Samantha Cohen “had no idea [she] would pursue a path in higher education” when she started her career as a first-grade teacher in Atlanta… or even after she enrolled in a doctoral program. “I envisioned becoming a district leader, building connections with higher education partners,” she explains. Once she began teaching as an adjunct professor, however, she “started exploring the possibilities of higher education work, specifically curriculum design, program design, and teaching undergraduate and graduate students in community-based courses.”
Fast forward to 2019, when Cheryl Holcomb-McCoy (Dean of American University’s School of Education at the time) recruited Cohen to help launch and then lead the practitioner-based Online Doctorate in Education Policy and Leadership program at American University’s School of Education. “Leading the EdD program has been a gift of a lifetime, an opportunity to think about how to co-create a program to support scholar practitioners (who are already leading across the country) by enhancing their own vision-setting, interpersonal skills, and strategic skills,” Cohen shares.
The following article is based on an interview with Cohen. In it, she discusses what distinguishes AU’s Education Policy and Leadership doctoral program from others, who is a good fit for the program, and how to make the most of its practitioner-based curriculum.
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Education Should Unlock Potential
Education has the potential to both remove and enforce barriers, according to Cohen. She observes: “Education can be a place of possibility, opportunity, and vision curation for students. When it is, it feels motivating and full of possibility. Education can also be a place of compliance, standardization, and sorting learners. And when it is these things, it feels prescriptive, limiting, and disconnected from building a future we cannot yet see.”
Cohen bases her observations on her experiences “as a learner and educator… Even when it is challenging to be in a learning space full of openness and self-direction, one grappling with seeming contradictions, these types of spaces are much preferred to spaces that are about checking boxes and rule following,” she asserts.
These principles, which she initially learned as a first-grade teacher, apply equally to doctoral students. Cohen explains: “At the doctoral level, this emerges by drawing upon Paulo Freire and bell hooks, creating learning spaces that are about social transformation, creating new spaces/means/methods, and embedding love and humanity into all we do.” She adds that AU faculty “concretely support learners on their dissertation of practice journeys. We support their problems of practice, which they uniquely see from their vantage points; they are uniquely positioned to impact these challenges and opportunities. Friere’s and hooks’ philosophies also impact our courses, as demonstrated by important offerings like Exercising Conscious Leadership and Building Teams.”
Developing Reflective, Justice-Oriented, and Research-Driven Leaders
AU’s Online Doctorate in Education Policy and Leadership program emphasizes four domains, which are interwoven throughout all the courses and the dissertation of practice experience: systems change, personal leadership, social justice & antiracism, and policy & research. Cohen exhorts the value of this framing structure, explaining that it “helps support learners with their vision setting, interpersonal skills, and strategic skills.”
A cohort-based model builds mutual support networks among the doctoral candidates. Cohen explains that the cohort encourages students to “construct a learning community and learning organization as we test ideas, build knowledge, and explore the possibilities of what can be within education. This requires dialogic engagement, dismantling individualism, collective ideation, trust building, and teaming. Our students build a community with their cohort, across cohorts, and with EdD staff and faculty—and these relationships continue, persist, deepen, and lead to continued imagination and re-imagination.”
The dissertation experience, Cohen observes, “is scaffolded throughout the program, supporting EdD learners with opportunities to understand a problem of practice through an antiracist lens while exploring the systems within which this problem is embedded. The learners have the opportunities to explore communal and self-ways to act to affect these problems of practice as they learn about applied methods, knowledge review writing, and policy. As two of our graduates who wrote a collaborative dissertation of practice said, ‘In education today, collaboration is essential and required… Rarely do leaders or teachers work in isolation. Therefore, being able to work together to co-construct this dissertation of practice felt familiar and less foreign to us.’”
The program design, Cohen says, helps students develop “a range of skills and knowledge, which they take into their alumni roles.They strengthen their awareness of themselves: their identity, their strengths, their learning edges, and their visions. They strengthen their knowledge and practice of social justice and antiracism, thinking about how these intersect with their identities and the education arena we operate within. They build their applied research skills, creating a toolkit to diagnose opportunities through landscaping, empathy interviews, and asset-based context exploration. They build their skills to design opportunities to impact these opportunities and tell stories and/or measure the impact of these created and implemented opportunities.”
Building Ethical, Equity-Centered Leadership Through CPED
American University’s Online Doctorate in Education Policy and Leadership incorporates the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) framework into its curriculum design. “The CPED has been an important partner for AU SOE’s EdD program,” Cohen points out. “The framework includes six principles. Our program aligns with these principles, which focus on ethics and justice; community-centered learning; communication; field- based problems of practice; accessing the professional knowledge base; and generating and impacting professional knowledge and practice.
She adds, “CPED’s focus is on supporting learners and leaders in roles where they are making change, and supporting these learners and leaders to enhance their knowledge and skills as they continue to make change. CPED and AU’s EdD program believe that the learners in PK-12 and higher education would benefit from a new vision for education, and that it is our responsibility to support this generation by empowering, connecting, and uplifting educators in these spaces right now.”
Who Thrives in the EdD in Education Policy and Leadership?
According to Cohen, “Candidates for this program generally share three characteristics: (1) a commitment to cohort and collaboration; this work is communal, and building our skills around communication, listening, and envisioning are key; (2) a deep desire to learn and see the complexities, inherent contradictions, and strengths and limitations of one’s existing viewpoints; and (3) an interest in creating, working, and imagining, sometimes alone, often when it is challenging, and to enhance possibilities.”
Successful candidates, she continues, are “those who want to focus on practice, enhance their leadership skills, build their repertoire of knowledge, and keep acting to make education, communities, and the world places of thriving for all learners. Through my own personal, professional, and academic experiences, I have realized that educators and leaders who find their way have a beautiful braiding of skills: vision setting, interpersonal skills, and strategic skills. This trio enables practitioners to think through a vision for a future (that often does not yet exist), adaptive work, technical work, and all of the human work.”
Success is more likely for those who don’t go it alone. Cohen notes that “Peer support networks, support from families, and building routines that are created by the scholar-practitioner professionals have been particularly valuable to students. There is no playbook. Some learners need their weekends for EdD work, while others have more flexible weekdays and weeknights. The program is for everyone who wants to learn about and promote justice: those with family caretaking responsibilities, those well into their career journeys, and those new to their professional education.”
She concludes: “As you consider entering an EdD program, my advice is: make sure you want to do this. It requires a commitment of time, resources, and love. Decide that you want to jump into the driver’s seat of your learning. Find a program that speaks to you. Connect with their alumni, current students, and faculty and see how those dialogues make you feel. Embrace the learning—realizing simultaneously how much you already know and how much you have yet to learn.”
Does that sound like you? If so, connect with an enrollment advisor to learn more about American University’s EdD in Education Policy and Leadership program, curriculum, and enrollment process.
