Overview

Editors:

Robyn Henderson
Faculty of Education, University of Southern Queensland, Australia

Patrick Alan Danaher
Faculty of Education, University of Southern Queensland, Australia

The planning and conducting of educational research is neither automatic nor easy. On the contrary, every step in the process involves a complex and sometimes controversial set of decisions and requires the exercise of finely honed judgment about the design and shape of the project and political stances to ensure legitimate, trustworthy and hopefully useful findings.

This collection presents diverse engagements with the processes of planning and conducting educational research by several intending, current and recently graduated doctoral candidates associated with the Faculty of Education at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia.

What emerges is a rich array of methodological approaches to research as these particular doctoral designers have reflected on and interrogated the characteristics of doctoral research.

Despite the diversity of approaches, contexts and foci revealed in this theme issue, the papers have in common an engagement with one or more of the following organising questions:

Their considerations have focused on what was included in their research, along with reflections on what might have been. This decision-making about the intentions and impact of doctoral research offers valuable knowledge about the difficult and challenging task of 'designing' doctoral study.

Doctoral design emerges as highly complex, contingent and situated, as involving an emotional as much as an intellectual dimension and as having at times unforeseen implications or unanticipated interactions with other elements of doctoral research. Sometimes it can exhibit rational predictability; at other times serendipity takes a hand and the results can be surprising.

No definitive or permanent 'answers' have been adduced from the articles presented here. As much as it is a journey, doctoral design is a text, with multiple authors and sometimes contradictory readings, rereadings and rewritings by researchers and others. This Special Issue is a  rich diversity of texts and we commend them to doctoral designers elsewhere.

The International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning encapsulates and synthesises such a rich diversity of strategies, issues, concepts and arguments about educational philosophy, policy and practice that range  broadly across contexts, countries and sectors.

Table of Contents

Guest Editors' Introduction to Special Theme Issue: Doctoral Designers: Challenges and Opportunities in Planning and Conducting Educational Research
Robyn Henderson, Patrick Alan Danaher

The Whisperings of a Doctor of Philosophy Student's Phenomenography
Mark A. Tyler

A Practitioner's Journey Exploring Transformative Approaches to the Professional Development of Online Educators
Shirley Reushle

Writing Issues in Designing Doctoral Research: Interpretation, Representation, Legitimation and Desiring in Investigating the Education of Australian Show People
Patrick Alan Danaher

A Research Approach to Investigating Curricular Innovation: Negotiating the Stakeholders and Gatekeepers of Korean English Language Teaching
Michel N. Trottier

A Rationale for Employing Mixed Methods Design in Doctoral Research about Female Students' Academic Achievement in Secondary Schools in Papua New Guinea
Dinah R. Dovona-Ope

Responding to Doctoral Designers: Dilemmas and Decisions
R. E. (Bobby) Harreveld