Discussing Professional & Practice-Based Doctorates with Professor Carol Costley

In advance of the 9th International Conference on Professional & Practice Based Doctorates, Professor Carol Costley provides a retrospective on the conference series, discussing professional and practice-based doctorates. Carol details the origin of the conference series and the development and progression of professional and practice-based doctorates internationally since the first iteration of the conference. In this interview, she discusses understanding the impact and outcomes of professional and practice-based doctorates, their engagement with reflective practice, and how they can enhance access and equity within the doctoral landscape.

Carol is a Professor of Work and Learning and Director of the Work and Learning Research Centre at Middlesex University. Her research area explores the role of practice, especially experiential learning, in developing doctoral education, a field area she has been working in for over 25 years. She specialises in doctoral education that is designed for people internationally in the public, private and voluntary sectors undertaking doctoral awards.

Carol has been chair of the steering committee for the UKCGE’s International Conference on Professional & Practice Based Doctorates since the conference’s inception supported by Middlesex University, in 2009.

ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000–0002-7996–8908

Can you please begin by sharing some insights from your time as the chair of the steering committee for the UKCGE’s International Conference on Professional and Practice-based Doctorates, which has run in partnership with Middlesex University since 2009?

In 2009, with the first conference, for me, a key motivation was that my university had started a professional doctorate in 1997. And, of course, once you start some academic work, you want to research, theorize and publish on it, and meet others across other universities to join the discussion and debate about something that’s being developed and researched. But, when I looked around, there was just a conference series in Australia. I thought, ​‘I’m going to go to that the next time it’s on,’ but they stopped running it. So, I contacted UKCGE and said, ​“we don’t seem to have anything on this topic here in the UK. Would you be interested in having a conference in this area?” They said yes and Middlesex partnered UKCGE, supporting it in lots of different ways. 

The first conference was successful and well attended in London. It was an elevating experience to be able to discuss the differences and similarities in the delegates’ experiences in different kinds of doctorates, and what we were pointing towards. As we’ve always said, there are a lot of cross-references between the PhD and various other doctorates – such as Doctor of Business Administration (DBA), Doctor of Engineering (EngD), Doctor of Education (EdD), and all degrees that have become known as professional doctorates. The main thing is that they are still called research degrees, so, participants are breaking new ground by doing research. 

One of the differences is that the professional doctorates tend to focus more on solving or addressing issues in the real world at a more practice-based level, which, let’s face it, arts degrees and other more practical degrees have always done. So, there was a lot to share. I think that’s why the conference series has continued, and it changed its name from the International Conference on Professional Doctorates to the International Conference on Professional and Practice-Based Doctorates, so that sharing could be engaged with widely. I think that’s one of the most instructive areas that have come out of the conference series, in that we have shared across disciplines and across ways of thinking, hierarchies, and ways of approaching doctoral learning. We have found a lot of relevancies for the ways of doing things, i.e., the pedagogies that have been developed for differing cohorts of candidates in these programs. 

The papers that have been presented at the conference have developed in quality quite significantly. They started by being mostly case studies about how different programmes had managed their practice doctorates and then moved onto researching the general principles of practice research and how doctorates are developed We began by publishing them in a university e‑journal and posting them on the UKCGE website and then we created opportunities to develop them for highly cited special edition journals. 

How have you seen Professional and Practice-Based Doctorates evolve over the course of the last 15 years since the start of ICPPD?

One of the greatest evolving factors is that it’s been international, and we’ve seen different ways of conducting vivas and presenting doctoral thesis/​dissertation/​research projects. There was one in the US which was presented in comic form — people can’t just judge by the cover. Presenting practice-based work is about what is being told to you, what you’re realising, what you’re seeing, the new knowledge that you’re gaining from it. Forms of doctorates can be a long, entirely written thesis, which uncovers deep theoretical thinking or ways of doing things or any appropriate and valuable format. 

Some key early findings were that professional development was an outcome of successful practice doctorates especially for those already in work. Networking whilst doing the doctorate was both professional and academic. Different purposes and outcomes of practice doctorates meant that candidates were not necessarily becoming peer in the academic world. The presentation of doctoral outcomes was more than academic publication it involved a wider audience often in professional settings. 

