Developing a pedagogy of critical reflection and reflexivity on a professional doctorate towards equity, ethics and social justice

The Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD) is designed for researching practitioners to address problems of practice and to develop theoretically informed practice-based knowledge, based on equity, ethics and social justice, according to the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate. Within the EdD programmes, practitioner reflection is a key characteristic. While extensive literature on reflection in educational programmes exists, there is little literature on how critically reflective approaches might be developed in practice at the beginning of a EdD programme. The article takes the example of the first module on a EdD programme and shows how such approaches can develop and deepen researching practitioners’ (EdD students) understandings of problems of practice. This article contributes to understandings of EdD pedagogy. Co-written with EdD students who have completed their first module of the programme, it includes their first-person responses to the approaches taken to foster critical reflection and reflexivity and offers a model for this form of collaborative writing. The article highlights the importance of considering students’ standpoint and positionality as researching practitioners and the value of a critically reflective and reflexive approach which is guided by the challenge of theory.