Education Doctoral Classrooms: A Community of Scholars or a Community of Resistance?
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Abstract
Since its beginning, doctoral education has been designed to serve largely a White male student population, which has resulted in prescribed forms of scholar identity, teaching, and scholarship (Gardner, 2009; Berelson, 1960). This prescribed norm, mold, and fit persist today even as doctoral education continues to diversify its faculty and student populations.
Acknowledging the White supremacy structure that is the academy begins to give room to questioning the prescribed scholar identity and the illusion of a scholar community. This disquisition examines the experiences of doctoral students in a mainstream education doctoral classroom through autoethnography, testimonios, and Photo Voice. In Chapter 2, I will utilize autoethnography to connect my personal narrative and reflections on my experiences early in education, and most recently, in the doctoral education classroom.
In essence, autoethnography is my tool to let my wild tongue speak and create a space for counter narratives of doctoral students’ experiences in the epicenter of White supremacy scholarship, the doctoral classroom. Chapter 3 examines the experiences of six doctoral students in the doctoral classrooms and how they have responded to the academic socialization and culture through the use of testimonios.
Chapter 4 is a practitioner piece envisioning what a counter hegemonic pedagogy and curriculum would look like in doctoral education through the use of Photo Voice in a first-year doctoral student classroom. The dissertation concludes in Chapter 5 with a reflection on the doctoral classroom as a Third Space and future directions for research.