Many universities have developed practice doctorates so that it’s not all a written piece, there’s also a practical outcome. The practical outcome could be something that’s quite relevant in the workplace, like a schema, a set of guidelines or some kind of process. Also, at the end of the thesis, whatever form it’s in, there’s some theses where you just conclude, however practice-based theses often have a heavy emphasis on recommendations. The researcher is not just providing the theory behind a practice, but also suggesting that out of this theory, you might address an issue in a particular way. 

These recommendations can also go to various parties because things are less uniform now. There’s usually a range of different parts to anything that we address; it’s multifaceted. There might be IT elements, psychological and more humanistic outcomes that come out of it. So, recommendations can be for the different parties that are going to be involved in developing something tangible and realistic. 

In my research, where I’ve looked at the different doctorate categories, you can get, for example, a PhD in music, by performance. Usually there’s a written element, but the amount of written element is variable. Practice-based doctorates have developed practice-based ways of doing research and, different kinds of doctoral outcome. 

More recently an engagement with practice theory by academics running doctoral programmes have focused on the value of practice to doctorates and the benefits of impacting real world practices, and more practice related epistemological and methodological approaches have been researched and engaged. 

More generally, in what ways can professional or practice-based doctorates offer distinct outcomes and impacts compared to other structures of doctorate?

I suppose the more practice-based outcomes and impacts is one of the key issues that are changing all types of doctorates including PhDs: the sharing in the conferences and by publications emanating from the conferences are making a difference in all kinds of doctoral learning. ICPPD started to collect a bank of doctoral thesis impact case studies. I think one of the things that the people that have been involved in practice-based doctorates are doing are developing different ways of having more doctoral outcomes that are of benefit to communities and organisations and create real world impact. 

One of the debates in that area is you might say, ​“well, we’ve always had pure and applied.” But then that seems to have dwelled more on drawing upon theory and then saying how you apply that theory. Rather, the practice doctorates have highlighted that you can start off with a practical issue and say how you might then approach it. It’s more like research and development rather than just the research which stops at a certain point and then joins the body of theory. That approach is still relevant, but what’s happening now is that we’re in a more complex, changing world, so we have more complex, varying doctoral degrees. A scholarly research approach with a practice-based focus is leading to new ways of conceptualizing the nexus between theory and practice. Different universities or clusters of universities have developed these approaches. 

Now, as things have developed, there are numerous ways of doing practice-based doctoral research within each country although for some time it has been mostly in the English-speaking world that professional doctorates have developed. Some countries don’t accept professional doctorates at all. Some say, ​‘PhDs can address that if we need them to’ I think it may go that way. 

You have a forthcoming book chapter titled: The roles of reflection in professional practice doctorates with Dr Steven Cranfield and Professor David Boud. Could you please share a few insights on the role of reflection in work-based or professional doctorates for both candidates and supervisors, such as in curriculum design or research methodologies?

Reflective practice is something within itself, which has developed over the years and across different disciplines but seems to apply very directly to how we behave as practitioners in our work. 

Critical reflection is a key element of practice doctorates, as they involve a careful and precise review of professional experiences through a theoretical lens. Reflectivity is a multifaceted process in curriculum design, pedagogy and assessment. Through reflection candidates can underpin their practice with theory, enhance professional practice and contribute to societal advancement through being informed, reflective practitioners. 

Th inspiring work of Donald Schön in his ideas about experiential learning and how prioritising engagement with theories and techniques in research has left out the issues that are of more human concern. These ideas provoke thoughts and options about reflective practice. It’s not an easy thing to teach as well. You might say you can’t teach it. Some people appear to do it quite naturally, whilst others need more support. 

There’s a lot been written on it, and I haven’t previously written on it myself, apart from compiling an annotated reading list but I think that it is an area of any practice-based subject or any practitioner in the work situation that needs to be addressed. Reflection concerns us as people as it is becoming more important to think about ourselves, our own emotional intelligence, working in teams with other people, reflecting on ourselves and how we behave in various situations. We’ve found more and more that people can go into a work situation very skilled in what they need to do, but they also need to work with others, and sometimes it can be more about how you are in the workplace, how you behave towards other people that can help you develop and enhance and for practitioner researchers, have your research and development counted as worthwhile. 

