The growth, internationally, in professional doctorates over the past 25 years has been well documented, as are the forms, fields and disciplines that such doctorates embrace. However, relatively little is known about the professional tensions that teachers encounter, in relation to their positionality, when carrying out doctoral research in the schools where they work. This blog post (and the research underpinning it) draws attention not only to the contribution that the Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD) makes to research as a whole, but also to the significance of teachers as invaluable members of the research community.
My research involved 30 senior teachers in England who volunteered to take part in the study after an initial social media call via Twitter. These participants were all engaged in doctoral research and, in the main, were in the final stages of their EdD theses. The method of data collection took the form of guided/semi-structured interviews carried out by telephone.
Positionality is a concept that is highly contested. Social attributes of class, gender, sexuality, race, caste, and so on are commonly cited elements that ‘mark a researcher’s relational position in society’ (Zhao, 2017, p. 185). It is not just at the individual level, however, that we witness different positionality plays in progress. Disciplines themselves can also be subject to positioning at the institutional, national and global levels within a history that has been dominated, in the main, by the prioritisation of ‘hard’ scientific and technical rationality over the ‘softer’ social sciences, humanities and, of course, education.
