PRODUCTS

More than a century after William James published his provocative critique The PhD Octopus in 1903, his warnings about the corrupting entanglements between institutions and graduate students remain strikingly relevant.

Doctoral Studies as Educational Industrial Complex revisits James’ concerns through a contemporary lens, offering a critical examination of doctoral education in the field of education in what feels like perennial crisis. Throughout the volume, contributors grapple with the tensions James identified: the obsession with credentials over genuine intellectual work, the “tyrannical machine” of institutional demands, and the misalignment between doctoral preparation and actual career paths.

These tensions are particularly acute in practitioner-oriented EdD programs designed to produce scholar-practitioners who often remain in their local communities rather than entering the academy. Yet research-oriented PhD programs face their own crisis, as they continue to prepare scholars for a tenure-track job market that has dramatically contracted. With only 32% of faculty holding tenured or tenure-track positions in 2023—down from 53% in 1987—the traditional pathway to academic careers has fundamentally eroded.

The book speaks to multiple audiences: faculty who supervise doctoral students and seek to understand the challenges they face; doctoral students navigating alternative program formats and uncertain career prospects; administrators responsible for program design and accreditation; and scholars interested in the future of higher education and professional preparation. By centering faculty expertise and critical analysis rather than external market demands, this volume offers a necessary counter-narrative to prevailing trends in doctoral education reform. Ultimately, this book argues for a reconsideration of what doctoral education should accomplish and for whom, grounding these questions in both historical perspective and contemporary realities.

Hidden in Plain Sight: Women Leaders in the Academy is an essential resource that examines the experiences, challenges, and achievements of women leading in higher education. Written for current and aspiring women academic leaders, it provides the tools, insights, and support needed to navigate this complex terrain successfully.

Hidden in Plain Sight addresses a striking paradox: while many accomplished women hold academic leadership positions, they often remain invisible within their own institutions. Despite occupying roles of authority, women leaders frequently find themselves overlooked, unrecognized, and unheard. This contradiction exposes the gap between institutional claims that leadership is gender-neutral and the reality women face daily in academic settings. Drawing on demographic data, statistical trends, and evidence-based practices, this textbook offers practical guidance grounded in real experience. Readers will find case studies, personal anecdotes, and actionable strategies for advancing in academic leadership while maintaining personal integrity and well-being. The book explores various leadership approaches and identifies common pitfalls, equipping readers with knowledge to navigate challenges effectively.

Hidden in Plain Sight serves as both mirror and map—reflecting the realities women leaders experience while charting pathways forward. It empowers current leaders to advocate for themselves and their institutions while inspiring the next generation to pursue academic leadership with eyes wide open and strategies firmly in hand. This is the guidebook for women determined to lead authentically, effectively, and sustainably in higher education. The book is written about and for women in leadership positions, and for women interested in educational leadership within the academy. It will also be of interest to college, university and public libraries; individuals including scholars in the discipline; and it can serve as a critical textbook in a variety of Leadership classes in undergraduate and graduate programs.

Perfect for courses such as: Women and Leadership; Higher Education Administration; Gender Studies in Education; Educational Leadership and Policy; Sociology of Higher Education; Feminist Theory and Practice; Women's Studies Capstone Seminar; Organizational Behavior in Education; Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education; Professional Development for Graduate Students

The Critical Importance of Teacher Advocacy: Empowered Educators on the Front Lines is a powerful and timely anthology that amplifies the voices of education activists from across the United States who are committed to reimagining what it means to be an educator in today's challenging climate. At its heart, this book is a testament to the unwavering spirit of those who enter the classroom not just to teach, but to make a lasting impact on the lives of their students and the future of our society.

In these pages, readers will find stories of courage, resilience, and resistance—narratives that highlight the importance of holding onto one’s core values amid increasing political, social, and institutional pressures. The educators featured in this compilation don’t just teach curriculum—they build authentic relationships with their students, create inclusive learning environments, and refuse to accept the status quo when it harms the very children they serve.

