Ensuring Trustworthiness

Multiple strategies were used to strengthen the trustworthiness of the study and to ensure that interpretations fairly represented the curriculum's changes across iterations. Trustworthiness for this curriculum-design research rests primarily on the auditability of the artifact trail: dated slide-deck revisions, module reorderings, syllabus updates, and assignment-design changes are all instructor-authored documents that an external reviewer can examine to verify the analytic claims. Course evaluation inputs are used to contextualize why a given revision occurred. These strategies followed established standards for excellent qualitative research and purposely included reflexive practices.

A record was maintained, including organized archives of curriculum artifacts, slide deck and module revisions, data-collection tools, coding themes, analytic memos, and reflexive notes, allowing outside reviewers to trace the evidence from original artifacts to conclusions and strengthening trustworthiness (RQ1, RQ2).

Peer feedback with colleagues in related fields provided additional exploration of methodological choices and new findings. This feedback included discussions of my positionality and reflexive memos as an instructor and researcher, supporting ongoing examination of how my experiences as an artist, educator, and GenAI practitioner formed research questions, design decisions, and interpretations (Schön, 1983). These strategies placed the study within a reflexive, practice-based research method in which curriculum design, teaching, and inquiry were linked, and where my reflective researcher stance was managed as a resource for understanding of iterative GenAI curriculum design and learner experience.