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My CCT Journey So Far
Kaylea Champion

When I joined the CCT program, I was starting what we were calling around our house a “sabbatical” — I had a successful career in information technology, but I was feeling close to burning out and ready for a change. I told my colleagues that my plan was to “listen to the universe”. My needs were not the only driving factor in this shift. My husband was ready for a new job opportunity. Our family, once spread across the country, was somewhat coalescing into the same region, so we had made up our minds to relocate when we could. Meanwhile, time was running out on another goal: we wanted to add another baby to our family of four, and not only were my husband and I growing older, but also our two girls were growing ever more distant in age from a theoretical infant. It was time for changes to happen.

My specific technology field was academic technology, which led me to numerous projects across the campus of the University of Chicago — designing new classrooms, implementing online teaching support systems, helping faculty to adopt technology or enhance their teaching. I enjoyed my work, but there was a missing piece: I knew technology, and I had certain instincts about educational support, but I had no training or method to underlie my pedagogical advice. At the same time, our field was embarking on what the hype called nothing less than a revolution in education — the implementation of massive, open online courses. I found myself in the difficult position of questioning what we stood for, questioning the nature of education, and feeling uncertain about the value of our interventions. If I was going to participate in revolutionizing education, I wanted to understand education first.

Academic support groups in higher education IT organizations are often misfits — on the one hand, we work at the crux of what’s understood to be the focus of the institution — teaching and research — but on the other, our work is not always measurable by conventional IT metrics or structured according to formal management frameworks. Corporate management consultants brought in to streamline IT never know what to do with us. Even among misfits, I found myself a misfit. I hold an MS in Computer Science, but in many ways I was less of a techie (interested in the latest product from ed-tech vendors) and more of an armchair anthropologist (interested in the cultures that develop inside a classroom). I found that I wanted to understand the dynamics of instruction and the quality of learning that developed in response to the technologies we were implementing. I had uncovered some stories of unintended consequences – stories that gave me pause and caused me to rethink the nature of our work.

One such story appeared in my Processes of Research and Engagement paper:
In one of my [classroom] design projects, I was doing an initial site survey when I was accosted by a faculty member who said, “This classroom has destroyed my teaching style!” Looking around the room – a typical seminar classroom – it was not immediately apparent to me what the room could have done to cause so much trouble. The room was typical of the building it was in: long tables arranged in an “O” or rectangle, 19 loose seats, chalkboards on two sides and a bank of windows along the other, projection and a cabinet of connectors and AV equipment situated to be used while standing beside the main teaching wall.


In surprise, I asked her to tell me more. She explained that in the building she had used previously, the classrooms had tables in a U shape, and her style once had been to conduct her class as a discussion in which every member was expected to participate: she would walk around the internal perimeter of the “U”, engaging directly with students in a very physical way. The topics were challenging and the class would grapple with them as a team.

In the new building, she had been essentially moved from a “U” to an “O”. In an “O”, she observed that her style had shifted away from discussion and instead toward lecture – she could see her students tuning out, or readily taking on her ideas rather than vigorously developing meaning together. The room was too small for her to circulate outside the table arrangement or to move the tables aside to enter the O, and the 10 minutes passing time allowed between classes discouraged more elaborate re-arrangements. The obstructing table was also useless – no one sat at the top of the O, since it would place their backs to the locus of the projection screen, podium, and chalkboard. A single table had created an unassailable wall for her – and suggested a very different teaching style, which she had adopted.

In a profession that wields unintended consequences, both analysis and reflection are paramount if we are to fulfill our obligation to support and extend education. One of the provocative questions that rattled around in my brain as part of applying for the CCT program is:
What is the dialectic of the learning management system?
This question may not be meaningful to everyone — a more expanded version of the question might be:
What interactions and ways of thinking might be privileged, promoted, or encouraged by the dynamics, design, and feature set which characterizes online education environments? This kind of question may not find substantial support in the aisles of an IT cubicle farm, but the fact that I was asking it gave me an ever-growing sense of unease in a profession where the deployment of learning management systems is our bread and butter.

