My goal is to improve the design practice of teachers who are engaged in designing learning materials in underserved communities around the world. By operating from a notion that design is not primarily scientific (Nelson & Stolterman, 2012; Simon, 1969), I believe that there is a need to develop well-grounded and rigorous design methods and techniques that will aid teachers engaged in instructional design in the these non-mainstream educational contexts. My scholarship takes a value-oriented approach directed towards positive social change (Carspecken, 1996; Horkheimer, 1972 ). My primary goal is to work towards reducing educational inequalities typically faced by underserved communities around the world. 

 

The best way to pursue my research agenda is by working in a research position at a leading Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) that advocates equitable education for the underserved population around the globe. During the last decade, NGOs have been played a prominent role in promoting equitable education. More specifically, NGOs have been recognized by the United Nations Education For All initiative, as a competitive alternative education provider, and a strong advocate in improving the quality of education among the underserved (UNICEF, 2014).

 

In this statement, I detail the competencies that I have amassed within the categories of research, teaching, and service.

 

Research

In my scholarly work, instead of focusing directly on the end products used for digital inclusion learning interventions, I decided to back up to ask questions of how current interventions are designed (e.g., teaching and learning strategies, digital tools, persons involved in the inclusion process, etc.). During that process I found out that designers played an important role in the resulting outcomes of the technology use.

 

Consequently, my research now focuses on understanding the role of the designer in the design process. I take on a descriptive approach in situating myself as a researcher and am specifically focused in studying non-professional designers such as teachers and community leaders who are not a designer by profession but are very much embedded in the design of digital inclusion learning interventions. 

 

I have conducted literature reviews on the efforts made in the area of digital inclusion, the tools used for digital inclusion interventions, the design of digital inclusion interventions, and the design process of designers. These literature reviews represent iterative steps from the focus on products backward to the designers of the programs and products. From these iterative steps I have taken in conducting my literature reviews, my research interest has primarily focused on the role of the designer. 

 

To gain a deeper understanding in this arena, in my first authored study I have attempted to view high school teachers as designers and understand their design process as they adapt a new technological intervention in their teaching practice. From this study, I find that teachers are central to the design process, and their designerly actions can be characterized as that of a designer. The findings from this study intimate the need for a deeper understanding of design practice of teachers. A deeper understanding of design practice of teachers will eventually aid in understanding the larger issues typically faced during the design process of educational interventions in underserved communities around the world. 

 

I envision myself to be working directly with NGOs and changing practices of NGOs in situ. Based on the literature on the efforts made towards digital inclusion learning interventions (Madon et al., 2009; Mitra & Rana, 2001; Selwyn & Facer, 2007; Warschauer, 2004), I have come to identify an evident lack of research on design, especially pertaining to the design practice of persons embedded in designing these learning interventions. This designerly perspective is often neglected in the traditional instructional design literature, with few exceptions (Boling, 2008; Korkmaz & Boling, 2014; Yanchar & Gabbitas, 2011). Therefore, I situate myself in this area of research on design, so as to be able to make an impact in empowering teachers as designers to develop a comprehensive view of designerly knowledge in becoming change agents in their own right. 

 

To further build on my research experience, I have actively participated in Professor Elizabeth Boling’s Design Research and Dr. Leftwich's Technology Integration research group.

 

In Professor Boling's Design Research group, I have come to understand the seminal readings on design research, and I have also assisted with the group’s study on instructional design practitioners. I believe this research group has helped me refine my own independent research. Equally important, my participation in this group continues to immerse me in the line of research on design, while linking research to practice.

In Dr. Leftwich's group, I have helped the research group in refining our research scope in terms of technology integration for learning. We presented the collected synopsis of our research rationale at the 2014 IST Conference Research Group Symposium. Through this research group I was given the opportunity to take on my first-authored study in understanding the design process of high school teachers who were using a new technological intervention in their teaching practices.

 

In addition to my involvement in these two research groups, I am also collaborating with Dr. Curtis J. Bonk and Ms. Najia Sabir in a Global Initiatives study. In this project I am investigating on how teachers design instruction using transformative learning as a tool to enhance teaching and learning among their students. I believe this study takes me a step closer to understanding the design practice of teachers and their role in facilitating a global classroom. 

