Ed.D. in Educational Leadership
Duquesne University’s School of Education enjoys a national reputation in educational leadership. It was one of 22 research universities elected by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 2007 to participate in the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED). CPED is an ongoing effort to rethink and redesign the professional doctorate in education to better serve those who aspire to practice educational leadership. The second phase of CPED-funded by a major federal grant–is headquartered at Duquesne. As a consequence of our CPED efforts, Duquesne’s School of Education has revised its Ed.D. program in educational leadership.
Duquesne’s School of Education is a member institution in the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA), a consortium comprising the top 10% of universities granting doctoral degrees in educational leadership. Duquesne’s School of Education is home to the UCEA Center for Educational Leadership and Social Justice, one of only eight UCEA centers in the nation. Through its UCEA Center, Duquesne hosts the annual Duquesne Educational Leadership Symposium, an invited symposium that gathers leading scholars from across North America. The UCEA Center also partners with other organizations, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, to pursue its mission. Doctoral students will be engaged in work that will inform and be informed by resources and projects of the UCEA Center for Educational Leadership and Social Justice in Duquesne’s School of Education.
Duquesne’s revised Ed.D. program in Educational Leadership reflects its cutting-edge efforts in CPED, its role as a national center for educational leadership and social justice, and the unique identity of Duquesne’s School of Education.
Program Mission and Goals
Duquesne’s Professional Doctorate in Educational Leadership (ProDEL) mission is to transform the practice of educational leadership through a program that is informed and framed by Duquesne University’s mission and the School of Education’s identity resting on the pillars of educational leadership, the Spiritan tradition of caring, and scholarship for schools. As such, the program of study will focus problems of practice in schools through the lens of social justice.
The goals of ProDEL are
• to prepare leaders who can collaborate effectively across school, academic, and community boundaries to understand, design, and develop solutions to real problems in real schools;
• to establish and grow intra- and inter-institutional capacity for continuous, evidence-based improvement of schools;
• to advocate effectively for and drive efforts to achieve educational equity and excellence.
Program Design
ProDEL is a cohort-based program that is driven by inquiry into problems of practice. Doctoral learning will be supported through both face-to-face and online resources. Learning experiences will be guided by a signature pedagogy–systematic and intentional inquiry into problems of practice–that reveals and challenges assumptions, a pedagogy that has been established empirically by a decade of work through the Center for Advancing the Study of Teaching and Learning at Duquesne.
