Tag Archives: curriculum

Steering Committee: February Report

Overview

The Project Steering Committee’s February meeting addressed feedback from the gathering of Next Gen PhD Project Directors. The meeting also included the Graduate Center’s Provost and a discussion about implementing curricular changes.

Discussion of Takeaways from Project Directors’ Meeting

Our discussion on the takeaways from the Project Directors’ meeting began with committee members identifying potential problems in designing project-based classes. There’s concern that digital projects and assignments organized by a faculty member won’t have the same currency or hold the same weight as independently-produced, individual research. Another committee member expressed that internships aren’t appropriate for students in his program because internships in that particular field aren’t equivalent to graduate-level engagement. Someone else raised the concern that work completed outside of the institution is inherently more difficult for instructors to evaluate.

This, in turn, raised the possibility of assigning someone the task of monitoring standards related to internships. This practice is already implemented in the Clinical Psychology Program. When students enroll in externships, a faculty member is responsible for coordinating the process. The faculty member checks on the appropriateness of the externship by conducting a site visit, talking to the potential supervisor, and creating a contract. Although the overarching process is laid out by the APA, faculty members are directly involved in supervising the process. Additionally, the companies involved benefit from student participation: They can bill for the hours and don’t have to pay the student, which is essentially free labor for them.

There was also some general discussion about how best to facilitate work in a public humanities research lab. The Center for the Humanities already offers some opportunities for students to engage in public humanities, as does the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, although the Segal Center could expand to include more interdisciplinarity. One committee member noted that there is also a public humanities program at work in the city called Humanities New York, which offers potential for future collaboration.

Council of Graduate Schools’ PhD Pathways for Program Improvement

The Council of Graduate Schools has issued an RFP regarding career pathways. The grant would provide funding for the implementation and analysis of surveys to current PhD students and alumni to better understand their career pathways and outcomes. The Graduate Center will be putting together an advisory group, which will be tasked with identifying stakeholders and advising on best strategies to disseminate and use the data collected during the project for program and institutional effectiveness and improvement.

This new project resonates with elements of our current project, especially as it pertains to Humanities students. One important thing to consider will be the difference between incoming and outgoing student expectations and accounting for how these expectations might change.

Discussion with the Provost about Curricular Review and Innovations

The Graduate Center Provost, Joy Connolly, attended our meeting in order to address her office’s current review of Graduate Center curriculum and the possibilities for upcoming innovations.

Some of the takeaways from Dr. Connolly’s talk are as follows:

  • We need more promotion of our activities and participation with the Next Gen PhD to reach potential students
  • We need to build into the current curriculum. We need to create exposure to these ideas in different, existing classes; we need to get faculty to incorporate these ideas.
  • The Provost’s Office will share the results of another curricular reviews conducted by the program Executive Officers, which required them to compare the curricular requirements of the Graduate Center with four other comparable, model institutions.
  • We need to continue to work on incentivizing flexibility.
  • Our biggest challenge will be to invite creative and flexible blue-sky thinking while simultaneously managing costs.

The committee members agreed about the importance of flexibility, especially as it relates to student funding. There was some question as to whether or not there has been a noticeable difference in the career trajectories of students in different funding tiers. Do those with tuition-only funding have to leave earlier? Is that an incentive towards a nonacademic career? One committee member commented that, in his program at least, those PhD students with tuition-only fellowships have proven much more flexible year after year.

One of our alumni committee members commented that during his time at the Graduate Center everyone kept saying that the job market was bad, but no one ever defined non-traditional pathways. Many students might be interested in fellowships that don’t require teaching undergraduate classes.

One of the major concerns regarding internship enrollment is that it has a knock-down effect in faculty teaching units. The current plan is to think through the issue logistically and the find the money. Faculty hires have been slowed, which has impacted multiple programs. Also, the size of the student body is still changing due to fellowship limitations.

Moving Forward

The next project meeting is scheduled for next week. The meeting will bring together the Core Working Group to continue our conversation around partnerships and to finalize some decisions for our May 4 event.

