Judith Chapman has been Professor of Educational Policy and Administration in the Graduate School of Education at UWA since 1993. She won an Excellence in Teaching Award in 1994. These Awards represent a joint effort between The Guild and The University to recognise and reward exemplary teaching.
She writes of the new Doctor of Education degree whose design and delivery she has had the responsibility of co-ordinating:
'The aim behind the design and implementation of the Doctor of Education at UWA was similar to that at other institutions introducing such 'professional doctorates' that is: 'to provide a course of study at the doctoral level which is research-based and research-driven, but in which the principal orientation is not only the development of knowledge per se but the extension of knowledge towards the improvement of professional practice'.
In my own teaching within the EdD course I take it as axiomatic that the students are, in a quite decided sense, my professional colleagues with whom I am working towards an increased understanding of, or deliberating upon possible improvements to professional policy, administrative problems, or institutional arrangements in the education service. The concept I work with-the growth of knowledge-requires that the students become the directors of their own learning, shaping the expansion of their intellectual domains by gradually building up and adding to their own cognitive networks in the field, using all the academic and professional resources that I can offer them on the way.
To this end I encourage EdD candidates to regard me very much as an additional 'learning resource person' and a facilitator of their own learning. This approach extends to the assessment of the students' work, in which the approach I adopt is one based upon 'illuminative' and 'formative' evaluations of work in progress, rather than focussing solely upon 'summative' assessments of a retrospective kind. For me assessment is a matter of development, motivating students to look forward and further refine and expand their circles of ability and understanding; I see students' work as further stages in a process of criticism, refinement and growth in knowlege and understanding (an 'evolutionary epistemology' approach).
My own academic work and the international academic community of which I am a part provides my students with a context into which they can articulate their own work and all its professional points of purchase. My students understand that my relationship with them provides one of the most important sources of my academic and professional satisfaction at this university.