PhD Mission
The PhD in Education at UC Davis has at its core a fundamental concern with impacting the practice of education: through research, through scholarly engagement, through public service, and through graduate training. Our work not only has implications for educational practice, but our faculty and graduate students are directly engaged on a local and regional level, as well as on the larger stage of national and international educational reform and policy. The program seeks to address contemporary challenges, particularly unprecedented levels of cultural and linguistic diversity, and to go beyond the more specialized and fragmented concerns of traditional schools of education. In particular, the PhD program prepares educators to use rigorous research and theory to define and frame educational problems so they can be addressed appropriately, and to merge research and practice effectively in ways that will improve public education. The program is designed to prepare a broad range of professionals in the field of education, including the professoriate, new teacher education faculty, educational researchers, and leaders for educational institutions. Because our program structure, which relies on the interdisciplinarity of the Graduate Group in Education (GGE) and permeable emphasis areas within the SOE, emphasizes interconnected approaches and knowledge, our PhD students come away with a deep systemic understanding of educational complexity—drawing on curricular, cultural and linguistic, cognitive, institutional, and policy perspectives.