Steering Committee: February Agenda

The Project Steering Committee met yesterday afternoon. It was a very productive session and included some new alumni committee members. We will post our meeting notes in the next couple of days, but for now …

Here is the meeting agenda:

Project Steering Committee Meeting
February 27, 2017

Meeting Agenda:
  1. Introductions
  2. Report from the January 30 Project Directors Meeting
  3. Council of Graduate Schools’ PhD career pathways, Jennifer Kobrin
    (Understanding PhD Career Pathways for Program Improvement)
  4. Curricular review and innovations, Provost Joy Connolly
  5. Planning for the May 4th event

Full Meeting: December Report

Overview

This was the first full meeting of both the Core Working Group and Project Steering Committee. In this joint-session, we wanted to summarize the curricular changes that we thoroughly discussed in our previous meetings and then jump into our discussions about current and desirable data collection practices.

Discussion of Proposed Curricular Changes

The group began by examining a summary document of ideas for curricular changes that were generated during our past months’ meetings. The ideas have been divided into the categories that follow below.

We want continued conversations that might actually be useful and produce changes that are feasible. The goal of all curricular changes is to add additional opportunities without adding any additional time to degree.

The generated document will be what we move forward with for curricular changes pending any possibility for future implementation.

(1) Career/professional development modules

The English Program’s spring Intro to Doctoral Studies class will pilot a combination of career and professional development modules. The goal is to ground discussions of non-academic careers. The module will hopefully address the concern of faculty members who feel underprepared or unqualified to teach about careers that are outside of their own experience. Such courses are already overburdened by articulating examination requirements and program expectations. The modules could also sign-post various offices and centers at the Graduate Center in order to help promote the activities that they are already doing.

Another possibility will be to cull first-year working hours for a professional development free-floating workshop. Students could be given a menu of programs to choose from. The idea has already been enthusiastically received by a majority of the humanities EOs. One key concern while developing this workshop is that it assumes that the majority of students are on a Graduate Teaching Fellowship. How can we not show prejudice against students who have different fellowships?

During our discussion, it was asked if we could find a way for interested students to participate in another program’s professional development? This would require each program to distinguish between those events that are localized within the program and those that should be interdisciplinary.

(2) Alternatives to the monographic dissertation

Suggestions regarding alternatives to the monographic dissertation are perhaps more challenging and require implementation from the individual programs. But, making such changes would put us in step with a national conversation about the dissertation.

The dissertation is not a unified concept; it varies greatly across disciplines and time. Is it a practice vehicle for academic writing? Is it evidence of a research practice? The institution needs to consider what the dissertation is across the humanities. There is a need for coherent guidelines outlining the required components of such a project that includes elements like sustainability and thinking about audience accessibility. The library is currently involved in working with students and advisors to construct data sets and present their work publicly based on current and future interests of working with that data. Expectations for longevity need to match formats.

Next steps might be:

  • Resuscitating the digital dissertation group.
  • Working on a program by program level to look at comparable institutions with policies already in place for proposal, execution, and evaluations phases.
  • Looking internationally (at places such as the U.K., Australia, and Canada) for how to address alternatives to the monographic dissertation, such as the incorporation of a practical component.

(3) Internships

There are semi-structured internship opportunities available during the summer. We might be able to take all of the students who have participated in such projects to form a cohort and organize a larger event (or smaller events within each program) in order to inform other students about larger opportunities available to them.

Most of these institutions who offer such internships have an underlying goal of how to make their current projects more public, whether through blogging or catalog-writing. This speaks to a key concern in the Working Group about addressing a wider audience. How do you take the theoretical information and communicate it to the public?

(4) Expanding mentorship

We continue to ask: How do we expand our alumni engagement with students in productive and organized ways?

Look at Current GC Alumni Data

We shifted to discussions of our second planning theme, data: collecting and publicly disseminating data about retention rates and student post-doctoral career paths.

We had two graduate students come to speak about and share the alumni data that currently exists as part of an internal study conducted by Institutional Research (IR). The study began in the spring of 2015 in reaction to an extremely low alumni survey response rate. IR first contacted programs to find out what data they had on their alums. The researchers then began to discover alumni information through web searches, institutional pages, and LinkedIn. The study has tracked 90% of GC graduates between 2003 and 2014. The remaining alums that are undiscoverable (about 10%) are mostly presumed to be international students who returned to their country of origin.

Lots of data exists, but it is yet unclear how the data should be aggregated.

The researchers created an executive summary of the data in order to demonstrate some possible things that can be expressed with the alumni data that exists.
We came up with a brief list of questions that we hope the data can answer. We’re particularly interested in looking across years in order to recognize trends relevant to our project:

  • A comparison of numbers between alums working inside and outside academia.
  • What happens to ABDs and/or other students who are leaving programs before completing the dissertation?
  • How can we take into account that decreasing enrollment numbers at the institutional-level might be affecting data?

