COURSE DESCRIPTION:
This course provides a strong embarkation to the doctoral program and a framework for students’ development as scholar-practitioners (no matter their individual starting point). The course provides an opportunity to engage with the scholar-practitioner role and identity, preview key doctoral competencies required for success in the program and encounter various modes of research inquiry and concrete examples of same. The course also provides opportunities to make powerful peer connections with fellow students and faculty, to enter the culture of HOD, and to locate myriad resources that will facilitate success on the program. The course will feature a combination of collective readings/exercises with opportunities to pursue personal scholar-practitioner interests.

COURSE LEARNING OBJECTIVES (COMPETENCIES):
1) Reflect on the nature, possibilities, and challenges of the scholar-practitioner role and locate your own identity and aspirations.
2) Show awareness of key doctoral competences and identify your own priorities for skill development.
3) Envision a personal research interest and develop this through a series of steps.
4) Distinguish between key modes of research inquiry (quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, and participative approaches) and apply this to a research interest.
5) Discuss a personal research interest in depth through the lens of a selected mode of research inquiry.

Systems thinking and analysis provide a lens for making sense of the world that transcends psychology, the individual, and particular entities in isolation. Systems thinking also goes beyond awareness of context to explore relationships and inter-relationships at a given time (system structures), and as they change over time (system dynamics). While systems can be examined at many levels, starting with a family, our course will focus on organizational and community systems, and also explore larger systems that shape our experience today and our possible futures. These larger systems include cultural and technological systems, including artificial intelligence, and digital systems that shape our personal and economic lives on a daily basis.

We will read some thinkers that provide foundations for these ideas to provide a basis for seminar discussion and exploration. Students will have an opportunity to explore and bring for discussion specific systems that are relevant to their own exploration and intellectual concerns.

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This course builds on the foundational systems concepts, models, principles, and practices covered in introductory courses to this area (pre-requisites include any of the following: HOD-806, ELC-724, IECD-566, or equivalent in MEDIA). It emphasizes non-reductionist and nonlinear ways of knowing, and explores the relations and interconnections that allow any complex adaptive system (CAS) to sustain itself while adapting to and cohering with changing, often turbulent, environments. Through the identification and exploration of auto-catalytic and cross-catalytic feedback cycles in eco-sociotechnical systems, we will familiarize ourselves first with the dynamics of classical autopoietic systems, and then with the emerging understanding at the forefront of systems research on sympoietic systems.

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Judgment and decision-making are universal processes—pervasive across disciplines, professions, and everyday life—shaping how individuals, groups, and organizations confront problems and choose courses of action. This course examines how people reason, exercise judgment, and make decisions within diverse contexts, from personal choices to complex organizational dilemmas. It explores how heuristics, biases, emotions, and situational factors influence problem formation, decision processes, and outcomes.

experiential research using quantitative design, methods, analysis.