More than a celebration of individual triumphs, The Critical Importance of Teacher Advocacy serves as a call to view education through a broader societal lens. It urges educators and readers alike to acknowledge how systemic inequities, policy decisions, and cultural narratives shape our schools and the experiences within them. Without this context, burnout is inevitable and attrition becomes a painful norm.

This book also challenges its audience to think beyond immediate outcomes. The fight for justice and equity in education is a long game—one that may not yield tangible change within a single career or even a single lifetime. But these stories affirm that the work must continue. Educators must rise, speak out, organize, and even disrupt unjust systems to protect the very soul of our democracy.

For new teachers, seasoned educators, and anyone invested in the future of public education, The Critical Importance of Teacher Advocacy is both a rallying cry and a source of deep inspiration. The work is hard—but these stories prove that it is always worth it. The book is a valuable teaching tool and textbook in a variety of classes for preservice teachers. It also is a great research tool for scholars working in teacher advocacy.

Walking the Doctoral Trail: A Fully Relatable (and Occasionally Humorous) Guide for Successful Completion and Beyond is not a how-to manual—and that is exactly the point.

For many prospective and current doctoral students, beginning a doctorate is one of the most meaningful, and most underestimated, undertakings of their lives. This book meets doctoral sojourners where they are: curious, hopeful, anxious, determined, sometimes discouraged, and often more alone than expected. Rather than offering a prescriptive formula for “how to finish,” it invites readers into honest reflection, grounded conversation, and realistic preparation and action for the doctoral journey as it is truly lived. Co-authored by three doctoral completers, the book reflects decades of experience walking alongside doctoral students as educators, advisors, and practitioner-scholars who understand the academic and personal demands of doctoral life. Together, the authors offer diverse perspectives without promoting a single theoretical, methodological, or disciplinary stance.

Using the metaphor of a hiking trail, Walking the Doctoral Trail supports doctoral students across disciplines and program structures and acknowledges that journeys differ in terrain and pacing, yet share common challenges and turning points. Organized into seven chapters representing stages of the doctoral journey, each topic includes reflection, guidance, warnings, trail tales, and space for readers’ own notes. Humor—through original cartoons—is woven throughout, reminding readers they are not alone and that completing the hike is achievable.

Ideal for doctoral orientation courses and mentoring conversations, this book offers companionship, perspective, wisdom, and steady encouragement for those committed to walking the doctoral trail to the end. It will be a meaningful gift for someone considering—or beginning—a doctorate program as well! Walking the Doctoral Trail is an invaluable tool for every doctoral student, regardless of the stage that they find themselves in in their program.

Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Doctoral Education; Doctoral Research Seminar; Dissertation/Thesis Proposal Writing; Doctoral Dissertation Seminar; Foundations of Social Science Research; Foundations of Behavioral Science Research; Foundations of Organizational and Leadership Research; Introduction to Educational Research; Doctoral Mentoring and Advising; Inquiry as Practice

Writing as Artistry: EdD Students Learning to Write as Scholarly Practitioners is a timely guidebook that supports EdD students’ scholarly writing development while honoring and amplifying their rich practitioner knowledge and wisdom. EdD students are educational leaders and working professionals transitioning from expert-practitioners to scholarly practitioners who aim to positively transform the lives of students and communities. This resource addresses the significant need for mastering scholarly writing skills required for EdD students’ successful degree completion and real-life impact.

The book’s conceptual approach frames scholarly writing as artistry. This perspective recognizes the work of practitioners as a deeply human and experiential process of solving problems of practice by drawing on prior knowledge and exploring new methods to improve practice. This view champions the idea that practitioners’ professional knowledge and rich prior experience are essential assets and that their insider knowledge is a necessary and key condition for rigorous practitioner inquiry. The authors adopt a critical stance that rejects the dominant notion of technical rationality, which historically views researchers as scholars and practitioners as mere “doers,” arguing instead that building successful experiences for EdD students requires and respects practitioners’ professional knowledge.

The guidebook offers a scaffolded, practical approach to scholarly writing, aiming to guide the reader toward a practice-focused lens, provides practical tools for fostering scholarly writing, and builds students’ confidence as writers. It is centrally focused on developing practice-centered dissertations and culminating projects that align with professional-practice degrees.