Other things that have been considered include: Who is the audience for this kind of data? What can the data be used for by people within the institution?

According to the researchers, we don’t currently have the infrastructure to continue tracking data as alumni change positions.

Discussion of Data Collection Practices

The Project Leaders outlined three key issues for us to address:

  • What can we do to better support programs in keeping data? What can we do to make this kind of tracking easier?
  • Is this something that we need to ask students about when they enter the program? Should we ask students what they intend or hope to do with their degree? How do we measure students’ intentionality and then discover if we are meeting their expectations? Should this data be shared with incoming students?
  • Can we create a better process for alumni to report their information or status with us? Both quantitative and qualitative data results are interesting. It is a shared responsibility across the institution. There’s also a lot of room for cross-disciplinary force.

We need some standard on how programs are gathering and sharing alumni data. It was suggested that the administration require programs to keep track of alumni information.

Sharing information on program websites seems to be a successful way of keeping track of the information. Thus, we need to highlight those programs that are already doing well at collecting and publishing data. The Theatre Program has been identified as one humanities program that is particularly good about collecting and publishing alumni data. Could we intervene at the APO meeting to highlight processes that are effective?

If we’re trying to get programs to contribute to data collection, we need to outline a series of questions that the numbers actually answer. What do we know? What other things might we want to know? Can we formulate the findings as prose rather than as data only? What questions might more articulated data collection help us answer?

One committee member suggested that the Graduate Center create a better alumni feature on the institution’s website.

An ongoing question we’ve had is: Can we work backwards from our data to craft professional development support? We might also consider both how our data is limited by what our programs have already articulated as job possibilities and how we might account for serendipitous career outcomes.

Beginning Plans for May 4 Event

We turned to opening discussions of the May 4 event, which has been tentatively titled as a Town Hall Meeting on Careers in the Humanities. The ultimate goal of the event will be to foster communication between alumni, students, and faculty.

Moving Forward

The next project meeting is scheduled for mid-January. At that meeting, the Core Working Group will finalize recommendations for data collection practices. This meeting will also serve as the transition from our second planning theme (data) to our third (partnerships). We will begin developing recommendations and strategies for building, fostering, and maintaining better partnerships with both alumni and employers.

Working Group: November Report

Overview

Although the original purpose of the Core Working Group’s November meeting was intended to be the inaugural discussion of data collection practices, the committee’s wrap-up of curricular discussions was exceedingly productive and dominated the meeting.

Our meeting focused on three areas: (1) analyzing program professional development syllabi, (2) discussing the implementation of career planning modules, and (3) (re)considering the value of digital dissertations.

Professional Development Syllabi

Following last month’s discussion about implementing a professional development module as part of every doctoral program’s first year class, the Project Leaders gathered course syllabi and other professional development materials from the various humanities PhD programs and made them available to the Core Working Group. At the beginning of our meeting this month, the committee directly addressed the gathered documents, which provided the basis for much of our discussion.

One committee member raised the logistical concern of inserting nonacademic elements into the existing syllabi. Would it be a two week session? How could these elements help students think about nonacademic jobs? Additionally, it’s unlikely that faculty members would be able to lead these sessions as most don’t have expertise in nonacademic career options.

Another committee member noted that those programs that do include information about nonacademic careers in their syllabi often point to the existence of alt-ac positions (i.e., “we want to make you aware that you may have to look for other types of employment”) rather than helping students build skills. There was some surprise to see individual program syllabi (notably Philosophy) so heavily geared towards academia even when there are particularly few academic jobs in those fields. Additionally, several remarks were made about the requirement for Art History students to complete 50 hours of teaching preparation for no credit. Part of students’ eagerness may stem from the fact that they have teaching fellowships, and they may feel that they need this level of preparation to be successful. It certainly demonstrates that students are eager to broaden their professional capacity.

Implementation, Structure, and Content of Modules

The discussion regarding individual program syllabi then segued into discussion regarding the creation of modules in order to address professional development across humanities disciplines. Modules might be particularly effective because they can be designed for early use in programs rather than level three interventions.

There were some general concerns about the best way to implement a module format. For instance, could we press programs on several levels by adding specific learning outcomes to the accreditation requirements of each program? Could we require programs to demonstrate that they have met these outcomes? Another suggestion put forth was for faculty members to complete a workshop on mentoring students and helping them to develop leadership skills.

