From the minute we take our first breath and through all the seasons of our lives, we are constantly learning. My journey through education hasn’t been the easiest, but it has definitely been rewarding, especially with the Master of Arts in Educational Technology (MAET) program. With each assignment and project I gained more perspective to consider teaching, and learning, in circumspect. My goals starting out were much more extrinsically motivated, to fulfill expectations that others had for me, rather than the intrinsic motivation that germinated from my very first course, Electronic Assessment for Teaching and Learning. As time went on, I found that I wanted to take my skills and apply them in ways I hadn’t considered before, to integrate them with the new skills, theories, and frameworks like: Ungrading, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK), Action Logics, Design Thinking Model, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, Critical Consumption of Research, and much more.
I had never taught formally before, and in my role as an IT Systems Engineer at Bay Mills Community College (BMCC) I wasn’t immediately required to teach, but I knew the eventual goal was to have me teaching 300 and 400 (bachelor degree) level courses. My specialization is in web development and I have worked as a programmer analyst with a regional education agency, where we developed human resources and payroll web software. Now I’m the lead on our website development and maintenance projects, but I have the freedom to research subjects that both interest me and benefit our institution; for instance: cybersecurity summits, the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) conference as an accompanying faculty member to our students, and a networking conference with our retention analyst partners.
Teaching was not the career I envisioned for myself, or at least I hadn’t been super enthused about it when I started classes in my master’s program. It was simply going to be part of my duties as a community college employee. I couldn’t pinpoint the moment it happened but now I feel passionately about working hard to be an effective, compassionate teacher and an active scholastic citizen.
The very first course I took in the program was a game changer for me. We dug into assessment practices and this was the first time I was being assessed on an ungrading assessment paradigm. This was the first class in my adult life where there was meaningful representation of my culture and language in one of the assignments and I cannot express how healing that was as a descendant of American Indian Boarding School survivors (Zalcman, 2016). I learned so much about how hegemonic practices embed biases into our assessments and how that harms not only marginalized folks but it hurts everybody. This class also gave me tools to help identify potentially problematic assessment practices and the greater impact of long-term and broader-scale discrimination and microaggressions. Additionally, it inspired me to consider what decolonized assessment practices could look like, what they looked like in the past, and how they will look in the future.
I taught my first class the next year, a web page design course with a handful of students. This course was designed by another instructor and was housed in Moodle, our school’s Learning Management System (LMS). The syllabus had some strict grading requirements in some areas that offered no leeway, like with attendance and online quizzes. When it came to homework, I was determined to ungrade as best I could within the constraints of our LMS, and syllabus, especially when a little kindness and understanding could make a world of difference to a student experiencing a death in the family, technical difficulties, or other personal issues. Ungrading gives students the opportunity to shine because we start with what they can do as opposed to what we feel they “should” be able to do. I extended due dates, met over video conference, or phone call, and did everything in my power to support the students. Then I finally caught Covid for the first time in October 2022. I struggled with teaching for the rest of the semester, and I was needing some kindness myself. It would take six months of what I thought was long Covid to eventually learn that I was dealing with undiagnosed and untreated hypothyroidism; and I probably had been since 2015.
The programmer analyst in me loves policy and procedure; with a particular fondness for unambiguous instruction. This aspect of my preferences is really apparent when I think about how much I love math because there are certain rules that apply and make sense when I think about the properties of numbers. When I took my undergraduate statistics class, it was entirely focused on the numbers. Although we could do our own (additional and optional) research surveys that would require approval from Lake Superior State University’s (LSSU) Institutional Review Board (IRB), they didn’t specifically require any IRB training additional to the curriculum of the statistics course. The Research Methods course in the MAET program at Michigan State University (MSU) required us to do additional training like the Human Research Protection training course. Even though the class didn’t require us to carry out research/surveys on human subjects, it did give us great insight into the observer effect in research and how the researcher can affect human subjects simply by carrying out the experiment.
A large chunk of the research I compiled and analyzed dealt with password management and the psychology behind it. This was very relevant to a work project I pursued where we ended up implementing a password manager software on a voluntary basis. If I were looking at this situation solely from a statistics perspective, one could infer that institutions that require password manager software for users have less security instances, and there’s a very strong case to write it in as a policy and procedure. With what we learned in the research methods course, I opted not to push administration for this requirement, and instead shared it as an opt-in service. The particular password manager we implemented offers an option to share credentials with groups and to organize them with different tags and folders. This has shown to be invaluable to the departments that share social media credentials and, to my delight (though I hadn’t originally considered this), the accounting department was able to configure an authentication token of some kind, streamlining an otherwise tedious and cumbersome process.
I wanted my research to focus on the benefits of password management, but I also wanted to be candid about the practicalities of implementation when it comes to folks my mother would describe as "technology immigrants" like herself.
In this class we explored each module a little differently than the other classes in the program and our feedback notebooks were a “Museum Guidebook” where we worked on exhibits. As an artist I found this aspect of the class really engaging and it kept me motivated. The focus of this course was familiarizing ourselves with the major mechanics behind the various categories of learning theories and how learning is explained by each theory.
The works of Gloria Ladson-Billings, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Paulo Freire helped me to define some aspects of my own lived experiences as they pertain to school-based learning. Ladson-Billings is a highly influential Education Researcher, known for her work on Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. Ladson-Billings emphasizes the need of educators to recognize and value the cultural backgrounds of their students. In Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Ted Talk, The Urgency of Intersectionality, she highlights that the injustices of intersectionality can be criticized by their blind spots because aspects of our experiences, like race and gender, are like roads which will cross. In Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the traditional authoritarian models of education are challenged and transformative approaches that promote critical consciousness, dialogue, and social action are promoted. Each of these works are important components to centering marginalized folks and decolonizing our education.
My theory of learning (Pocus, 2024) was developed in this class, and while I believe this may be more of a living document that should evolve over time, I was happy to get to create a theory of my own. Our brains work in unique ways that I’m not sure we’ll ever successfully predict or describe (except maybe in retrospect). I think we all have some learning styles in common, but what works best for one person in different subjects will not be a perfect match for everyone. For example, two people having the same learning style doesn’t mean they’ll visualize something in the same way. This class helped me really build on my teaching “skill tree” of tools and methodologies, to better recognize learning styles in others and identify more effective channels of communication.
Overall this program and all of its classes have helped me to understand the human impact of teaching and learning. I’ve learned that raw statistics and pure theory will only take us so far in the practice of teaching and learning, especially in technology. It has taught me that the human element adds a deep, rich complexity which will transcend the bounds of theories built around it. As with the observer effect, attempts to grasp and define the effects of this human element tend to evolve into their own wicked problem.
Crenshaw, K. (Director). (2016, October). The Urgency of Intersectionality. TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality/transcript
Freire, P. (2017). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin Classics.
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). But that's just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy. Theory Into Practice, 34(3), 159-165.
Pocus, V. (2024, April 26). Dynamic Knowledge Sharing. https://www.daphnewt.com/blog/dynamic-knowledge-sharing
Zalcman, D. (2016). “KILL THE INDIAN, SAVE THE MAN”: ON THE PAINFUL LEGACY OF CANADA’S RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS. World Policy Journal, 33(3), 72–85. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26781425