So yes, there’s lots of overlapping ideas within theory, and it is something that we as teachers in universities need to appreciate, because as I said, the pedagogy of teaching reflection is not quite so accessible as other pedagogies. 

What is the role of professional and practice-based doctorates in enhancing access and equity within the doctoral landscape?

I have had quite a look at this, and I suppose in my experience in the UK, a key point about access and equity is that it’s often culturally based. The sociologist Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory indicates that cultural capital perpetuates social and definitely educational inequalities. However, practice-based approaches tend to draw on a range of capabilities that we have in us that don’t require cultural capital so much because practice is situated and reflects the abilities of a diversity of people to respond to a given context. This is also the case regarding gender, race and many other inequalities. 

Worthwhile knowledge may be useful and have value but may not be the validated and legitimated knowledge of the disciplines. What may be termed legitimated knowledge is not always the everyday and practical knowledge that can be understood as having value; and disciplines are now considered stronger with the application of trans- or inter-disciplinary research. Some approaches have shown how a transdisciplinary lens on the world can open our eyes to multiple realities. Investigations into practical questions do not have a direct outcome from theoretical and empirical inquiries alone. There is frequently personal engagement, through relational networks both human and non-human. Practice is embodied, emergent, relational, situated, and engaged. Practices exist and evolve in historical and social contexts and include power dynamics and practical space, time, resource restrictions and opportunities. 

Just going back to the idea of reflection, one of the things that you can do is reflect on things that you’re capable of doing, achievements that you’ve made, whatever they are, but they don’t have to be academic. Experience, as you reflect can bring to your own awareness that you have got capability to be able to achieve something and then as you gradually understand it, you realise you are someone with significant abilities. Practice gives people confidence, I suppose. And if you interview people about ​‘how come you managed to succeed in doing this and you haven’t succeeded before,’ many of them say, ​‘I never had the confidence that I could have done this all along. I just didn’t think someone like me could.’ 

That is something that accesses some people into being able to undertake doctorates because there hasn’t been much done about people in doctoral learning and just the statistics that universities are obliged to keep about gender, race, disability, and all those things that can affect people’s achievement show that in doctoral education it’s much more imbalanced. 

Looking at how people access doctoral education and then, once accessed, how they engage with their study; it still needs a lot of work, but I think there is now more of an awareness. There is still, in many people’s minds, this idea of separation between ​‘the academic’ and ​‘the vocational.’ There are these artificial dualisms. We’ve got a couple of generations before they get broken down, I think, and that we’re all able to think in this more multifaceted, horizontal way about knowledge and how we engage with it. 

Do you have any tips for supervisors working with candidates pursuing professional, work-based, or practice-based doctorates? How can they enable effective supervision and assessment with their candidates, as well as foster collaboration across the supervisory teams? 

The key is collaboration across the supervisory team. It does take a while, I would say, to engage in it differently. We often appoint second supervisors who are not used to supervising practice doctorates but who want to understand how it is done and mentor them as Supervisors/​Advisers. This works as a good induction for colleagues. Although supervision is not like sitting at the foot of the master anymore, I don’t think anyone does it like that now, supervising a practice doctorate often requires a different approach. 

My supervisory experience is mostly working with people who are in full time employment and undertaking doctoral study about an aspect of their work on a part time basis. They are older and already have high level knowledge about their professional area so there is an inclination to be more equal. Supervisors can work alongside the candidate in what they’re doing and acknowledging that they have the depth of knowledge in their professional activity in what they’re doing, more than I do. We call them advisers rather than supervisors. Even though they have the subject discipline knowledge, it’s not all about the subject discipline. An experienced Adviser could probably advise someone who’s in a completely different discipline, not as first supervisor, but have something to bring to the team because they pick up on elements of understanding and doctoral education, which aren’t just about the discipline. 

I wrote a paper with David Boud in 2007, From Project Supervision to Advising. It wasn’t about doctoral learning; it was about taught Independent Study Bachelor and Master level degrees. It addressed the different skills that the advising team need; Knowledge of work and context, learning consultancy skills, inter/​transdisciplinary awareness, practice research approaches, reflexivity and reviewing skills. I think Doctoral level can stay more traditional in its thinking than at other university degree levels. Quite often more radical thinking starts at lower levels, and I think that doctoral education is changing like that too.