The PhD in Mathematics Education aims to build on the success and potential of existing research programs at UMass Dartmouth, particularly those situated in the Kaput Center, and to contribute to the campus's mission to "develop graduate programs in areas of importance for our region" and "support sub-disciplinary graduate programs where departments already have strength… and when there is a demand for graduates."

The primary purpose of the program is to produce stewards of the discipline, as defined by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in its Initiative on the Doctorate: "to educate and prepare those to whom we can entrust the vigor, quality, and integrity of the field." Moreover, its explicit interdisciplinary approach is intended to address specific challenges identified by the Carnegie Initiative (Walker, Golde, Jones et al., 2008). These challenges involve new technologies in "altering and accelerating the way new knowledge is shared and developed" (p. 2), a vision of a global marketplace for scholarship, and recognition that "much of the most important, path-breaking intellectual work going on today occurs in the borderlands between fields, blurring boundaries and challenging traditional disciplinary definitions" (p. 2). Our program pays particular attention to how curricular and research components can be integrated systematically to connect students' learning to faculty scholarship and thereby provide authentic learning experiences that produce graduates with strong research skills. We are guided by a metaphor of apprenticeship as a "theory of learning and a set of practices that are widely relevant" (p. 91); the activity of apprenticing encompasses and strengthens all curricular and research components of the program.

The doctoral program is synergistically linked to the Kaput Center through common goals and approaches. Much more than a collection of projects, the Center is an intellectual community that fosters "intellectual risk taking, creativity, and entrepreneurship" (see Walker et al., 2008, p.11) and, in the spirit of the Carnegie Initiative's formation of scholars, offers incubation through which a doctoral program can provide "real partnerships between faculty and students, habits of respect for and interest in one another's work, and the lively exchange of ideas in which new knowledge is formed and transformed" (p. 11). The research of the Math Ed faculty within the Center provides a core strength for the doctoral program and establishes its uniqueness through avenues of authentic learning with other academic institutions and non-academic partners.

The PhD program in Mathematics Education is designed to embrace the future with scientific education as the sustaining foundation of what has been called the century of information and knowledge. Globally and nationally, we have the critical ability to transfuse scientific and technological developments into our educational realities. Heretofore lacking in technology-rich environments and teachers trained in effective pedagogies, today's school culture requires the gradual but deep re-orientation of its practices to gain access to powerful ideas of mathematics and to new habits of mind including exploring, modeling, handling of information, and the ability to systematize. It is possible to cultivate powerful ideas that generate different levels of mathematical thinking both at the level of the classroom and at the level of the global educational system, to create an open system responsive to the multidimensional influences of its social and cultural environment.