INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGNERS’ APPROACHES TO TRANSFORMING CONFLICT & ATTITUDES

Abstract

This dissertation is comprised of research articles examining the strategies instructional designers’ employ to transform both conflict with faculty in higher education and learners’ attitudes through instruction. In the first study, we investigated instructional designers’ perspectives on how conflict impacts their collaborative work with faculty. Through our qualitative analysis of fourteen instructional designers’ perceptions and experiences of conflict with faculty, we found that participants held nuanced perceptions of conflict and experienced conflicts falling within three thematic types of conflict. The second study expanded upon the first study by examining instructional designers approaches to navigate conflict with faculty. Findings revealed instructional designers utilized several strategic interconnected approaches focused on cultivating and strengthening collaborations along with using reflection post collaboration to try and improve future collaborations with faculty. Importantly, these strategies were able to be mapped to the typical collaborative project timeline emphasizing that conflict permeates instructional designers and faculty collaborations. In the third article, we synthesized the literature on designing attitudinal change instruction and organized the literature using Merrill’s first principles of instruction framework. We identified specific strategies that instructional designers can use to effectively design attitudinal change instruction.