 

I believe that I have gained firm grounding for the more specialized knowledge I am going to pursue. Part of this grounding stems in part, from marrying my professional experience to the theoretical understanding of the field. More specifically, I am referring to my work experience as an Instructional Consultant at the University of Texas at El Paso, and from the classes I have taken at the IST doctoral program at IU over these past three years.

 

To aid in my knowledge of methods in inquiry, I have taken R690 Application of Research Methods to IST Issues and Y502 Intermediate Statistics Applied to Education. I have enrolled in Y612 Critical Qualitative Inquiry for the fall of 2014 and am currently enrolled in the second set of Y613 Critical Qualitative Inquiry this semester. I also realize that knowledge of the inquiry process is a lifelong endeavor. As such, I will continue to expand and refine my inquiry skill base in the coming year and decades.

 

To date, I believe that I have acquired an understanding on the seminal knowledge in the field of IST (see White Paper). I have completed all my IST coursework in the fall of 2014, and am currently taking courses (R795 & R799) as part of the process of preparing for my dissertation proposal (see pilot prospectus) which I intend to defend in the fall of 2015.

 

Teaching

My teaching experiences have prepared me for the kind of teaching role I envision myself to be involved in an NGO. The kinds of teaching practices I’ve concentrated on are brief and highly focused presentations, as well as, one-on-one training and mentoring. Therefore, I have made it my business to gain additional practice in this area.

 

Working as an instructional consultant at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), I was responsible for designing several online and face-to-face workshops for faculty. These workshops were aimed at developing online course development and teaching skills for faculty who were new to teaching and designing online courses. In addition, I was the liaison instructional consultant for the Graduate School of Nursing. In this position, I provided one-on-one training and mentoring for nursing faculty with regards to designing and teaching online courses. I had the opportunity to collaborate with a nursing professor to conduct research on social networking and online learning. I was also fortunate to share the results of our study with UTEP faculty as well as at the 2011 E-Learn Conference and the 2012 Online Learning Conference at San Antonio, Texas.

 

At IU, I have assisted Dr. Tom Brush in teaching the graduate online R711 class. I assisted Dr. Brush with facilitating the online discussions and grading. In the spring of 2013, I was invited to give a lecture on the digital divide at a graduate level social informatics Z542 course on "International Information Issues." I also delivered talks at both the W200 course for pre-service teachers, and for a teacher education course on “Using Children’s and Adolescent Literature in the Classroom.” 

 

The teaching experiences I’ve gained so far prepare me to present and facilitate workshops and talks in my particular research and professional interest areas, and the IST field at large. The teaching roles I have assumed at IU are indicative of my research interest in research on design and digital learning interventions.

 

I have been teaching multiple sections of the undergraduate W200: Using Computers in Education this past year. As part of my associate instructor role, I am heavily involved in collaborating with my other associate instructors in redesigning the course content, and more specifically involved in redesigning the course content on the digital divide and emerging technologies. My goal as a teacher in this class is to use the knowledge and vicarious experiences I’ve gained from my previous research and teaching, and use it to provide pre-service teachers with the necessary skills set and knowledge set in developing designerly skills, as they prepare to design instruction for the 21st century learner.

 

Service

 

I consider service to be equally as important as research and teaching in my growth as a scholar. I believe that developing a sense of collegiality is a crucial element in preparing myself for a service-oriented position.

 

In terms of my service to the IST community, I was the president of the Graduates Students in Instructional Technology (GIST) student organization in 2013. My role was to provide overall leadership for GIST, coordinate general membership, and preside over executive committee meetings. In 2012, I also assumed the position of Vice President for Socials and Professional Development in GIST where my role was to plan, coordinate, and host GIST social and professional development activities, with the goal of creating events that stimulated fellowship and provided professional and recreational opportunities for students, both distance and residential.

 

As part of my IST fellowship, my service as the Distance Coordinator was to support faculty in IST with developing and managing their online courses on Oncourse. In addition, I managed the IST School of Education website. My service to the department, also extended in offering my qualitative research skills in assisting Dr. Tom Brush and Dr. Gamze Ozogul in the IST Program Evaluation study. Outside of IST, I have been appointed as the IST student representative at the Graduate Professional Student Organization (GPSO). My role as the graduate student representative had me participate in the discussion of policies concerning graduate student fee remission and health insurance.