To support students throughout the process, the book provides a robust repertoire of writing approaches and strategies. It offers guidance on prewriting techniques for capturing initial ideas and helps students in effectively connecting their ideas with others. Critical to this artistic approach is the development of a unique writer’s voice and positionality, often through the use of reflexivity. The book includes comprehensive practical tools for navigating the often-challenging mechanics of scholarly work, detailing writing feedback and revision strategies, and including a range of templates and clear examples of student work. Furthermore, the guide provides essential advice for leveraging support structures, such as engaging with multiple mentors and critical friends. The guide also prepares students for diverse project types, including individual, collaborative, and alternative dissertation projects.

Ultimately, mastering these skills is a critical way to support students in their work beyond graduation. The ability to write clear, scholarly reports is essential, as the skills learned must transfer from the Dissertation-in-Practice experience to the student's world of practice, thus ensuring real-world impact by enhancing leaders’ capacity to implement evidence-based solutions to complex problems.

From Getting Started to Graduation: A Student Guide to the EdD, a volume in The Coming of Age of the Education Doctorate Series book series, pulls back the curtain on the hidden curriculum of the EdD experience for students, fully supporting their journeys by making what is too often anxious and abstract more clear and concrete. Drawing from years of experience from designing and directing an EdD program, the authors provide an end-to-end playbook for students to draw from as they navigate their own EdD program of choice.

Part I focuses on getting started. The book begins with an establishment of the why behind getting an EdD and how this is a distinct and unique experience unlike other graduate degrees. It pushes readers to think beyond the title, encouraging them to drill down into their core motivation for pursuing not just a degree but a transformative experience. Readers will then learn about finding the match quality between their goals and aspirations and the myriad program choices available to them. Once students have winnowed down their choices and found their fit, they will be coached on how to build survival systems that will help them thrive from the onset to the finish line. This includes learning how to pace themselves, how to lean on friends and family, how to create contingency plans, and how to create helpful constraints that make room for work-life balance. The book closes Part I with helpful tips for time and resource management, as well as how to build routines and habits that allow them to be kind of their future selves.

Part II explicitly explores how to navigate this years-long quest and stay the course. Readers will learn how to get curious and keep that door open across coursework in order to allow for innovative and creative ideas to flourish and eventually lead to fusion—the key to creative thinking. With the door opened to ideas and exploration, the book sets the stage for how to become a scholar-practitioner through key habits of mind such as the what-if and maybe mindset and tackling the tough task of synthesis. Part II ends with the call to team up and to take this winding road together. The EdD experience can be lonely if students go it alone, and the volume explains how and why teaming up is not just nice but necessary to persevere as the way to reach the finish line.

Finally, Part III pivots to helping students survive the intensive thinking, researching, and writing demands of the dissertation. Readers will tap into years of tips and tricks on how to break this mystifying and monstrous project into sizable and achievable small steps that fuel motivation for the long haul so that students avoid burnout during the final push as they near defending their projects and crushing their comps. When finished, EdD students will be able to leverage what is too often hidden from students and draw from the concrete examples, strategies, stories, and templates therein in order to start strong and finish strong.

Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Research; Research Methodology; Introduction to the EdD; The Scholar-Practitioner; Exploring Problems of Practice; Becoming a Change Agent

Beyond Compensation: Empowering Teachers’ Unions to Think Beyond Bread-and-Butter Issues is an incredibly important book that explores the value of union representation of teachers on the front lines of public education. After the 2018 Supreme Court ruling on Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), educators and other union members wondered why they should belong to a union. This book provides an answer and demonstrates that the role of teachers’ unions goes far beyond bread-and-butter issues as shown in the myriad priorities they are involved in. Teachers’ unions today are requesting additional funding for education to improve outcomes for all students—including those who are disadvantaged, as well as racial and ethnic and sexual-minority students and English-language learners. The goal of teachers’ unions is not simply to represent the rights of their members, but rather to improve education on the whole. They are seeking smaller class sizes, safer schools, and the addition of nurses and counselors, issues that go beyond increased pay for teachers. The book explores in detail the role of one teachers’ union, the Washington Teachers’ Union and its parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers, and their priorities as a roadmap for how other teachers’ unions might pursue these goals and the hazards they might face. The author discusses major educational issues such as teacher evaluation, merit pay for teachers, standardized testing, and community schools and warns about the dangers of vouchers and charter schools.

