Explore your potential. Expand your possibilities.
Grow your professional abilities and commitment.
"Inspiring, challenging, transforming" is our vision.
We are guided by two simple yet powerful messages: First, as professionals we are dedicated to helping ourselves and our colleagues influence society through our work. Second, the doctorate is also dedicated to developing reflective practice in a multicultural context.
Principles of the Education Doctorate
The preparation of all course plans has been guided by these educational principles:
1. To operate intellectually and ethically is to co-operate. Reality is not found. It is created individually and in shared meaning in a community of learners.
2. The most powerful learning occurs through experience, action, and reflection on experience and action—a process which can be stimulated and nurtured by a variety of educational resources that each course will seek to provide.
3. The faculty’s primary role will be facilitative, consultative, and supportive of participants’ learning experiences.
4. Learners are viewed as professionally accomplished, highly motivated, and self-directed.
Curriculum Design
The quality of the doctoral experience results from the meaningful program design, the exploration of eight program themes and their implementation, the responsive setting of the learning climate, and the skill and expertise of the faculty and students.
The EdD curriculum combines a thematic framework with the distinctive characteristics of graduate education at Hamline. This includes the Hamline’s professional education conceptual framework based on four precepts: Promote Equity in Schools and Society; Build Communities of Teachers and Learners; Construct Knowledge; and Practice Thoughtful Inquiry and Reflection.
In Hamline’s doctoral learning communities, participants remain together throughout eight core (required) courses, thus deepening personal connections and enriching shared experiences.
Eight themes are interwoven throughout the curriculum. They reflect a deliberate design to unite key learning concepts within the curriculum. Spiraling the themes enables EdD students to revisit them during their study and to explore changing emphases and deepening understanding. These themes are also the foundation of the EdD portfolio.
Theme 1: Building Community
Building community is essential to the educational process. The quality of learning is dependent on the quality of the community in which it takes place—that is, the community co-constructed by the participants. The individuals within a community determine the covenants that guide the processes, and evaluate the efficacy of the community in relation to attaining individual and group goals.
Theme 2: Constructivism/Constructing Knowledge
Constructivism is a theory of knowing and understanding that guides individual and group learning. Participants actively construct new categories of understanding and meaning by representing and reconstructing previous knowledge and experience. Engagement in constructivist dialogue leads to the examination of personal and professional values and schemas and to the alignment of theory and practice with current cognitive research.
Theme 3: Language/Communication
The development of strong language skills enables effective learning and understanding in a diverse world. Language operates in cultural communities, and its nature varies according to the age, ethnicity, gender, economic status, social status, education, and geographic location of the users. Language—verbal and nonverbal—has oral, visual, and written components, varying according to its purpose.
Theme 4: Child/Adult Development
The child/adult development theme reminds us that human beings are active, open, self-regulating systems. Lifespan human development depends upon many factors: physical and psychological maturation; personal learning from experience; social construction of knowledge; and integration of being and meaning.
Theme 5: Technology
Technology can assist in the active construction of knowledge by enabling learners to personalize and internalize ideas, solve problems, generalize and synthesize knowledge, and extend skills and concepts across different contexts. Information-age technology can provide us with powerful communication, visualization, and analytical tools.
Theme 6: Leadership
Leadership is an influence relationship that is contextual, reciprocal, and multidirectional. Effective leadership—reflective, ethical, and democratic—concentrates on the centrality of learning and teaching, on building capacity of individuals, and on improving processes, programs, and systems. From this perspective, every individual is a leader and a follower.
Theme 7: Inquiry
Inquiry is a problem-posing and problem-solving process. It enables us to identify authentic questions, to discover resources, to plan and implement solutions, and to construct new knowledge. Deep inquiry leads to careful analysis of issues and the synthesis of new policy and practice.
Theme 8: Assessment
Assessment can satisfy many needs: provide diagnostic feedback, set standards, evaluate and communicate progress. Assessment of learning is a complex and often controversial issue that challenges professionals to be familiar with many forms of assessment and the political-cultural ways in which they are used.
Diverse Student Body
The Hamline University Education Doctorate attracts people from a variety of contexts, including higher education, parent education, staff development and training, private industry, and P-12 education. Regardless of vocation, EdD students are willing to grow as teachers, researchers, scholars, and leaders.
People choose Hamline’s EdD program for many reasons: professional advancement, quality instruction, integrated curriculum, attainment of a terminal degree, increased knowledge of the education field, and self-understanding. More often than not, however, the main reason to pursue an EdD degree is personal fulfillment.
Accommodating Schedule
In Hamline's doctoral learning communities, participants remain together throughout eight core(required) courses, thus deepening personal connections and enriching shared experiences. The required courses meet for ten weeks per term across fall, winter, and spring terms. Within each course there are four Friday night (5-9 pm)-Saturday (9 am-5 pm) sessions.
Faculty
The EdD program draws upon a diverse and experienced faculty affiliated with Hamline’s graduate education and other graduate programs. EdD faculty is selected for their proven ability to teach, to advise, and to coach individuals and small groups.
Facilities
Centralized facilities for the Graduate School of Education house the administrative and student services. Classes meet on the Hamline University campus in St. Paul. The Hamline University Bush Library and Law Library contain extensive electronic and traditional resources available for on-campus and off-campus access. The University is also a member of the Cooperating Libraries in Consortium (CLIC), a consortium of local private college and university libraries. Online access also expands opportunities for students to find specialized national and international publications.
About Hamline University
Hamline University, founded in 1854 as Minnesota's first university, is a nationally ranked, private liberal arts university with 3,300 degree-seeking students in the College of Liberal Arts, School of Law, Graduate School of Education, Graduate School of Public Administration and Management, and Graduate Liberal Studies Program.
For further information, please contact Graduate Administrative Services at 651-523-3000, or email Graduate Admissions.
Find out more!
For program questions contact Kim Hartung:
651-523-2928 or email Kimberly Hartung
For an application packet, contact Ranell Tennyson: 651-523-2807 or email Ranell Tennyson
