Mission, Vision, Guiding Principles

The mission of the Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership:

Facilitate experiences that cultivate dedicated leaders who rely on reason and evidence to act on issues of excellence, equity, and agency in educational settings.

The program vision is:

Scholarly practitioners partnering toward making the world a better place.

The mission and vision inform our fundamental program guiding principles listed below:

• Principle 1: Framed around questions of equity, ethic of care, and social justice to develop evolving strategies and approaches to complex problems of practice.
• Principle 2: Preparing scholarly practitioners who can construct and apply knowledge to make a positive difference in the lives of individuals, families, organizations, and communities.
• Principle 3: Providing opportunities for practitioners to develop and demonstrate collaboration and communication skills to work with diverse communities and to build partnerships.
• Principle 4: Engaging practitioners in their context of practice in inquiry-based activities that use multiple perspectives to develop authentic, innovative, results-oriented solutions and/or outcomes.
• Principle 5: Grounded in and designed to develop professional knowledge that integrates practitioner and research-based knowledge that links theory with systemic and systematic inquiry.
• Principle 6: Preparing leaders to be scholarly practitioners and leaders in education who can generate, develop, apply, and transform knowledge and practice.