Welcome to the Faculty of Education at the University of Windsor.
The University of Windsor is collaborating with Lakehead University and Brock University to offer you a rich doctoral program in Educational Studies that draws upon the combined teaching and research expertise of our faculty members. In this pandemic context, and in the interest of everyone’s health and safety, these seminars will proceed virtually.
Our instructors have been working hard to convert their courses to be remotely delivered from July. Although all participants will undoubtedly miss the valued face-to-face interactions with these experts and with one another, I am confident that you will explore and challenge long-established ideas and ideologies that impact education. Your efforts this summer will help you to generate new knowledge and directions in research, enhance your professional practice, and engage you in diverse partnerships locally, nationally, or internationally.
Doctoral work is undeniably challenging. These summer seminars are particularly intense, and likely more so in the current context with its many accompanying stresses, but they also have the potential to be liberating. The great educational philosopher Maxine Greene, drawing from Kierkegaard some 150 years earlier, wrote about such difficult intellectual work as that which can move us beyond the bland routinization of life toward critical awareness of present conditions, a sense of moral agency, and a conscious engagement with, and larger sense of responsibility for, an ever changing and problematic world. So, as I welcome you to this particular stage of your PhD journey, I also encourage you to remember that as the work gets difficult, the pay-off is a kind of intellectual emancipation or an awakening that few who complete the PhD journey would ever say they regret.
We had been looking forward to hosting in person the 2020 Joint PhD Program doctoral seminars here along the Detroit River on the traditional territory of the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations. It is our hope that, once the pandemic has passed, you will find an opportunity to explore in person our University of Windsor campus and all that this beautiful region has to offer. In the meantime, we wish you good health, safety, and an excellent educational experience over the summer.
Respectfully,
Ken Montgomery, Dean
