Scaffolding the Language of Power An Apprenticeship in Writing the Dissertation in Practice

Scaffolding the Language of Power: An Apprenticeship in Writing the Dissertation in Practice extends the interactive and supportive approach of the original Scaffolding the Language of Power to the unique genre demands of the Dissertation in Practice (DiP), the capstone of the Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED)-aligned Education Doctorate. Like its predecessor, the book is grounded in three interconnected commitments: doctoral writing as social justice, as genre, and as scaffolding. However, in this edition, original author Kathryn Strom teams up with CPED Executive Director Jill Alexa Perry to reimagine that framework for scholarly practitioners with professional knowledge, practical wisdom, and contextual change agendas that are central to the work of the dissertation.
The book's unique design features stem from our understanding of the DiP as a distinct form of doctoral inquiry oriented toward understanding, improving, and leading change within a specific practice context and in service of particular communities. Accordingly, this volume emphasizes the dual-audience nature of the DiP: although students write to their committee first, DiP work simultaneously needs to serve a practitioner/professional community. To achieve that, for example, scaffolds for organization, headings, and topic sentences are framed not only as tools for writing, but also for producing writing that is accessible to multiple audiences beyond academia. Second, the book maintains a practice-to-improvement arc, reminding readers throughout that their writing is building toward something that they will be implementing, evaluating, and acting on. Third, the book is written to honor the highly contextual nature of the DiP, helping writers achieve the specificity needed to make local work understandable and transferable to readers in other settings. Finally, the volume explicitly affirms a scholar-practitioner identity, positioning professional knowledge in dialogue with scholarly knowledge rather than as something requiring academic legitimization.

These design features support readers while guiding them to complete the specific tasks of the dissertation in practice, which includes articulating a problem of practice grounded in organizational urgency and stakeholder impact; constructing a review of scholarly and professional knowledge; and using that literature to create a theory of action and contextual plan of intervention. The book focuses on applied research, with specific guidance for three methodologies most common to CPED-aligned programs, Action Research, Improvement Science, and Program/Practice Evaluation. As in the original volume, each chapter follows a carefully sequenced structure that includes warm-up reflections, explicit instruction in the genre's linguistic moves, annotated modeling, and scaffolded exercises that build systematically toward independent writing. Many examples are drawn from CPED-aligned dissertations, giving readers models that reflect the scholarship of practice central to their own doctoral work.

Ultimately, the book provides an affirmative apprenticeship that honors practitioners' existing expertise while making visible the often-hidden rules of academic writing, helping scholarly practitioners build confidence in their writing and facilitating the dissemination of impact in service of local change.

This title is part of a series--the first volume, Scaffolding the Language of Power: An Apprenticeship in Doctoral Level Writing and the Companion Workbook are available as a bundle.

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).