As I dove into the program, I was taking courses at a full-time pace while volunteering both at an elementary school and a science museum’s internal evaluation and research team. I felt that educational research was the right field for me, but first I needed to both expand my academic repertoire and test my personal tolerance for advanced studies. In each course, I often tackled a new aspect of education and picked up new tools for exploration and analysis, as reflected by the topics I chose to explore: how and whether museum exhibits encourage critical thinking; a mobile game to promote metacognition in medical students (the medical school at the University of Chicago was one of my favorite groups to work with); promoting engaged conversations in online courses; a contrarian approach to designing next-generation learning spaces; evaluating whether the evidence better supported electronic note-taking or paper-based note-taking for best educational outcomes.

At the same time, I found other themes emerging in my work and interests — finding a place for my own personal voice, perspective, and identity; developing a level of comfort in engaging directly and personally with a topic; exploring my own capacity to write in a range of styles. Along the way, I’ve discovered the narrowness of my initial analytical perspective, found space for reflection and mindfulness, and sought deeper understanding of creativity and play — including my own creativity and playfulness.

It is from this voice-finding, and from my sense that the modern directions of educational reform are lacking essential ingredients, that I chose to heed the enduring pull, and essential humanity, of narrative as a way of knowing and sense-making. By bringing together emerging ideas from my studies under the organizing theme of narrative education, my synthesis project brings together not only my studies, but places my two selves — the writer-self, and the education-analyst self, into direct conversation.

I had two possible topics in mind when I began the synthesis writing process: the other option was the development of an analytical framework that could be used to evaluate technologies and designs — a guide for sussing out what values were being promoted, what styles of interaction were most supported, what kinds of learning were most likely to be encouraged. Ultimately I found that this topic, although potentially useful to the field, seemed to generally be the sort of question that I might find support to pursue at any time, in any number of contexts. I could see a fairly short path to a shallow model and some preliminary examples, or a very long path with a deep model and exhaustive examples and references. A more interdisciplinary and broad-ranging exploration of a narrative educational model, however, seemed to offer more potential inside my largely self-created context in the CCT program. I started by alternating days; writing on one topic one day, the other the next — and quickly found that within a few weeks, I had much more to say about narrative than I did about my analytical guide.

In some ways, the two competing projects represent the mindset I held at the beginning of the program. The analytical framework has implied quest for certainty in such questions as: Is this stuff any good? How do we know? By contrast, the mindset I have developed over the course of the program acknowledges uncertainty and embraces ambiguity with such questions as: How might we open up possibilities and foster growth?. In terms of my next steps, I think I’ve found a stronger voice for my academic writing, explored methods and tools, and through practice developed essential skills for research. I feel certain that I am well suited to continue my trajectory as a researcher and writer, and I have found a greater willingness in myself to be a teacher.

I wrote in my synthesis paper:
In exploring the power of narrative in history, culture, and education, I have also been reflecting on the power of narrative for me: not only as a reader and an analyst of teaching practices, but also as a writer of stories and a teller of tales. Even when my stories are classed as fiction on the shelf, it is my commitment that I somehow also make them as true as they can be, and to finally put not only my very best ideas into them, but also my heart. As I proceed to the next stage in my journey of taking myself seriously, I will continue to expand my investigations into educational methods and narrative power, as a researcher, writer, and educator. In addition to pursuing education research and doing my own writing, I am cultivating writing and critical thinking in others.

Following this trajectory, I will next turn my attention to polishing some of my academic writing for publication and to use as part of application support materials. I will be seeking to enroll in one of a small handful of doctoral programs that would suit my needs, as I now understand them. I will also be developing programs for teaching writing and critical thinking skills, and seeking to extend the types of teaching experience I have. I have novels to write and children to raise. I have found that research conducted inside of museums is a particularly enjoyable field for me, and I hope to continue to explore this and other less-traditional learning environments. My interest in education extends to the full lifespan of the individual, and I will be seeking opportunities to make more direct use of my insider understanding of technology — and now, I am perhaps better able to own my outsider voice.