Winter

EDUC 208B: CURRICULUM CONSTRUCTION

I arrived in this course believing I already understood what it meant to design with communities rather than for them. My years in Alaska had taught me to root curricula in place, in language, in the cultural assets students carry into classrooms. Philadelphia was different. My team designed a financial literacy curriculum for young creatives at Lil' Filmmakers Inc., and I was the outsider. That asymmetry turned out to be precisely the instruction I needed.

The most unsettling moment of the course was not in a reading. It was during a team meeting on February 18 that we debated whether mindset should be a structural prerequisite or simply a thread woven through our four-session curriculum, "Who Said Money Isn't For Artists?" Janine Spruill, the Executive Director, had told us directly that mindset is a prerequisite to everything else. My teammates worried that a curriculum heavy on reflection without concrete financial content would lose 16- to 24-year-olds in the first session. We compromised. We wove mindset as a thread.

Tyack and Cuban's concept of the grammar of schooling reframed what had happened at that table. The pull toward content delivery as the primary deliverable was not a values failure. It was the grammar operating inside us, quiet enough to feel like good judgment. Eisner's concept of secondary ignorance named it more precisely: my team understood recognition intellectually, and still underestimated its structural weight because the felt pressure to deliver content was so familiar it did not register as a design bias. Janine's pushback was not just stakeholder input. It was an epistemological correction on assumptions we did not know we were making.

The implication for my practice is structural. Recognition is not warmth. It is not an opening ritual or a session icebreaker. It is the load-bearing wall of any curriculum that asks historically marginalized learners to engage with content that has not historically been offered to them. I know this now, not only from the literature but from sitting at that design table and feeling the pull myself.

EDUC 398: CORE MECHANICS FOR LEARNING

This course asked whether there are mechanics that reliably drive learning forward, the way rules drive gameplay, and whether those mechanics can be deliberately designed. My contribution to answering that question was empirical. I partnered with Ishita Kumar to run a between-subjects experiment testing whether discussion prompts embedded in an interactive climate simulator would increase learner curiosity, measured through time on the simulator, question depth, and self-reported curiosity ratings.

The results surprised me. Participants without prompts spent more time exploring the simulator and generated questions of meaningfully greater depth than those with prompts. Participants in the prompt condition clustered their engagement around the prompts themselves, completing them like a checklist and stopping. Schwartz, Tsang, and Blair's distinction between well-structured and ill-structured problems explained what we saw: the prompts converted open-ended exploration into task completion. In doing so, they replaced the learner's own curiosity with the designer's prescribed questions.

This finding connects to something I had been doing intuitively long before I had language for it. In the documentary workshops I led in Alaska, I handed students cameras and sent them into their communities before teaching them anything about framing. The discomfort of open exploration was productive. Students returned with questions the curriculum had not anticipated, and those questions became the curriculum. I had not understood why that worked. Now I do. In environments already rich with personally meaningful content, prompts can occupy the inquiry space before learners have a chance to claim it. The design lesson is not that prompts are bad. It is that they must be open enough to widen exploration rather than bound it.

EDUC 254: DIGITAL LEARNING DESIGN WORKSHOP

I entered this workshop having already learned, the hard way in the fall seminar, that designing from a desk is not designing at all. What this course demanded was different: not just proximity to the problem, but a willingness to build something rough and put it in front of people who would break it. My partner Nchimunya Kaoma and I were designing Dial-In, a voice-based formative assessment platform for overcrowded classrooms in Zambia's Chongwe District, where teachers trained in learner-centered pedagogy were forced into lecture-only survival mode because they had no diagnostic way to know what 100 to 150 students actually understood.

The most clarifying design decision of the quarter was not a feature choice. It was a clarification about what Dial-In is not. It is not a technology that teaches. It is a diagnostic infrastructure that restores what the teacher is already trained to do: respond to what students actually understand. That framing required precision about the role of AI in the system. The LLM does not grade. It surfaces patterns, flags possible misconceptions, and suggests groupings. The teacher decides what those patterns mean. Collapsing the space between analysis and judgment would not just be an ethical failure. It would be a design incoherence, a misunderstanding of where learning actually happens.

