Posts ⁂ The Postmodern Terminal >_
De Kock's five movements turn a professional frustration into a defined problem, a disciplined inquiry, and something a community can actually use.
Embodied wisdom is a fine phrase, and fine phrases have a way of staying aspirational. De Kock does not let it. I will argue that his sequence of movements converts practice-based research from a mood into a design. I will walk the five movements: decide and define, gather and interpret, identify and ideate, create and innovate, compose and defend. Then I will name the three layers a project has to hold together if it is going to hold at all.
Deciding and defining comes first, and most students begin one step earlier than they think. They begin with a passion: leadership, discipleship, racial justice, educational innovation, trauma-informed ministry, congregational change, public theology. A passion is good. A passion is not a project. The project starts when the passion becomes a defined problem in a specific setting. What exactly is not working? Who is affected? What evidence says this is a real problem rather than a personal frustration? What changes if it gets addressed?
Taking context seriously is the whole discipline here. A problem of practice lives somewhere, with people, history, resources, constraints, power dynamics, and inherited assumptions attached. Description is not filler you write to reach a page count; it is the foundation of responsible interpretation. Misdescribe the context and you will misdesign the intervention, reliably and expensively.
Gathering and interpreting comes second. Evidence in practice-based research may be interviews, focus groups, observations, artifacts, policy documents, reflective journals, case studies, or institutional records. The aim is not to collect everything; the aim is to collect what deepens your grasp of the problem. Interpretation then asks what patterns, tensions, and surprises have shown up uninvited. The literature review does real work at this stage, helping you name what kind of problem you are actually holding. Theological? Pedagogical? Leadership? Cultural? Systems? Usually several at once, stacked, and the literature is how you tell the layers apart.
The third movement, identifying and ideating, is where the project turns generative. You begin to imagine a response: a model, a process, an intervention, a curriculum, a tool, a framework, a pilot, a change strategy. In a professional practice dissertation the research does not stop at analysis. It moves toward an artifact or an action that can be tested, interpreted, and improved.
That is what "actionable" buys you. An actionable dissertation does not conclude by saying here is what I learned. It says here is what this learning makes possible. And the action has to emerge from the research rather than being decided in month one and defended afterward, which is the most common way these projects go quietly wrong.
De Kock is careful about innovation, and I want to sit on his care for a moment. Innovation is not novelty for its own sake, and it is not whatever happens to be trendy, technological, or marketable. In professional practice, innovation means a thoughtful and faithful response to a real problem. Sometimes it looks like a new model. Sometimes it looks like recovering a neglected wisdom. Sometimes it looks like naming a hidden assumption so plainly that a community can finally act differently. All three count.
Composing and defending still matters. The dissertation shows how the problem was defined, how the literature shaped the inquiry, how the method was chosen, how evidence was gathered and interpreted, and how the contribution emerged. It is not merely a report; it is the written form of a longer process of embodied learning.
So think in three layers. The problem of practice, the scholarly conversation, the contribution. Strong projects connect all three. Clear problem with thin literature goes anecdotal. Strong literature with vague context goes abstract. Creative contribution without evidence goes premature. The discipline is keeping problem, scholarship, and contribution talking to each other.
One exercise, and it is harder than it looks. Write your project in a single sentence: in this context, this group faces this problem, and my research will explore this question to develop this contribution. The sentence will be wrong. Write it anyway; it forces context, problem, inquiry, and action into the same breath. The dissertation is the evidence of your formation. The formation is the point.
The Postmodern Terminal >_