The Civic-Minded Instructional Designers (CMID) framework: Educating instructional designers with community-based service-learning approaches

Abstract

This dissertation examines the issue of academic preparation of future professional instructional designers in the context of higher academic institutions. It is presented in nontraditional dissertation format as approved by the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Iowa State University. The dissertation is comprised of three publishable journal articles that would represent Chapters 2, 3 and 4 of a more traditional dissertation, along with introduction and conclusion chapters. The dissertation argues that current approaches to educate instructional designers are career-centered and technically-oriented, resulting in production of an elite group of instructional designers designers whose services become exclusively available only to selective clients and therefore disregarding the majority of others. The first study is therefore focused on understanding the concept of civic professionalism in Instructional Design and Technology (IDT). A novel framework based on synthesis of literature is proposed to educate civic-minded instructional designers. Using this proposed Civic-Minded Instructional Designers (CMID) framework to design an instructional experience, the second ethnographic study investigates just how a group of three IDT students enacted their civic-minded agencies and discusses the challenges they faced in their roles as consultants to three non-profit organizations. Data were gathered through participantobservation techniques and complemented with participants’ interviews, analyses of their works, and a researcher’s reflective journal. Findings reveal that students enacted their civicminded activity by addressing community members’ needs, giving voices to their community partners, addressing issue of projects’ sustainability, being sensitive to community partners’ perspectives while diplomatically voicing professional opinions, and acknowledging their