Scaffolding the Language of Power

This volume extends the interactive and supportive approach of the original Scaffolding the Language of Power to the unique genre demands of the Dissertation in Practice (DiP), the capstone of the Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED)-aligned Education Doctorate. Like its predecessor, the book is grounded in three interconnected commitments: doctoral writing as social justice, as genre, and as scaffolding. However, in this edition, original author Kathryn Strom teams up with CPED Executive Director Jill Alexa Perry to reimagine that framework for scholarly practitioners with professional knowledge, practical wisdom, and contextual change agendas that are central to the work of the dissertation.

The book’s unique design features stem from our understanding of the DiP as a distinct form of doctoral inquiry oriented toward understanding, improving, and leading change within a specific practice context and in service of particular communities. Accordingly, this volume emphasizes the dual-audience nature of the DiP: although students write to their committee first, DiP work simultaneously needs to serve a practitioner/professional community. To achieve that, for example, scaffolds for organization, headings, and topic sentences are framed not only as tools for writing, but also for producing writing that is accessible to multiple audiences beyond academia. Second, the book maintains a practice-to-improvement arc, reminding readers throughout that their writing is building toward something that they will be implementing, evaluating, and acting on. Third, the book is written to honor the highly contextual nature of the DiP, helping writers achieve the specificity needed to make local work understandable and transferable to readers in other settings. Finally, the volume explicitly affirms a scholar-practitioner identity, positioning professional knowledge in dialogue with scholarly knowledge rather than as something requiring academic legitimization.

These design features support readers while guiding them to complete the specific tasks of the dissertation in practice, which includes articulating a problem of practice grounded in organizational urgency and stakeholder impact; constructing a review of scholarly and professional knowledge; and using that literature to create a theory of action and contextual plan of intervention. The book focuses on applied research, with specific guidance for three methodologies most common to CPED-aligned programs, Action Research, Improvement Science, and Program/Practice Evaluation. As in the original volume, each chapter follows a carefully sequenced structure that includes warm-up reflections, explicit instruction in the genre's linguistic moves, annotated modeling, and scaffolded exercises that build systematically toward independent writing. Many examples are drawn from CPED-aligned dissertations, giving readers models that reflect the scholarship of practice central to their own doctoral work.

Ultimately, the book provides an affirmative apprenticeship that honors practitioners' existing expertise while making visible the often-hidden rules of academic writing, helping scholarly practitioners build confidence in their writing and facilitating the dissemination of impact in service of local change.