Joint Program in English and Education (JPEE): Program Overview
The Joint Ph.D. Program in English and Education prepares students with prior teaching experience to assume positions as professors of English and/or professors of Education. The Program emphasizes research traditions and methods appropriate to study in the discipline of English as well as those customarily followed in the study of educational issues; because of this, the Program is interdisciplinary in character, and students have the opportunity to take a broad range of courses in English and education, and others outside those fields.
What is the Program really like?
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One of the Program's chief strengths is the consistent and supportive colleagueship that has developed among students and faculty. The Program has helped its many highly qualified students achieve a satisfying, rich doctoral experience; in large part because it offers mature graduate students the flexibility they need to achieve their own aims in a demanding intellectual environment. Current students will gladly explain their experience. A recent issue of the Program newsletter, Dimensions and Directions, is available upon request.
See what our graduates are doing.
Traditionally, graduates of the Program have obtained jobs in: (a) university English departments focusing on rhetoric and composition or on English education (b) university departments of education, teaching methods courses, adolescent literature, or literacy courses. Some graduates have found joint appointments in English departments and Schools of Education. Others have assumed supervisory roles in state departments of education, in intermediate school districts, and in independent schools. The Program’s placement rate is excellent; please take a moment to view a list of our alumni and their current positions.
Joint Program in English and Education
"One of the things that makes our program particularly unique is that it brings together a discipline in the humanities and a discipline in the social sciences," says Professor Anne Gere. "What you get as a result of that particular combination is an unusually rich mixture, both conceptually and methodologically."
"It’s designed for people who are ready to make a career change," adds Gere. "They go from being a high school English teacher, say, to becoming a university professor of English or education. Or they go from someone who has been teaching writing, often as a lecturer or adjunct, to being someone who is a tenure-track professor. The preparation that students get here combines the humanistic tradition of rhetoric with the educational tradition of literacy studies, so these people are unusually well prepared."
Professor Lesley Rex cites a recently completed dissertation by Victoria Haviland, now a research associate, as an example of how the program’s students put that preparation at society’s service.
"She was interested in studying why it was so difficult for white female teachers, especially those beginning their professional lives, to talk with their students about issues of race and multiculturalism," Rex says. "Coming from her own experience as a white female teacher who had had that kind of difficulty, she discovered there wasn’t anything in the literature that would be helpful for beginning teachers. She set up her own study and found there were ways in which these teachers were talking to students that undermined having in-depth and relevant and potentially transforming discussions about race and multiculturalism. It contributes significantly to understanding why we’re having such a difficult time improving the study of multicultural issues in the classroom in this country."
"The joint program really allowed me to follow my own path in terms of designing a program that worked for me," says Haviland. "I was able to make choices much more freely among a range of courses within English and Education, and the humanities focus that I got through the English part led me to take anthropology classes and other kinds of research classes that are the exact same things that I ended up using in my dissertation."
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