Choosing voice-first as the core modality was not a technical preference or a creative constraint. Most students in Chongwe do not have smartphones. They have basic phones. The decision was an equity decision, and the unit on design for belonging sharpened how I needed to name it publicly: voice-first is infrastructure for inclusion, not a fallback for a population still catching up. I had learned a version of this in Alaska, designing for communities where bandwidth could not be assumed. Dial-In asked me to apply that same logic on a different continent and with more deliberate rigor than I had previously brought to it.

EDUC 215: EDUCATION INTERNSHIP WORKSHOP

Years before Stanford, a technical co-founder once told me my work would never be scalable. That sentence followed me into my internship at the Doerr School of Sustainability, where the explicit goal was to build a system that could produce good stories consistently, with or without me in the loop. My project was designing a story collection workflow for board directors and senior sustainability executives: the submission form, the narrative framework, the editorial prompts, the standard operating procedures, and the outreach relationships. In practice, it meant learning what it costs to stop being a craftsperson and start being a systems designer.

Jennifer Gardner, my supervisor and Director of Professional Programs at Doerr, gave me the clearest design note of the quarter: simple scales, and if it is complex, it is going to fail. I had been editing each executive story for voice, restructuring narratives, obsessing over transitions. That was the documentary filmmaker in me, treating each piece as its own thing. The system I needed to build required the opposite instinct. Every decision had to pass a single test: can someone else run this?

Victor Lee's framing of learning environments as systems, where the design shapes what participants can do within it, showed up repeatedly in my work. Executives were not failing to engage with my story submission form because they lacked motivation. They were failing to engage because the environment I built placed too many decision points in their path. Applying principles of reducing extraneous cognitive load, I restructured the form to isolate one question at a time. Engagement followed. The lesson confirmed what I had been absorbing all year: environment design precedes motivation. And it does not matter how well you know your content if the people you need have no clear path to act.

EDUC 229B: LEARNING DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR

Winter quarter did not start well. My first project partnership had fallen apart, and I came into January carrying a trust problem I did not want to admit to. It rattled my confidence in my own judgment. So when Nchimunya Mwiinga and I started talking about building Dial-In together, I was cautious. I did not want to make the same mistake twice. What I did not see coming was that the partnership would become the most important thing that happened to me this quarter.

Nchimunya grew up in Zambia. He did not know the problem of overcrowded classrooms in Chongwe District as a design challenge he had read about. He knew it. So when I drafted language about student call-in volume as a proxy for engagement, he stopped me. In many households, he explained, students share phones across siblings. Calling time is not always available on demand. That is not a footnote. That is a threat to the core mechanism of what we were building, and it needed to surface before we submitted a proposal, not after a pilot fell apart. I would not have caught that alone. His proximity to the context was not background color. It was a load-bearing design input.

The proposal-writing process was where our thinking was tested the most. I expected the writing to document what we already knew. Instead, it kept exposing what we could not yet answer. Dr. Demszky kept pressing us on the harder question: what does Dial-In actually change, and how would you know? That forced us toward behavioral anchors. Does a teacher re-group students week over week? Does she return to a concept she had already moved past? Without those, a pilot would tell us nothing honest. Late in the quarter, Demszky raised a concern I had not fully reckoned with: sorting students based on diagnostic data is not always ideal. Teachers can develop a deficit-based mindset from the information we surface. We had been designing Dial-In as though the diagnostic output would restore teacher agency. Her challenge forced a harder question: what if the design itself produces the problem we were trying to solve? We do not have a clean answer. But the question is now load-bearing in how we think about the dashboard, and we are carrying it with us to Chongwe.

We are ending the winter quarter in Zambia. Not as a capstone activity. We are in Chongwe District, sitting with teachers, watching where they hesitate, what they push back on, and what they ignore entirely. The proposal we wrote across the quarter is a rigorous draft of an argument, not a finished one. In Alaska, I learned that the most important design decisions happen on the ground. Dial-In is the first time I have applied that conviction somewhere I did not already belong. That distance has made the stakes sharper and the learning more honest. I came into January shaken. I am ending it in a classroom in Zambia, finally close enough to see what is actually true.