Scaffolding the Language of Power

Kathryn (Katie) Strom is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at California State University, East Bay, Director of CSUEB's Center for Research on Equity and Collaborative Engagement (CRECE), and co-founder of the Posthuman Research Nexus (a global organization that supports and connects scholars engaging in posthuman and other complexity perspectives). Dr. Strom's research combines multiple critical and complex theories to study teacher learning and practice (particularly in support of multilingual learners), as well as to advocate more broadly for more relational, difference-affirmative ways of thinking-being-doing in education and academia. The latter includes her commitment to supporting doctoral students and early career scholars to successfully navigate the hidden curriculum of writing a dissertation and publishing afterward. A scholar of teaching and learning, Dr. Strom has used her knowledge of social justice, scaffolding, and systemic functional linguistics to develop lessons and workshops to support her doctoral students and junior academics in their writing over the last decade. Her most recent book, Scaffolding the Language of Power: An Apprenticeship in Writing at the Doctoral Level, turns these lessons into a comprehensive and interactive guide for doctoral-level writing. She is also the co-author of Becoming-Teacher: A Rhizomatic Look at First Year Teaching and Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship: Critical Posthuman Methodological Perspectives, along with many peer-reviewed articles and several special issues. Her most current work is in partnership with the Smithsonian Institute's Network for Emergent Socioscientific Thinking (NESST), exploring ways to support educators and their students in shifting to the complex ways of thinking needed to create sustainable futures in the Anthropocene era. Dr. Jill Alexa Perry is the first full Professor of Practice in the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh. Additionally, she is Director of the school's Doctor of Education (EdD) program and is Executive Director of the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate. Her research focuses on professional doctorate preparation in education, organizational change in higher education, and faculty leadership roles. Currently she is researching the ways EdD programs teach practitioners to utilize research evidence. She teaches and coaches how to teach Improvement Science in EdD programs. Her books include The Improvement Science Dissertation in Practice, The EdD and the Scholarly Practitioner, and In their own words: A journey to the stewardship of the practice in education. Dr. Perry is a graduate of the University of Maryland, where she received her PhD in International Education Policy. She holds an MA in Higher Education Administration and a BA in Spanish and International Studies from Boston College. She has over 25 years of experience in leadership and program development in education and teaching experience at the elementary, secondary, undergraduate, and graduate levels in the US and abroad. She is a Fulbright Scholar (Germany) and a returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Paraguay).

Chapter 1: Introduction: Writing for action, equity, and practice 1.1 Writing at the doctoral level as a social justice project 1.2 The language of power in applied doctoral work 1.3 A pragmatic approach to DiP writing: systemic functional linguistics 1.4 Learning to write through a scaffolded apprenticeship 1.5 How this book supports DiP work Chapter 2: The rules of the language of power: Writing as a pedagogical act 2.1 What "counts" as doctoral writing 2.2 Organization and scaffolding 2.3 Headings and chunking 2.4 Road maps 2.5 Topic sentences and paragraph coherence 2.6 Transitions and connectors 2.7 Signal words and phrases Chapter 3: Writing with scholarly practitioner authority 3.1 Making well-reasoned arguments 3.2 Supporting claims with evidence 3.3 Using detailed, specific, precise language 3.4 Striving for synthesis over summary 3.5 Developing an original scholarly practitioner voice Chapter 4: The problem of practice 4.1 Purposes of the problem of practice statement 4.2 Exploratory reading and writing 4.3 The problem of practice summary 4.4 The problem of practice background 4.5 The problem of practice rationale 4.6 The purpose statement Chapter 5: Literature review and theoretical framework PART I: Building the literature review 5.1 Purposes and scope of the DiP literature review 5.2 Searching and finding literature 5.3 Analyzing literature 5.4 Building out the review PART II: Building the theoretical or conceptual framework 5.5 Finding your theoretical tools 5.6 Reading about your framework 5.7 Writing your theoretical framework 5.8 Overall takeaways Chapter 6: Theory of action and plan of inquiry PART I: Building the theory of action 6.1 Theory of action in DiPs 6.2 Synthesizing knowledge for action 6.3 Putting the theory of action together PART II: Building the plan of inquiry 6.4 Purposes and elements of the plan of inquiry 6.5 Synthesizing methodological knowledge 6.6 Methodology description 6.7 Context, setting, and participants 6.8 Data sources and collection procedures 6.9 Data analysis 6.10 Quality and trustworthiness 6.11 Positionality and reflexivity Chapter 7: The findings 7.1 Purposes and structure of the findings 7.2 Building an organizing schema 7.3 Answering your inquiry questions 7.4 Making analytic claims 7.5 Providing evidence and analytic explanation 7.6 Demonstrating trustworthiness 7.7 Scaffolding understanding for your reader Chapter 8: Discussion, recommendations, and next steps 8.1 Purposes and structure of the discussion, recommendations, and next steps 8.2 Drawing contextualized conclusions 8.3 Connecting to scholarly and professional knowledge 8.4 Interpreting findings through the theoretical framework 8.5 Revisiting and revising the theory of action 8.6 Turning learning into actionable recommendations 8.7 Planning next steps 8.8 Concluding the Dissertation in Practice References