most strongly-resisted stage of the whole process.
The extent of expert knowledge possessed by the candidates can also create tensions with supervi-
sors. This reflects the work of Malfoy (2005) who has argued that tensions can in part be attributed to
the retention of traditional supervisory practices that are largely unsuitable for professional doctorate
students, suggesting that some of these tensions can be dissipated by ‘opening up’ supervisory practices
into a more collaborative learning environment, creating a strong sense of community of researchers.
As with a traditional PhD student, one of the key areas where academic staff can most influence the
candidate is in term of providing academic rigor and research design and there is an expectation from
the professional candidates that is what the academic supervisor is supposed to be doing. Unlike a tra-
ditional PhD student, the advantage that the professional doctorate candidate has over the supervisor is
that the subject expertise has already been acquired by the candidate and they are, in this respect, more
knowledgeable than their supervisor (Taylor, 2007). The main role of the supervisor therefore becomes
to advise on how to locate the practitioner knowledge in the academic literature and on how to develop
it so that it becomes more ‘transdisciplinary and transprofessional’ (p21, Fell, Flint and Haines, 2011).
The success of the supervisory relationship depends a great deal on managing what Atherton (1999)
calls ‘representation’, i.e. what the supervisor represents to the student. This is focused on personal
credibility - professional students may frequently question if supervisors have direct experience of what
they are talking about, and whether they understand the real-life difficulties a practitioner faces on a
day to day basis. Atherton argues that what the academic represents is more important than his or her
technical competence as a tutor.
We have found that developing new ways of thinking and supporting candidates to view their profes-
sional world through a fresh lens can be a difficult and daunting process for many of our students, and for
some academics the shift from a purely discipline-based model of delivery is equally daunting. Despite
these issues the programme has been extremely successful – commended in an independent review of
the university’s postgraduate research degree programmes in 2012, with a recommendation that our
more traditional PhDs adopt some of the principles upon which our Professional Doctorate is based.

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