Developing New Academic Programs

Northeastern's sights are set on offering a doctoral program in Urban Education in Fall 2024.

Upon meeting Kamau Rashid, one immediately senses his passion for his work and for supporting students. As an “educator’s educator,” he has guided and mentored scholar-practitioners through their doctoral programs for over a decade. He’s currently collaborating with an internal Northeastern committee and an external community advisory group to develop a new doctoral program in Urban Education.

Rashid hopes to enroll 15 doctoral candidates in the first year of the four-year program. The program’s mission and several iterations of curricula and program design have been drafted. Course development and admission policies are advancing as well. He and his team worked with CiTTA Partnership, a Chicago-based consulting firm that specializes in helping nonprofits add new revenue streams. Their insights are helping Rashid and his team examine the program with attention to current educational and job market trends.

He explained the program would not be one that would provide licensure for principalship or superintendentency. Rather, this program would serve a wide range of people interested in deeply examining educational issues from a variety of angles.

“This program will be focused to serve a range of people who are situated in the context of education and leadership in the urban milieu,” Rashid said. “They might already be working in higher education. This program would provide deep, rich and informed insights in terms of how one can improve communities and structures within the institution that they operate.”

With experience as an advisor to doctoral candidates, Rashid emphasized the necessity to support students through the process.

“We need to engage very holistically with developing the students as whole human beings, not just as learning automatons,” Rashid said.

As a student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Rashid credited his dissertation advisor, William Trent, with helping him recognize how the journey to a doctorate “commingles the professional and the personal.”

“When I met with my advisor, we would spend the first third of the meeting talking about families and marriage, being husbands, being fathers,” Rashid said. “The meeting didn’t start with, ‘Oh, I read your latest draft of chapter three.’ It was always, ‘How’s your family doing?’”

Creating an atmosphere of community in the program and during the dissertation phase will be vital to retaining students.

“I think the dissertation phase is a very lonely stage for many people,” Rashid said. “You’re not in class anymore; you’re often not seeing the professors anymore. You’re doing something that takes a lot of time. Your family, your co-workers, they don’t know what you’re doing. Some program models have been very effective at creating that sense of community. That sense of community is key in terms of people’s persistence to graduate.”

Rashid envisions a holistic program where students and faculty truly get to know each other and support one another. His ideas are similar to those of Jacob H. Carruthers, who pioneered the development of both Northeastern’s undergraduate and graduate programs in Urban Community Studies.

“In his paper, ‘Towards the Discipline of Inner City Studies,’ what Dr. Carruthers was essentially attempting to argue was that an inner city studies program should facilitate a different type of disciplinary approach, a very holistic approach to studying urban community,” Rashid said. “That has been inherently a part of how I thought about creating this doctoral program. It’s not something that’s bound within any particular disciplinary structure; but one that carries this work out through multidisciplinary lenses.”

What he was attempting to argue, essentially … is what the program should facilitate is a different type of disciplinary approach, a very holistic approach to studying urban community. And that has been inherently a part of how I thought about creating the doctoral program.