Clean on the outside? Professional doctorate students researching practice or washing dirty linen?

Research-in-progress.We are exercised by tensions in researching our own practice at doctoral level. We are both experienced academics in HE and we have both completed EdDs. This paper is intended to raise issues with a view to in the longer term contributing to a literature that supports professional doctoral students' methodologies.Interviewing current professional doctoral students and practitioners who completed professional doctorates recently in Education and in Social Work. We ask1. How does practitioners' research on the professional doctorate relate to practitioners' work? 2. What benefits of insider research do practitioner doctoral students experience? 3. What challenges do insider research pose to practitioner doctoral students?This next phase is to be conducted with care so as not to exploit or compromise our informants. We will interview a theoretical sample of 12 people, identified through previous research by Linda Heath (2006) to exemplify a range of positions of professional doctoral students: men and women teaching in schools, FE and HE at different levels of seniority; and social workers.We aim to build theory by developing a phenomenology of the student experience of research as a professional doctoral student. The paper, which is intended to promote discussion, will include case studies exemplifying the issues involved including our own methodological and ethical challenges. If, as we suspect may happen, methodological themes become distinct from experiential themes, these will be considered separately.