 

Even before coming to Indiana University, I have had a long and eventful history of using my professional skills in a service context. As an example, I have served as a reviewer for the journal of Computers and Education in 2011. The following year, I reviewed proposals for the 2012 AERA Conference in Vancouver, Canada and at the AERA Conference that year, I served as a discussant for the SIG in Constructivism and will be serving as a discussant and chair for the 2015 AERA meeting in Chicago this year.

 

In addition, I served as the E-Learn Conference Presider for one key session. I also took on a leadership role in organizing the IST Conference (2013, 2014). Finally, I have been involved in the annual international conference hosted by AECT; which many faculty and students in IST annually attend. For instance, I have represented IST at the annual 2013 and 2014 AECT conferences, and have reviewed proposals for 2014 AECT Convention and served as a volunteer for the 2013 AECT Conference.

 

Primary Focus Area

My primary focus area is in research on design, which is contextualized in the area of informing design practice of teachers who are engaged in designing instructional materials that aide in the process of social equity and access.

 

Toward this end, I will be collaborating with the Water Hands and Hope Non-Governmental organization (NGO), an organization that is closely working with the local ministry of education officials and the local Na Wokabaut NGO. The two NGO’s play a critical role in delivering prosthetic hands, clean water, and sanitation education to the people in the Jiwaka and Western Highlands provinces of Papua New Guinea.

 

I will be embarking on an emergent design fit methodological multi-site extrinsic case study (see pilot prospectus) in the Western highlands of Papua New Guinea in the summer of 2015. An emergent design methodology is a research process where the outcome is not determined. The design of the research gets shaped based on the results that derive from the data that is collected from the pilot phase of the study (Patton, 2002). This research design is by design a phased research, which will be divided into two phases. The first phase being my pilot study where my research intent is two-fold; one to describe the design practice of elementary school teachers and the second to conduct a participatory action research project of facilitating elementary school teachers in the design of water and sanitation curricula.

 

The second phase of the study will ensue only after I have analyzed the data from the first phase. Emergent designs have been reported as strengthening the validity and rigor of the study and can give rise to meaningful discovery and generation of research questions (Patton, 2002; Suter, 2011). As part of the emergent design fit methodology, the research questions for my dissertation will emerge only after the analysis of phase one research.

 

In addition to designing my pilot study, I am continuing my participation in Professor Boling’s Design research group where we will soon embark on a qualitative study of identifying core judgments of experienced instructional designers in the industry. In this research group I have been actively participating in the discussion of our research design and reviewing related literature to inform our study design.

 

Breadth and Integration

In building up my repertoire as a scholar I have paid strong attention to traditional instructional design (ID). While I find much value and use in traditional ID, there are myriad limitations in terms of my main research interest in describing the design practice of non-professional designers. Given many of the basic tenets of ID, it is clear that my focus is in a less mainstream area or educational setting. In effect, I am exploring a type of organized learning, which occurs in less than ideal and often quite extreme conditions (e.g., lack of ICT and other learning materials, lack of adequately trained teachers, salient socio-cultural differences, etc.).

 

Therefore I feel an inner need to understand and recognize where the field of IST is addressing these key areas; and so, I have been reading extensively in the field (Smith, 2008; Christensen & Osguthrope, 2004; Rowland, 1992; Visscher-Voerman & Gustafson, 2004). I am also exploring the literature in areas where I am diverging from the mainstream notion of design in the IST field. I am diverging in part because our field tends to be broadly focused on business training as well as K-12 technology integration which often utilizes a technologically deterministic lens (Kling, 1994). Such research arguably tends to fall into the area of relying on more prescriptive models and theories, instead of emergent ones.

 

As with all doctoral student journeys, my research interests in research on design in IST has been shaped by my research, teaching, and service activities. Both my major in IST as well as my minor in Social Informatics have played vital and, at times, highly intersecting roles in leading me on this path. For instance, minoring in Social Informatics has expanded my perspective on the actual nature of computerization by engaging in discourses that address topics on social realism. These topics and classroom assignments (e.g., Design of Digital inclusion Interventions: A theoretical framework, Digital Literacy Country Comparative Analysis, Computer Mediated Communication Analysis) has helped me develop an analytical lens of technology use, and theorize the impact of technologies that are typically used in digital inclusion learning interventions (Akrich, 1992; Kling, 1992; & Bijker, 2001).