The Core Working Group generally seemed to like the suggestion of selecting a student cohort to pilot a project. The students who participate in the pilot could help work on the course module (as an alternative to faculty being required to do so). The individual programs could identify students who are open to thinking broadly about what it means to get academic training in the humanities.

One committee member suggested that it might be beneficial to rethink students’ WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum) fellowships, which were created in the 1990s. Perhaps a long-term plan could redesign them to align with a new module. Additionally, more flexible thinking around course credits could also open up interesting teaching possibilities.

After some brainstorming, the committee settled on the following list of desirable nonacademic learning outcomes:

  • Ability to write for a general audience
  • Flexibility and adaptability
  • Ability to effectively collaborate

It was also agreed that mentorship is very important. We could work with programs to help students identify a secondary mentor, perhaps outside of the programs themselves. A benefit of the dual mentorship idea would be developing an additional reference for nonacademic jobs.

Another important phase of the module would be an internship component. If students could get a course release in the spring and then again in the fall (two course releases but not in the same academic year), they would have an entire calendar year to work on a project. Something akin to the Provost’s Digital Initiative could fund GC offices to hire students to work on worthy institutional projects.

Other module suggestions included advocating for the humanities and differentiating between writing for the public and scholarly communication.

In discussing desirable student skill sets that modules could promote, the conversation turned back towards the digital dissertation and the skill sets that it demonstrates.

Digital Dissertation Skill Sets

Two digital dissertation projects by Graduate Center students served as the nexus for the discussion:

Venereal Disease Visual History Archive
the web component of a dissertation by Erin Wuebker, GC PhD History

Walking with Whitman: A Mobile Walking Tour
a fully digital dissertation by Jesse Merandy
(project cited by the Chronicle of Higher Education)

Committee members familiar with digital dissertations commented that many of these projects are archive-intense Omeka sites and have some complementary written component. The audiences for digital dissertations varies, but they are often geared towards nonacademic audiences. Additionally, they demand a higher level of project planning and require students to share the building blocks of their project and think about accessibility. They require students to ask complex questions about maintenance and archives and to think about privacy and copyright concerns. Students learn about outreach and publicity. Students completing these projects have to get test users and work collaboratively. They also have to choose the right digital tool—exposure to a kind of decision-making that might happen on a regular basis in a nonacademic setting.

One committee member remarked that a humanities background is more and more relevant to public issues and questions. Gaining business-related skills would be extremely handy for humanities students.

Moving Forward

The continuing discussion about possible curricular changes has been fruitful, and committee members have lots to consider before our May Town Hall Meeting.

The next project meeting is scheduled for early December. That gathering will be a full meeting of both the Project Steering Committee and the Core Working Group. Our goals will be the examination of data collection practices and the creation of recommendations around data collection.

Working Group: October Agenda

We just concluded the second meeting of the Core Working Group during which we attempted to wrap up our conversations about curriculum by synthesizing ideas from our August and September discussions. Our meeting report will be posted as soon as possible.

Here is the meeting agenda from this afternoon:

Core Working Group Meeting
October 4, 2016

Meeting Agenda:
  1. Review of last week’s Steering Committee Meeting conversation
    • Outcomes data as a means for building a professional curriculum
    • Do the programs have too many requirements?
    • How to promote a culture of other career possibilities among students? Among faculty?
    • Reaching students earlier
  2. Additional ideas regarding curricular change
  3. Bringing closure to curricular change discussions
  4. Preliminary discussion of May 4 event

Steering Committee: September Report

Overview

The purpose of the Project Steering Committee’s September meeting was to share notes from the Core Working Group’s first meeting and continue the discussion of possible curricular changes with this larger group.

As the inaugural meeting of the Project Steering Committee, the first portion of the gathering focused on practical aspects of the planning grant. The Graduate Center’s three planning themes were discussed at length, as was the intended relationship between the Core Working Group and the Project Steering Committee. Time was also spent sharing ideas and best practices from other institutions and updates from the NEH and Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) regarding the Next Generation Humanities Ph.D. grant.

However, the majority of the discussion centered on sharing out and discussing possible curricular changes to (humanities) doctoral programs.

Possible Curricular Changes

The discussion began with the question of using qualifying exams to develop real world skills.