Beyond Compensation is a volume in The Badass Teachers Association Education Series. The series serves to contribute to educators’ and educational leaders’ understandings of the need for teacher education, activism, and leadership in these areas. It will provide a place for future and current educators to learn more about these issues and how they can build their classrooms and communities into the spaces all students deserve. The series consists of print books and e-books for current educators, pre-service teachers, parents, and others in the greater community.

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BOOK:
Scaffolding the Language of Power: An Apprenticeship in Doctoral Level Writing
offers an accessible, practical, hands-on guide to developing the skills needed to successfully write a doctoral dissertation or thesis. This textbook-workbook hybrid can be used both as a program/course text and as a supplement for individual doctoral students in education and related social science and humanities fields.

The book is built on three main ideas. First, writing is fundamentally connected to issues of social justice. Doctoral-level writing is part of the “language of power” in academia, which builds on the linguistic patterns of the dominant culture and serves as a gatekeeping mechanism. Second, writing is genre-based. This means that doctoral level writing is a particular way of using language, or a specific genre, with distinct rules and structures that can be taught. And third, writing can be scaffolded. Approaching writing as a pedagogical act that supports readers’ understanding through purposeful scaffolding is not just a way to successfully complete a doctoral dissertation—it is a way to make academic writing more accessible in general.

WORKBOOK:
The workbook is a supplement to the textbook featuring accompanying activities that are scaffolded and carefully sequenced to help students identify key ideas and generate text that can be used to build out the elements of each major dissertation task (e.g., problem statement, literature review, and so on).

This supplemental workbook contains all the activities from the textbook in expanded form so that students can engage more fully with warm-ups, free-writes, analysis of mentor texts and examples, graphic organizers, and guided writing exercises. These activities are also accompanied with additional free-write prompts as well as bonus discussion questions for extended sense-making.

Individual chapters include:
1. Introduction: A Three-Pronged Approach to Writing at the Doctoral Level.
2. The Rules: Writing as a Pedagogical Act.
3. The Rest of the Rules of the Language of Power.
4. The Problem Statement..
5. The Literature Review.
6. The Theoretical Framework.
7. The Methodology Chapter.
8. The Findings Chapter.
9. The Discussion and Recommendations

This book and workbook combo is appropriate for any course on academic writing in EdD or PhD programs. It is also useful for courses that teach how to write a problem statement, literature review, and/or theoretical framework. Additional courses include: Qualitative Research; Qualitative Practicum/pilot study courses; and Dissertation seminar and support courses.

This workbook is a supplement to the textbook Scaffolding the Language of Power: An Apprenticeship in Doctoral-Level Writing. One of the features of the textbook is accompanying activities that are scaffolded and carefully sequenced to help students identify key ideas and generate text that can be used to build out the elements of each major dissertation task (e.g., problem statement, literature review, and so on). However, these are mainly offered in abbreviated form due to space limitations.

This supplemental workbook contains all the activities from the textbook in expanded form so that students can engage more fully with warm-ups, free-writes, analyses of mentor texts and examples, graphic organizers, and guided writing exercises. These activities are also accompanied with additional free-write prompts as well as bonus discussion questions for extended sense-making.

