Opening up DF Modules
- 3 Comments
- Module: Designing for Education
Often, the process of design begins with a research phase resulting in a “design brief” — a guiding document that outlines essential needs, audience and stakeholders, and challenges and opportunities facing the design team. In the spirit of critical instructional design (which we believe can’t be defined by a strict set of rules, checklists, or expectations), we are resisting giving you a “template” to guide your planning. Moreover, we believe the purpose of Design Forward is not to just “design courses” but to help you develop into a confident, agile, and creative educator, capable of tackling many kinds of teaching and learning challenges.
To that end, we provide the following to guide your thinking about the question “What am I designing?” You may answer below in any context that makes sense: a single assignment, a course, a program, etc. You should return to this exercise whenever you feel your thinking shift, whenever you are tackling a new challenge, whenever you feel inspired.
Feel free to add, delete/erase, annotate, change, evolve whatever you do below.
What are you designing? Tell us in a word and a few sentences. How do you feel about the thing?
I would like to brainstorm the possibility of letting any participant in the Davis Grant create a DF module about a teaching, learning, or instructional design topic. These would not be full modules like our five core ones, but rather more like the “flexible” ones we’ve created for The AI Challenge and Retention and Persistence. I could imagine these being projects that this year’s cohort take on as an activity during Year Two, if they wanted.
I’m excited about the possibility of expanding the DF curriculum in ways that are responsive to the needs and interests of our participants in the grant. I also think whatever folks create could benefit other faculty at PSU and, perhaps, faculty outside of our institution.
Who will be impacted by what you design? How do you feel about them?
The participants in our David Grant would be impacted by how I design this experience/opportunity. Not surprisingly, I’m big fans of all of them. :-) The idea for creating this came to me as I watched them participate in the June modules this summer — there has been so much great discussion and sharing going on, and I want to make sure folks have an opportunity to capture and expand upon anything that really seems to emerge as important to their learning and thinking.
How are you related to the thing you are designing and the people impacted? How do you feel about this relationship?
I’m pretty heavily invested in DF. 😅 I tell people a lot that this curriculum (and this website!) are a labor of love for me. It’s taken years for me to fully understand what it is we’re building with DF and to really wrap my head around what I’d like it to be and become. With the launch of the Designing for Education module this summer, we’ve finally “finished” all of the core modules. I have no real interest in expanding the core curriculum, although I do want to work on revising and updating it, hopefully with the help of some grant participants in Years Two & Three.
Since I’ve worked on DF so much for the last few years I feel a bit protective of it. Opening it up to others to build upon is both really exciting and a little scary. But, I also feel like finding a way to open this up to folks is a natural next step!
At the same time, I also want to do something new with DF. I have a tendency to work really intensely on something and then burn out on it. I don’t want to just burn out on DF — I want to help it continue to transform and become new things for our faculty at PSU.
Why is this thing important? What work does it do in the world?
For me, building this is important because it allows me to continue to explore how we do faculty development, now with a particular eye toward peer-to-peer development. I know how much expertise we have in our Season One cohort, and I also know how hard it is to find time to share one’s expertise in ways that are meaningful and scalable. Hopefully, with some grant funding, we’ll have some folks who feel like they can make time and space to share what they know.
Faculty development is such a weird thing to me. There’s lots of it out there, happening at schools all over and a lot of it feels like the same stuff over and over. With DF, I always wanted to try and do something different — something really exploratory, non-linear, and emergent. I’m sure for some participants this makes it feel a little “loosey-goosey” and maybe unfocussed. But, in my experience, it’s when people have the opportunity to explore in non-predictive ways that they really discover new things for themselves.
By creating a platform where others could create these kinds of emergent, non-linear faculty development opportunities, I’m hoping we can collectively build a library of really unique and rich opportunities for faculty to learn together.
Draw a Picture of the Thing You are Designing
This my be literal, abstract, or both.
Draw a Picture of the Thing You are Designing, Dissected
Show us all its parts. Label them. Draw arrows or connections to parts that are related,
What is a useful simile for the thing you are designing? A few suggestions:
- How is the thing like/not like a boat?
- An apple tree?
I’ll extend the metaphor I used in my first drawing and compare DF to a spider web, but the web of a really kind, non-carnivorous spider! This web is about building connection and bringing ideas together. In my drawing I “hung” our core modules and flexible modules on the web, but I also tried to brainstorm a few other topics based on what’s come up so far in Designing Forward this summer. These are just ideas, of course! I would want whatever topics people explore in their own topic to come from their own insights, discoveries, or interests.
And DF isn’t a hungry spider who is going to gobble up the topics, but rather a friendly host who is going to continue to build a supportive web for all of these topics to live in and become their best selves.
Who is made most vulnerable by this thing? How can you care for them with your design?
Hmmm…I guess the folks who would develop these modules are potentially the most vulnerable. I would want to build a space for them that is both structured and emergent. It will be important to try and stick to some kind of “standard” when it comes to the design of these modules, but the platform also needs to be flexible enough to “hold” lots of different kinds of ideas. Right now, we actually have a few different models among our current modules, so I love the idea of either using those models or developing new structures that others could adopt/adapt — all with an eye towards some kind of “curricular fidelity” as Molly brought up in a recent discussion (love that phrase!).
I do, of course, have my own values that I’ve brought to DF, and I need to figure out how to balance those with what folks want to do. I don’t want to force others into my way of thinking/doing things. But I do want to try and continue to emphasize emergent, explorative, non-linear faculty development. I need to ponder more about whether or not that approach pigeonholes other people in ways that make them and their own ideas vulnerable.
What part of the thing do you wish you could avoid? Why? What part do you want to protect?
I wish I could avoid the fact that any work like this is just that…work! I’m NOT interested in overwhelming people or asking them to do more than they have time for. So many of our faculty already feel overwhelmed and overworked, and the last thing I want to do is pile more on. I’m hoping that by building this into the grant activity, we could at least help people feel compensated for the labor. I’m also hopeful that folks will see the building of their own “mini-module” as a way to further their own exploration and learning in ways that might come back to benefit them with all the other work they do.
UPDATE: I wish I could also avoid the possibility that people will build things that won’t get used in the way we would hope. With everything going on right now in the system, I think there’s a lot of uncertainty about our future. I want to believe that we can build things together that will continue to make a different for teaching, learning, and the students of PSU.
What I want to protect most is a sense of wonder and excitement about being in community with others, sharing and exploring that which excites us most about teaching and learning.
Write a list of words that come to mind that are worrying you about designing the thing.
- structure
- flexibility
- standardization
- labor
- silence
Write a list of words that come to mind that are inspiring you about designing the thing.
- structure
- flexibility
- ownership
- community
Once the thing is designed, and you and the people you’ve identified have experienced it, how do you hope you will all feel? What will matter most? Why?
I hope I will feel like I’ve shared something meaningful with people who I care about in my community. I guess what will matter most is that people feel like they had a chance to authentically share their interests and expertise with others — and that they don’t feel like that process stifled or overwhelmed them. But it will also matter that others see and appreciate this work. I haven’t really talked about this yet, but, obviously, there is a hope that whatever people build will be used by others. I’m now realizing that my biggest fear might be that I ask people to build something that no one else uses? I’m going to go back and revise my answer above!