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National College of Education—Doctoral

National College of Education's doctoral programs are built on a tradition of excellence in teacher education stretching over 100 years. Through advanced studies, the programs extend NLU's and NCE’s tradition of providing quality education for educational practitioners, academic scholars and researchers focused on educational levels from pre-kindergarten through higher education.

Doctoral Program Philosophy and Conceptual Framework

The NCE doctoral program comprises carefully constructed learning environments that initiate both doctoral candidates and faculty into a variety of sustainable discourse communities, while developing the grounds for a critique of knowledge and practice from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

The doctoral program's conceptual framework revolves around critical reflective thinking in three interconnected key domains: theory, research and practice. Specifically, students and faculty in the doctoral program engage in critical reflection in these key domains, and explore their inter-relationships through coursework, research and writings. To this end, faculty and students form a diverse community of learners in order to continuously examine each of following elements and their interconnections:

  • Creation of a community of learners who are knowledgeable about and active in a variety of discourse communities
  • Development of critical reflective perspectives
  • Exploring the complexities of issues and the problems which surface from a critical reflective orientation
  • Development of multiple and interdisciplinary perspectives
  • Building on previous undergraduate and graduate work
  • Exploring the implications of ideas from diverse individual, social, psychological, cultural, political and historical perspectives
  • Interrogating multiple ways of knowing: raising epistemological and ontological questions
  • Building a capacity to consider and/or engage in social action in a variety of settings
  • Contributing to our knowledge and understanding in disciplinary fields
  • Developing habits of scholarship in a variety of areas including teaching, research, writing, publication, presentations and leadership in professional organizations

The above orientation to doctoral studies distinguishes our program locally and places it at the cutting-edge nationally. The conceptual framework is imbedded into each of the doctoral programs, which further develop it in accordance to the specific disciplinary perspective.