Individual chapters include:
1. Introduction: A Three-Pronged Approach to Writing at the Doctoral Level. This chapter provides discussion questions that help students make meaning of the three key ideas of the three main ideas that inform the book: critical perspectives on language, systemic functional linguistics, and sociocultural theory/scaffolding. Additional free-writing prompts are included that help students make personal connections to these ideas from their past and present experiences.
2. The Rules: Writing as a Pedagogical Act. This chapter provides discussion questions and personal connection prompts for the first “rule” of the Language of Power framework: doctoral writing is organized and scaffolded. Exercises are then provided for readers to practice five different organization and scaffolding strategies, including headings/chunking, road maps, topic sentences, signal phrases, and transitions/connectors.
3. The Rest of the Rules of the Language of Power. This chapter explores the remaining five rules of the “Language of Power” framework. Discussion questions and personal connection prompts are provided for each rule. Exercises are provided that help students practice key skills, including making well-reasoned arguments, identifying and using compelling evidence, writing with specificity and detail, synthesizing information, and developing original voice.
4. The Problem Statement. This chapter provides discussion questions regarding the problem statement and its purposes: to explain the problem, convince the reader that the issue is indeed a problem, and describe how the proposed study will begin to address that problem. Exercises are provided that help students articulate the particular problem that will be driving their study, with graphic organizers that break down each part of the problem statement, including the problem summary, the problem background, the rationale of the study, and the purpose statement. Writing activities are also provided that help students take the text generated from these organizers, craft them into problem statement sections, and edit them.
5. The Literature Review. This chapter provides discussion questions and personal connection prompts relating to the purposes and processes of the literature review. Activities and tools are provided for article analysis and pre-writing, as well as exercises in which readers analyze exemplars for writing moves. Graphic organizers and writing exercises are provided to help students create an overall schema for their literature review, identify and articulate gaps in the literature, build out levels of claims, and select and summarize exemplars.
6. The Theoretical Framework. This chapter provides discussion questions and personal connection prompts regarding the theoretical foundation of the dissertation and its purposes. Graphic organizers and writing exercises are provided to help students craft a rationale for using the framework, define their theories or perspectives, provide a background of the theory or theories, and discuss the key concepts of the framework.
7. The Methodology Chapter. This chapter provides activities that help students think through and describe their research design in clear and detailed terms. Exercises and graphic organizers are provided that help readers generate a description of their their methodology, participants and setting, data sources and procedures, analysis methods, trustworthiness, and positionality. Additional exercises are offered to help students map connections between their methodology, theoretical framework, and study purpose to ensure a coherent design.
8. The Findings Chapter. This chapter provides warm-ups and discussion questions for building out the “results” chapter of the dissertation. Activities and exercises help readers create an overarching organizational structure for their findings, anchor them with major assertions, support those claims with compelling evidence, and provide analytic explanation. Additional activities are provided to help students reflect on the ways that they purposefully scaffold their readers’ understanding throughout the chapter and the ways that they meet the trustworthiness criteria they created for themselves in the previous chapter.
9. The Discussion and Recommendations Chapter. This chapter provides discussion prompts to help students think through the purposes of the discussion and recommendations sections of the dissertation and begin generating text for both. Activities and graphic organizers support students to develop conclusions based on the findings, connect their findings and conclusions to extant literature, generate theoretical readings of their findings and conclusions, and draw out recommendations for addressing the initial problem they identified in the first chapter. Final exercises help students generate main take-aways and contributions, which they will use to develop their dissertation conclusion and abstract.

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“If you want to achieve tenure, you should know a bit more about what it means and why it exists, and its benefits. All too often, even faculty don’t understand why tenure is important."

Thus begins the Preface of the first edition of Candid Advice for New Faculty Members, the most comprehensive “how to” guide for graduate students, post-docs, and junior faculty across a variety of academic disciplines. Now, in the Second Edition of this award-winning volume, Marybeth Gasman has added a variety of new topics, including teaching in a post-COVID environment, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in writing and research, new views of DEI, navigating our new politic world, managing your social media and many other important and timely topics. Drawing upon her own extensive experiences and that of many colleagues, Gasman provides you with an incredibly valuable tool for attaining tenure and for the things that you should do to advance your academic career. She provides practical (and sometimes humorous) advice about a range of topics, including:

• negotiating job offers
• planning a research agenda
• improving your teaching skills
• managing service
• advising students
• applying for research grants
• achieving life/work balance
• managing academic politics