The Ph.D. Program in English recently revised its qualifying exam following a survey in which students expressed feelings that the previous exam felt stressful without any clear pay off. As a result, the program re-engineered the exam with a focus on (academic) professionally-oriented tasks such as preparing an annotated bibliography. A committee representative from the English Program admitted that the program’s Executive Committee hadn’t considered incorporating non-academic professional tasks into the exam. Nevertheless, the portfolio exam model is an example of a curricular requirement already at place in a doctoral program that might be reframed in order to interweave academic and non-academic skills.

The Ph.D. Program in Art History has begun such skill development with their Mellon grant for curatorial training. The program has twelve curatorial fellowships, which allow students to take off one year from their Graduate Teaching Fellowships to work in a museum. Although museums are often most likely to choose candidates with prior curatorial experience rather than career academics, the skills that lend themselves to teaching also lend themselves to curatorial roles. Students in the program also complete an exhibition proposal, and the student with the best proposal has an opportunity to bring their exhibition to the James Gallery. Unfortunately, the Art History Program also suffers when ABDs leave the program in order to pursue non-academic careers.

In contrast, one committee member noted that students in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre are often interested in academe because of the scarcity of stable, full-time theatre careers. Nevertheless, practical experience in professional theatre often helps students succeed in securing academic jobs. Those who do seek professional careers in the arts often must compete in an international job market. Key concerns for Theatre Program faculty include being more responsive to students interested in cultural or arts activism and supporting the endeavors of students who participate in their own theatre companies. However, best practices for building these types of practical careers have not been gathered.

Committee members familiar with the Graduate Center’s STEM programs were able to offer some insight into some developments outside of the humanities as well. For instance, the biomed programs have shifted to making their qualifying exam a grant application. Additionally, two students launched a biomed club to figure out what kinds of skill sets can help students succeed in biopharma. Meanwhile, the Ph.D. Programs in Math, Physics, and Computer Science are experimenting with courses in mathematical finance since so many students are interested in that pathway. One problem that many students within science programs face is the fact that many non-academic jobs require lots of writing. This is often a considerable challenge for international students in particular.

Confronting Current Curricular Requirements

The discussion progressed onto the question of developing multiple tracks within each Ph.D. program. Within the History Program, the question of a public history track has been a recent topic of conversation. Such a track could provide students with practical experience. Unfortunately, such experience often requires financial support. There are potentially summer opportunities through various institutions and organizations, such as the Morgan and the Altfest Internship Program, that are supposed to give students this type of experience pre-graduation, but it is unclear whether students who partake in such opportunities share their experiences with their colleagues. Reporting back might help students understand the link between their field of study and non-academic paths and subsequently generate more student interest.

The Graduate Center has a digital Praxis course already in place. The course is built around the idea of getting students to engage with digital methods early on in their graduate study. Perhaps there is a way to get students involved in professional development early on in their graduate study as well.

One hurdle that the committees must face is the problem that Ph.D. programs at the Graduate Center are already requirement heavy. The ultimate goal of the NEH initiative must be to change the programs themselves, not to add additional tasks.

Trimming requirements for doctoral programs would need to be an institution-wide initiative. Faculty buy-in would be imperative to reduce requirements. One idea that came up was the possibility of faculty development grants for developing courses geared towards a more flexible vision of professional development. Some programs have already begun to have conversations about helping students get to the dissertation earlier, but there exists, at least in some places, cultural anxiety about reducing requirements as faculty worry that this is a chance to cut staff.

Moving Forward

Committee members generally agreed that it would be useful to collect and aggregate data regarding graduate career placement. Notably, the percentage of students who pursue alternatives to academic careers is likely to vary widely between programs. Understanding where Ph.D. graduates end up might help the grant committees determine what additional skills students need to build in order to succeed in these settings. The Graduate Center has previously completed a “Linked In” study, and there is a possibility that career outcomes data could be pulled from that report.

Regardless of what careers students peruse, the institution needs to be more flexible with curricular pathways. Early research leads to early degree completion.

Steering Committee: September Agenda

We just finished our first Project Steering Committee meeting. There were lots of ideas regarding possible curricular changes that were brought forward and discussed in-depth. Our next post will detail some of that discussion.

