Chapter 4: Redesigning an EdD Program: Reality and Necessity Engender New Possibilities

In this we describe the development of the new Education Doctorate (EdD) program at the Graduate School of Education (GSE) at Rutgers University. Over the course of three years we have moved from offering nine separate programs whose distinctions were often blurred with Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) programs in the school, to a school-wide, practice-oriented doctorate employing a cohort format. We begin by providing a brief history of doctoral education at the GSE before then outlining the social and political factors that contributed to our decision as a faculty to begin distinguishing between our doctoral programs. The second part of the chapter then describes the revised EdD program and the processes we undertook to get us to this new design. We conclude the chapter with some reflections on our process of change as a way of prefacing the two chapters (Chapters 9 and 16) that follow that look more deeply at the tensions we have encountered as we have moved forward with redesigning the EdD at Rutgers GSE.