Respecting and Challenging the Candidate: Some Developments in Program Design

The professional doctorate is often sold as the doctorate that departs from elite understandings of academic apprenticeship, reaching out to ‘external ’ communities of knowledge, with their emphasis on the local and the pragmatic. Universities, however, continue to grapple with the problem of actually delivering on such rhetoric. Anxiety about declining standards has university managers on red alert to ensure and assure high quality, and this is all too often a strong imperative to hold to traditional models of doctoral education. Such models are far more likely to ‘start from scratch ’ in terms of research design than to welcome the messiness of practice and professional thinking about practice to inform research in doctoral education. This paper explores ways of delivering on the promise of both respecting and challenging the knowledge that professional doctorate candidates bring to undertaking research. It does so in three ways. First, it considers the problem of ‘practice-meets-research ’ as a long-term issue for the academy. Second, it outlines one programmatic attempt to provide client/candidates with a genuine experience of respect-and-challenge. Finally, it considers implications of the pedagogical work in this program for professiona