EDUC 800: Ways of Knowing
I took this course during my second semester at GMU and recall entering the first evening of class with zero expectations, thanks to a rather useless course description in the GMU course catalog. The instructor was Dr. Priscilla Norton and her "getting acquainted" exercise consisted of a name/association game. The purpose of the game was to make the participants articulate the ways they know (and use) to explore the things that they do not know. Now, I have never been a lover of games. I concluded that Ways of Knowing was going to resemble some of the philosophy courses I had taken years ago as an undergraduate, where peace, love, and solving world hunger were discussed ad nauseum, impacting nothing. Boy, was I wrong!

In my previous discipline - and in my entire educational experience - the rational, logical, data-driven way of knowing was the norm against which all scholarly work was evaluated. For that reason, I was comfortable and confident as we explored the rationalist literature and discussed it in the various reflection papers. It affirmed me in the contextual framework I already knew and from which I approached the literature of any discipline. It was how I conducted business in the corporate world. It also provided me with the opportunity to identify flaws in the reasoning of Descartes, the omission of the question "why" in positivist-based education research, the remarkable longevity of a tradition that began with Socrates and continues to shape the foundation of teaching and learning in higher education. Our reading and discussion of C.P. Snow made me reflect upon my own dissertation experience more than 20 years ago. At that time, the use of statistical techniques like factor analysis and multiple regression to explain political behavior was relatively new. Pioneer social scientists at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor - where I spent a summer as a devoted disciple - gave in to full-blown attacks of "physics envy", running around in white lab coats as they tried to ANOVA-ize political, social and economic phenomena. I could almost attach a face to each of the arguments that Snow outlined in The Two Cultures, because the gap about which he spoke and wrote had survived well into the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. As I analyzed and reflected on an article about power and influence and higher education in the 1990s, the tables and charts used to illustrate the outcomes of the authors' quantitative approach to human self-perception reinforced the two cultures-argument. Social scientists still seek the safe-haven of numerically measurable results to demonstrate their validity.

However, the real "aha!" came when we explored the ideas of Kuhn. I recognized Kuhn's paradigm concept in my previous discipline (political science), and I could see his paradigm dialectic happening right now in the scientific theories that are the foundation for software design and development today. I drew upon Kuhn to help me to explore a way of knowing - namely, Artificial Intelligence - about which I wanted to know more. I reflected on that particular journey in a research paper entitled How the Science of Artificial Intelligence Shapes Knowing. I will only add that Kuhn and the Artificial Intelligence paper have provided me with the framework I have been seeking to begin my research agenda on the synergy between administrative technology and academic technology in higher education. TOP

EDUC 802: Leadership Seminar
This was my very first course in the Ph.D. program at GMU in the Fall of 2000. The instructor was Professor S. David Brazer. From the moment I sat down, I knew that this was going to be something special. First, there was the Syllabus. It was not just a listing of deliverables, due dates, and resources. It started with the following quotation:

Now, that's a course description! In addition, the Syllabus listed course goals - that never happened 20 years ago - along with expectations for student interaction with peers, with the instructor, and with the material.

As the course progressed, my expectations were fulfilled. A common thread running through all of the readings in the course is the variety of perspectives from which leadership has been defined. The most meaningful assignment was to review the biography of a leader in education and to map that leader's style to one or more of the leadership theories. At first, I found the assignment challenging because I wanted to select a leader from higher education, the sector with which I currently work. Unfortunately, I couldn't think of a single higher education "leader". If there are leaders - and I assume there must be - they do a very poor job of making themselves known beyond the walls of their respective institutions. Consequently, I selected the biography of Albert Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers, and illustrated how Shanker's style is consistent with the Logic of Appropriateness style of leadership. I've included the Closing Summary of that paper in this portfolio because it demonstrates how the course material really jelled in my mind. The full paper received very positive feedback from Prof. Brazer as well. TOP

EDUC 805: Doctoral Seminar in Education
This course introduced me to the professors and programs with the Graduate School of Education at GMU. Each week, a professor would deliver a talk and students were asked to write critiques of articles written by these presenters. On the positive side, I learned about the pool of talent among the GSE faculty, with interests ranging from bilingual education to special ed to models of teaching. Critiquing their articles was also an opportunity for me to concentrate on looking at research papers critically, noting where they lie on the theoretical continuum and what practical applications, if any, they have. On the negative side, I was disappointed that there was almost nothing on higher education and lifelong learning. Interesting as K-12 is, it's not my area of interest, so I really missed having speakers from higher education. Moreover, I would have been just as informed had the course been only one semester instead of stretching out over two semesters.

What I did find relevant to me was Dr. Eammon Kelly's paper on guiding principles for conducting research. Although his paper focused on math and science, the principles he outlines for preparing research proposals and projects is relevant for all the soft sciences. For that reason, I've included my Reflections on that document in this portfolio. TOP