 

In addition to understanding technology use at a deeper level, I have taken classes in design philosophy and design theory to extend my knowledge base on design theory and design research (Cross, 2001; Nelson & Stolterman, 2012). My philosophical paper, the Emergence of Designerly Character and Design Philosophy for Dr. Erik Stolterman's design philosophy class has helped me refine my notion on design character, and approach a philosophical lens of design thinking towards teachers as designers engaged in instructional design. 

 

Through my minor program, I have gained incredible insight on the perspectives of design and maintaining a sociotechnical understanding of technology outside the field of IST. By reading and grasping Verbeek's (2006) notion on the morality placed on technologies, I begin to question if the failure of a number of digital inclusion learning interventions are based on a western value-system. Similarly, scholars like Ihde’s (1990) notion on the multi-stability of technology, gives me a deeper understanding of viewing technology as negotiated in its context of use. These constructs of social informatics and philosophies of designs have provided more dimensions with which we personally need to consult. I am excited to approach these constructs of knowledge as I immerse myself in the area of research on design and equitable education.

 

references

Boling, E. (2008). The designer as human instrument. Presented as part of a panel organized by D. Jonassen. Alternative perspectives on design. Annual Meeting of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology.

Bijker, W. E. (2001). Social construction of technology. In N. J. Smelser &P.B. Baltes (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (pp. 15522-15527). Oxford: Elsevier Science Ltd. 

Carspecken, P. F. (1996). Critical ethnography in educational research: A theoretical and practical guide. New York: Routledge.

Cross, N. (2007). Designerly Ways of Knowing. Birkhauser Verlag: London.

Christensen, T. K., & Osguthorpe, R. T. (2004). How Do Instructional‐Design Practitioners Make Instructional‐Strategy Decisions?. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 17(3), 45-65.

Horkheimer, M. (1972). Critical Theory. New York: Seabury.

Ihde, D. (1990). Technology and the lifeworld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Internet World Statistics (2014). Internet Users in the World. Retrieved from http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Kling, R. (1994). Reading "all about" computerization: How genre conventions shape non-fiction social analysis. The Information Society, 10(3), 147-172.

Krippendorff, Klaus. 2006. The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design. Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis.

Korkmaz, N. Boling, E. (2014). Development of design judgment in instructional design: perspectives from instructors, students and instructional designers in B. Hokanson A. Gibbons (Eds.). Design Thinking, Design Processes, and the Design Studio.

Madon, S., Reinhard, N., Roode, D., & Walsham, G. (2009). Digital inclusion projects in developing countries: Processes of institutionalization. Information Technology for Development, 15(2), 95-107.

Mitra, S., & Rana, V. (2001). Children and the internet: Experiments with minimally invasive education in India. The British Journal of Educational Technology, 32(2), 221-232.

Nelson, H. G., & Stolterman, E. (2012). The design way: Intentional change in an unpredictable world. (2nd Edition) MIT Press: London.

Rowland, G. (1992). What do instructional designers actually do? An initial investigation of expert practice. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 5(2), 65-86.

Selwyn, N., & Facer, K. (2007). Beyond the digital divide: Rethinking digital inclusion for the 21st century. Bristol, UK: FutureLab. 

Simon, Herbert. 1969. The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Schön, Donald A. 1983. The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books.

Smith, K. M. (2008). Meanings of "design" in instructional technology: A conceptual analysis based on the field's foundational literature. (Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University, 2008). Dissertation Abstracts International 69-08, 3122A.

UNICEF (2014). Education for all global monitoring report. New York, United Nations. 

Verbeek, P. (2006). Materializing morality: Design ethics and technological mediation. Science Technology Human Values, 31(3), 361-380. 

Warschauer, M. (2004). Technology and Social Inclusion. Rethinking the Digital Divide. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Yanchar, S. C., & Gabbitas, B. W. (2011). Between eclecticism and orthodoxy in instructional design. Educational Technology Research and Development, 59(3), 383-398. doi:10.1007/s11423-010-9180-3.