Instructional Designers Perceptions of Their Agency: Tales of Change and Community

In addition to the important role instructional designers play in the design and development of instructional products and programs, they also act in communities of practice as agents in changing the way traditional colleges and universities implement their missions. Designers work directly with faculty and clients to help them think more critically about the needs of all learners, issues of access, social and cultural implications of information technologies, alternative learning environments (e.g., workplace learning), and related policy development. As such, through reflexive practice, interpersonal agency and critical practice they are important participants in shaping interpersonal, institutional and societal agendas for change. This chapter will draw on the stories of instructional designers in higher education to highlight their interpretations of their own agency in each context. In essence, this chapter deviates from the understanding of a case study as occurring in a single setting in that it draws on the experiences of several instructional designers in several contexts. Rather, we accept Yin’s (2003) definition of case study as a research strategy, that is, as an empirical inquiry that “investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context” (p. 13) and view our study in this regard as a multiple-case design with the instructional designer as the unit of analysis. Taken as a group, these designers tell a strong story of struggle and agency in higher education contexts, and it is a story that portrays designers as active, moral, political and influential in activating change. So from their rich descriptions of practice, we attempt in this chapter to weave a composite case study of an instructional designer’s experience that is true to the collective narrative of the designers we’ve interviewed. Any single person’s story of agency is by necessity narrow and contextually bound, and these are both the greatest strengths and limitations of individual cases. We hope that by viewing the stories of instructional designers through the macro lens of narrative, we can better illustrate the scope of agency and community that instructional designers practice each day

Instructional Designers' Observations about Identity, Communities of Practice and Change Agency

We presume that models and theory in instructional design inform professional practice, but theory has not been consistently built from the professional experiences of instructional designers. This study draws on the observations of five instructional designers who discuss their professional identities, their communities of practice and their roles as agents of social and institutional change. This study is embedded in two theoretical positions: instructional design as a social construct that is expressed in professional communities of practice, and critical pedagogy, in which designers act as agents of social change

Conversation as Inquiry: A conversation with instructional designers

Instructional designers regularly engage in a process of professional and personal transformation that has the potential to transform the culture of institutions through faculty-client relationships. Instructional designers promote new ideas and understandings in social contexts that include other designers and clients, among others. This research program attempts to understand this process, using narrative inquiry and instructional designers’ stories of practice to explore two interconnected theoretical frames. One frame is methodological and offers a case for narrative inquiry as an alternative approach to research in educational technology. The second frame is practice-based, and uses narrative inquiry to explore the themes of reflexivity, voice, strong subjectivity and power/authority through the stories of three instructional designers

Transforming Higher Education: Agency and the Instructional Designer

In addition to the important role instructional designers play in the design and development of instructional products and programs, they also act in communities of practice as agents in changing the way traditional colleges and universities implement their missions. Through reflexive practice, interpersonal agency and critical practice designers are important participants in shaping interpersonal, institutional and societal agendas for change. This paper draws on the stories of instructional designers in higher education to highlight their interpretations of their own agency in each context. These designers tell a strong story of struggle and agency in higher education contexts, and it is a story that portrays designers as active, moral, political and influential in activating change. By viewing the stories of instructional designers through the macro lens of narrative, we can better illustrate the scope of agency and community that instructional designers practice each day

The critical, relational practice of instructional design in higher education: an emerging model of change agency

This paper offers an emerging interpretive framework for understanding the active role instructional designers play in the transformation of learning systems in higher education. A 3-year study of instructional designers in Canadian universities revealed how, through reflexive critical practice, designers are active, moral, political, and influential in activating change at interpersonal, professional, institutional and societal levels. Through narrative inquiry the voices of designers reflect the scope of agency, community and relational practice in which they regularly engage with faculty in institutions of higher learning

Agency of the Instructional Designer:Moral Coherence and Transformative Social Practice

In this paper we propose a view of instructional design practice in which the instructional designer is an agent of social change at the personal, relational, and institutional levels. In this view designers are not journeymen workers directed by management but act in purposeful, value-based ways with ethical knowledge, in social relationships and contexts that have consequences in and for action. The paper is drawn from the data set of a three-year study of the personal meaning that instructional designers make of their work, in a world where identities rely less on institutionally “ascribed status or place” than on the spaces that we make as actors in the social world. Through the voices of two instructional designers in this study, we begin to make the case for instructional design practice as ethical knowledge in action, and for how agency emerges from the designer’s validated sense of identity in institutions of higher learning

A Review of What Instructional Designers Do: Questions Answered and Questions Not Asked

The purpose of this literature review was to determine what evidence there is that instructional designers apply ID Models, as well as to establish what other activities and processes they might use in their professional activities. Only ten articles were located that directly pertained to this topic: seven reporting on empirical research and three case descriptions recounting development experiences. All ten papers pertained to process-based ID models. Results showed that, while instructional designers apparently do make use of process-based ID models, they do not spend the majority of their time working with them nor do they follow them in a rigid fashion. They also engage in a wide variety of other tasks that are not reflected in ID models

Implications for ID practice of Instructional Designers' Cultural Identities

Are there social and political purposes for design that are culturally based? A growing body of research is concerned with the design of culturally-appropriate learning resources and environments, but the emphasis of this panel is on the instructional designer as the agent of the design. Colloquially put, if we design for ourselves, we should understand the sociocultural influences on us and how they inform our practices. We should also develop respect for, and learn from, how various global cultures address similar design problems differently. This panel includes instructional design scholars and practitioners from a range of geopolitical regions, who will share culturally-based narratives and metaphors of ID, and invite participants to do the same. (Authors' abstract

Elluminate Article: Research on Formal Virtual Learning Communities in Higher Education

The publisher of IRRODL, The Canadian Institute of Distance Education Research (CIDER), is pleased to link here to a series of eight online seminars that took place over Spring 2005, using Elluminate live e-learning and collaborative solutions. These interactive CIDER Sessions disseminate research emanating from Canada's vibrant DE research community, and we feel these archived recordings are highly relevant to many in the international distance education research community. To access these sessions, you must first download FREE software. Visit http://www.elluminate.com/support/ to download this software