Abstract

This paper examines how authentic project experiences matter to instructional design students. We explored this through a single case study of an instructional design student (referred to as Abby) who participated as a member of an educational simulation design team at a university in the western United States. Our data consisted of interviews with Abby that we analyzed to understand how she depicted her participation in this authentic project. In general, Abby found her project involvement to open up both possibilities and constraints. Early in her involvement, when she encountered limitations she did not expect, those constraints showed up as most significant and she saw the project as a place of disenfranchisement that highlighted her inadequacies. Later, in conjunction with changes in the project structure and help from a supportive mentor, she reoriented to the possibilities her participation made available, all of which disrupted the cycle of disenfranchisement in which she seemed to be caught. Abby saw more clearly opportunities that had previously been obscured, and she became one of the project’s valued leaders. We conclude by discussing implications of these findings for understanding how authentic project experiences can fit into instructional design education.

Highlights

  • Our purpose in this paper is to explore authentic project experiences in instructional design education

  • Our interest in studying Abby’s case was to explore how her authentic project involvement mattered in her instructional design education

  • We suggest that a reason for this is because the outcomes of authentic project experiences do not solely lie in any intrinsic properties of the opportunities themselves, nor in students’ personal attempts to make meaning out of those opportunities

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Summary

Introduction

Our purpose in this paper is to explore authentic project experiences in instructional design education. Studied the issue from a practice-oriented point-of-view (Nicolini, 2012), attending to different modes of engagement that are opened up to students through authentic project participation, including how students fit into project environments and what can be learned about how projects matter by depicting this fit qualitatively. To explore this in richness and depth, we carried out a single case study of a student involved in an authentic project at the culmination of her Master’s program in instructional design. Our inquiry focused on three questions: How did the student’s authentic project participation matter to her? How did her project involvement fit into her education? And what can be learned about student involvement in authentic instructional design projects by studying this fit?

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