יום ב' ,   29.11.2004,   18:00 - 20:00
חדר 496 בנין גילמן

פרופסור יהודה אלקנה - Central European University

"שינויים בתפישת הדוקטורט באירופה ובארה"ב היום"

כחומר רקע להרצאה מומלץ לקרוא את המאמר הבא:

UNMASKING UNCERTAINTIES AND EMBRACING CONTRADICTIONS:
GRADUATE EDUCATION IN THE SCIENCES

FULL TEXT

THE ARGUMENT

1. There is far more fundamental controversy within the sciences than its practitioners are prepared to confront. Doctoral students need to understand that much of modern science still must confront basic epistemological issues of knowledge and knowing. These range from questions of knowledge organization and images of the possible to arguments about method, precision, and rigor. The contradictions and inconsistencies of science must be cherished. Seminars should emphasize the examples of instances where the favored theories simply will not work.
   
   
2. Doctoral education in the sciences must emphasize the personality, character, habits of heart and mind, and general scholarly dispositions of the steward of the discipline. Being a steward of the discipline involves generation, conservation, and transformation (the educational and pedagogical functions of the scientist), as well as understanding the public context of the scientists’ work. Toward this goal, doctoral programs must encourage risktaking and intellectual adventurousness, while fostering the importance of precision and rigor.
   
   
3. The single most significant and pivotal process in science training is finding, choosing, and defining a problem and locating the problem on the larger map of one’s field. Problem choice should be a major focus of the entire doctoral program, a primary responsibility for the candidate to exercise. The program should focus more work—course work, colloquia, formal and informal conversations—on the state of the field and its controversies more generally, always with problem choice at the heart of this work.
   
   
4. Doctoral programs should devote far less attention to work within the boundaries of a discipline’s sub-fields and far more attention to the broader questions of the philosophical, sociological, and methodological contexts of work that combat overspecialization. This must be repeated regularly at all the important choice points in a doctoral program.
   
   
5. Doctoral education needs to “go meta” and encourage and guide the students to step back, look reflectively and critically, contemplate how it might be otherwise, and critically examine the weaknesses of the “mainstream” of the discipline, however well respected and well funded it might be.
   
   
6. Leaders in the disciplines must understand the critical roles of curricular and pedagogical work in their field, how deeply these functions are affected by the same epistemological understandings that relate to the research role. They must recognize, empirically, that most of those who earn the doctorate will spend far more time teaching and engaging with a variety of publics—in industry, policy, and community settings—than they will at the frontiers of science. Doctoral education must equip students to work in these settings.
   
   
7. Science is inexorably intertwined with the world, which today is globalized to an unprecedented degree. Doctoral students must have opportunities to explore the implications of this.
   
   
8. We must be willing to re-think the features of our doctoral program so that we are focusing doing what is necessary to produce stewards of the discipline.

ד"ר ליאו קורי , יו"ר