For now, here is a copy of our meeting agenda:

Project Steering Committee Meeting
September 26, 2016

Meeting Agenda:
  1. Outline practical aspects of the grant
    • Planning themes: curriculum, data, partnerships
    • Meeting schedule for the academic year
    • Interactions between Working Group and Project Steering Committee
    • Sharing information
  2. Updates from NEH and CGS
  3. Discuss inclusion of additional committee members
  4. Share ideas and best practices from other institutions
  5. Share and discuss possible curricular changes to doctoral programs
    • Using qualifying exams to develop real world skills
          –       Define desirable professional skills
    • Embedding elements of GCDI Praxis course into early stages of doctoral coursework
          –       Identify possibilities of working within programs’ course requirements
          –       Possibility of a for-credit interdisciplinary humanities professional development course
          –       Possibility of a three- to five-course humanities professional development certificate program
    • Changes to the form and structure of the dissertation
    • Receiving academic credit for internships, externships, and job shadowing experiences
  6. Building consensus and support among faculty members for any proposed changes

Working Group: August Report

Overview

During its first meeting, the Core Working Group had several tasks to accomplish in order to get the NEH planning grant off to a running start. Members of the Core Working Group needed to better familiarize themselves with the intent and purview of the Next Generation Humanities Ph.D. grant and the project goals outlined by the Graduate Center in our grant application before jumping into serious preliminary discussion about implementing change in the institution.

Planning Themes

The meeting began with the Project Leaders outlining project priorities and elaborating on our three planning themes. (See our last update post to read more about our planning themes.)

Grant Logistics

After outlining the goals of our planning themes, the Core Working Group addressed some housekeeping issues. The meeting schedule for the rest of the academic year was set. For the most part, meetings will take place on the first Tuesday of the month, and measures will be taken to allow committee members to video-conference into meetings if need be.

The Working Group also discussed best practices for sharing working documents. We will use Dropbox for static documents (e.g., articles, reports, administrative documents), and we will use Google Docs for working documents (e.g., meeting minutes). Google Docs offers the advantage of version control. Once a working document is complete, it will be moved to our project Dropbox. Depending on the content, these documents may be posted to our website to be accessed by the public.

A list of the current Project Steering Committee members was scrutinized by the Working Group in order to revise the list prior to the Steering Committee’s first meeting. In particular, we discussed the inclusion of students on the committee and concluded that the selection was best left to the Doctoral Students’ Council (DSC). There were some suggestions regarding possible alumni and additional faculty members to include on the committee, and the Project Leaders agreed to follow up with them regarding their interest in the project. A key concern right now is that all humanities programs have some committee representation for the duration of the project.

Possible Curricular Changes

The preliminary discussion about implementing curricular changes at the Graduate Center began with an analysis of recent changes to the English Program’s qualifying exam. According to a program representative, English Ph.D. students found the previous version of the qualifying exam to be unhelpful. It was decided to make the exam mimic discipline-specific tasks, in particular, writing tasks students would have to complete if they secured a tenure-track position. Ph.D. Programs in French and Philosophy are also experimenting with making their exams mimic the work of faculty members.

The discussion then turned to skills-based training. The committee pursued the question of whether or not the assessment of student skills needs to (or should) live in individual programs. Some specific questions that arose from this discussion include:

  • What are the skills we want doctoral students to have?
  • Which of these skills can come through individual programs (even if they need to be worked on in a more conscious way)?
  • Which skills would need to be added to current training?

The committee came up with the following short list of desirable skills:

  • Project management
  • Supervising or collaborating with others
  • Budgeting
  • Grant writing
  • Writing for a range of audiences
  • Ability to recognize the correct (digital) tool for a given project
  • Presenting and facilitating discussion
  • Quantitative literacy

The committee was encouraged to take a look at the American Library Association’s Framework for Information Literacy to find ideas to express the skills that humanities Ph.D.s can bring to an employer.

In moving out from the list of desirable skills, the discussion turned to the following questions:

  • How can we have students understand the development of these skills as a necessary part of doctoral work?
  • How can we have an employer understand doctoral skills as an advantage rather than a liability?

We also discussed the tension between wanting to spin the Ph.D. into something completely different versus selling the Ph.D. as a body of accumulated knowledge. One committee member asked that we keep in mind the idea of the Public Scholar, someone who can address both parties with specialized knowledge and the general public.

