The Critical Friends Group: A Strategy for Developing Intellectual Community in Doctoral Education

A key recommendation from the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate project is for doctoral programs to focus on developing intellectual communities that are knowledge-centered and multigenerational. In this article I describe a graduate art education course, Writing Critique in Art Education, which uses the Critical Friends discussion protocol to facilitate a heterogeneous intellectual community for doctoral and master’s level students. Using a practitioner inquiry methodology, I investigated how the use of a Critical Friends protocol influenced the development of an intellectual community in this course, and how the intellectual community supported students’ growth as educational researchers, future teacher educators, and current practicing teachers. While this course is situated in an art education graduate program, the research findings can inform doctoral preparation across disciplines as it focuses on a strategy that facilitates critical dialogue in a supportive environment regardless of content area