Ethics of Care and Soft Systems Methodology Employed to Guide a Doctoral Program Redesign

Abstract

For many educational organizations, ensuring students have a positive experience and feel cared for by their degree program faculty is necessary for recruitment and retention, which can be especially important in challenging doctoral programs. Making information easily accessible and up-todate on the website, including the necessary forms, is a simple yet significant way of demonstrating support and care for students as they seek to complete important milestones such as the dissertation. Further, regular communication of expectations with care messages is vital for retention because it builds students’ confidence that department members support their well-being and success. From the perspective that the organization’s behaviors should be moral, it is necessary to show care for students to ensure they can complete a degree. Instructional design should follow a strong learning design theory aligned with desired outcomes. As such, our program redesign was guided by Noddings’ concept of Ethics of Care, which is grounded in a feminist, moral perspective of educational support. The operational enactment of that conception was supported by soft systems methodology, which is focused on understanding and depicting the complexity of human interactions in organizations. This paper presents our attempt to completely redesign a doctoral program to support students to improve their experience by providing improved advising services and academic resources.