The discussion turned once more, this time to the Graduate Center’s Digital Praxis course. Two problems that the Praxis course currently faces are (1) it’s hard to get first-year Ph.D. students to register for a year-long course and (2) the structure of individual programs might not allow first-year students to take electives. It’s possible that these problems highlight the tension between old modes of book-oriented scholarship and new modes of digital scholarly practice. One difficult question to address is the timing of introducing curricular alternatives: When is the best moment for intervention? It might be easier to sell a course like the Praxis if it were tied to a dissertation project as a student makes the move from Level II to Level III. However, completing the Praxis in a student’s first year means that they already have these alternative ways of approaching research questions in place so as to avoid redoing or rethinking such approaches as work on the dissertation begins.

Moving Forward

Two other possible curricular changes (changes to the form and structure of the dissertation and receiving academic credit for internships, externships, and job shadowing experiences) were tabled for the Steering Committee’s first meeting in September and the Core Working Group’s follow-up meeting in October.

Also, the committee began a much lengthier discussion of which employers to partner with and how best to do that. How can we “sell” humanities doctoral students to employers who may be interested in them? During times of scarce resources, these ideas can be hard to get employers to buy into. One possible resource is the 4Humanities alliance. This point of discussion will definitely continue later in the year when we address our planning theme of partnerships.

Working Group: August Agenda

Yesterday was the first meeting for “The New PhD: A Renaissance of Public Education.” This inaugural meeting of the Core Working Group covered some general housekeeping and project overview, as well as beginning discussions regarding our first planning theme: curriculum. We will create another update post shortly with some details from our discussion.

For now, here is a copy of our meeting agenda:

Core Working Group Meeting
August 30, 2016

Meeting Agenda:
  1. Outline project priorities
  2. Planning themes: curriculum, data, partnerships
  3. Set meeting schedule for the academic year
  4. Discuss best practices for sharing working documents, etc.
    • Platform possibilities: Dropbox, Google Docs, Commons, Basecamp, Slack
  5. Discuss inclusion of individuals on Project Steering Committee
  6. Discuss possible curricular changes to doctoral programs
    • Using qualifying exams to develop real world skills
    • Embedding elements of GCDI Praxis course into early stages of doctoral coursework
    • Changes to the form and structure of the dissertation
    • Receiving academic credit for internships, externships, and job shadowing experiences

Planning Themes

As “The New PhD: A Renaissance of Public Education” gets underway, we thought it would be beneficial to highlight some components of our three planning themes: (1) curriculum, (2) data, and (3) partnerships. By centering our project on these three themes, we hope to align our aims with those of the Next Generation Humanities Ph.D.

(1) Curriculum

This planning theme intersects with the following Next Generation Humanities Ph.D. themes:
  • Ways to integrate multiple career outcomes from the very beginning of students’ experience in graduate school
  • Ideas for developing new courses and curricula
  • Altered formats or requirements for the Ph.D. dissertation (so that a student could receive a doctorate without producing a research monograph)
Topics and actions we will discuss under this planning theme include:
  • How to include more professionally-oriented skills development opportunities in the humanities doctoral curriculum
  • Implementing professional portfolios and alternatives to the monographic dissertation
  • Building a strong first-year professional development program for all humanities doctoral students
  • Discussing a wider integration of the existing Digital Praxis course (or elements thereof) into a wider compliment of doctoral humanities programs
  • Building consensus and support among faculty members for any proposed changes

(2) Data

This planning theme intersects with the following Next Generation Humanities Ph.D. themes:
  • Commitment to collecting and publicly disseminating data about retention rates and students’ post-doctoral career paths
  • Development of an evaluation plan for future activities and implementation
Topics and actions we will discuss under this planning theme include:
  • How can we better tell the stories of our doctoral students and alumni, both immediately upon graduation and throughout their careers?
  • Possibility of tracking career outcomes of those who leave doctoral programs
  • Developing useful visualizations of this data set
  • Developing metrics to evaluate any proposed changes in curriculum or professional development workshops and programming

(3) Partnerships

This planning theme intersects with the following Next Generation Humanities Ph.D. themes:
  • Experiments in providing financial support for graduate students for activities other than teaching
  • Identification of humanities Ph.D. alumni in various fields to advise or mentor graduate students
  • Initiation of partnerships with non-academic institutions
Topics and actions we will discuss under this planning theme include:
  • Developing and launching of an alumni mentoring database for humanities students
  • Fostering cross-disciplinary conversations with alumni working in a range of fields
  • Developing best practices for connecting with external organizations interested in hiring humanities Ph.D.s
  • Discussing ways to integrate internship experiences into the doctoral curriculum and funding packages