Draft Preliminary note on identifiability and PII review · click to expand

This appendix is being circulated to the committee as a draft. It contains material that has not yet completed a final review for personally identifiable information. Before the appendix is finalized for submission, every mention of a named individual will be reviewed against the taxonomy in §B.6.5: students named in instructor-produced materials will be anonymized unless explicit written consent for educational use is documented; named guest speakers will be retained as public professional identities with their professional context attached; Luma-platform workshop feedback will be reviewed for anonymization; and external journalism is retained as already published and consented.

Index
§A.2

Practitioner-pioneer biography

In this section I narrate the path that brought me to the work the dissertation documents. The narration is drawn primarily from my Research Impact Essay (RE), which I wrote in the first person near the end of Iteration 1 and which carries my own account of how I arrived at the CU course. The biography matters analytically because the framework I built (Education, Industry, Ethics, Accessibility) and the way I taught it carry the imprint of where I came from.

A.2.1 My background as ELA and high-school art teacher

I trained and taught as an English-language-arts and high-school art teacher before entering the doctoral program at CU Boulder. My classroom experience was secondary-level work in subject matter that prized open-ended creative production, individual student voice, and the rhetorical and ethical dimensions of made objects. The eye I brought to generative-AI tools when they emerged was a teacher's eye on what those tools made possible for students, not a researcher's eye on what those tools failed at as systems.

A.2.2 Spring 2023 · the Colorado school-district professional development

In the spring of 2023 I led a professional development session for a school district in Colorado on how teachers and students could use generative-AI art applications, including DALL-E, Midjourney, and NightCafe, to create artwork from prompts. I wrote about this work in my Research Impact Essay:

"Over a year ago I started researching Generative AI and how teachers and students can use different art applications, such as DALL E, Midjourney and NightCafe in order to create artwork from a prompt." (RE-Q1)

"After creating an art curriculum with these different AI art generators, I shared my ideas with a school district in Colorado, where I led a professional development to teach the staff how to incorporate and collaborate with these tools in the classroom." (RE-Q2)

The school-district professional development was my first sustained generative-AI teaching practice. It was a teacher-to-teacher exchange focused on how to bring the tools into existing curricula rather than on what the tools could or could not do as systems. The professional-development orientation is visible in the four-theme architecture I subsequently built at CU: each theme is named in terms of what generative AI does for a domain of practice (Education, Industry, Accessibility) rather than in terms of how the underlying models work.

A.2.3 The Charles Burrell School of Arts diptych contest

Following the professional development I designed and ran an art contest for high-school students at the Charles Burrell School of Arts. Each student produced two pieces of work: a hand-drawn or hand-painted 2-D piece and a generative-AI-prompted piece, displayed together as a diptych. The contest title was Human vs AI, and the diptych format made the comparison concrete and student-facing.

The contest drew more than sixty competitors. In my Research Impact Essay I wrote:

"From this art contest, we had over 60 students compete and it was such a success that it motivated me to pilot the first ever Generative AI class at the University of Colorado Boulder through the Atlas Institute." (RE-Q3)

This is the autoethnographic finding I name at the opening of the dissertation. The arc was not the conventional researcher-to-teacher arc, in which a graduate student designs an experiment and then teaches a course to gather data. The arc was a teacher-to-researcher arc, in which a teacher's classroom practice in K-12 motivated her to pilot an early generative-AI course at her university. (I use my own first-person language above; "first ever" is my framing at the time of writing the Research Impact Essay. Without an institutional registry of GenAI course offerings nationally, the precise pioneering claim I can support is that this was among the earliest systematic offerings at CU Boulder and in the field nationally during 2023-2024, not that it was first absolutely.) The data of the dissertation is not separable from the biography that produced it.

A.2.4 The CU pilot and the four-theme architecture I built

Following the Charles Burrell contest I designed the curriculum that became Iteration 1 at the ATLAS Institute. I named the curriculum architecture explicitly in my Research Impact Essay:

"During this spring semester, I've been teaching Generative AI to undergraduate students about how these different applications can be used in Education, Industry and Accessibility, and the ethical concerns that arise while using these programs." (RE-Q4)

This is a tighter rendering of the four themes than the dissertation's earlier framing. The Research Impact Essay names Education, Industry, and Accessibility as the three standalone themes, with Ethics as the cross-cutting fourth theme that runs through each of the other three. The dissertation's earlier four-theme rendering treats Ethics as a standalone fourth theme, and the curriculum as actually taught reflects this earlier framing (the Iteration 2 syllabus SY-2 schedules Weeks 1-4 as Education, Weeks 5-11 as Industry, Weeks 12-15 as Accessibility, and Ethics as cross-cutting across all). The two renderings are compatible, and the cross-cutting status of Ethics is itself a finding worth marking in §A.4 below.

A.2.5 What this biography means analytically

The K-12-to-CU arc has three analytic consequences for the dissertation.

First, it grounds the four-theme architecture in actual pedagogical practice rather than in a literature-derived analytic frame. The themes were how I taught the work from the beginning. They are not a researcher's overlay imposed on a course taught for other reasons.

Second, it predicts the multi-channel pattern that Chapter D develops as a substantive finding (§D.4). A teacher who came to generative-AI work through K-12 professional development and a high-school art contest is a teacher who is likely to keep K-12 outreach alongside her university teaching. The STEAM Festival mural (ST-MURAL), the UW KidsTeam research collaboration (KT-DECK and the KT corpus), and the storytelling-with-Cartoonimator worksheet (STC) are continuous with the K-12 origin rather than discontinuous from it.

Third, it shapes the practitioner-pioneer position I claim. I claim to be among the earliest systematic offerors of a generative-AI class at CU Boulder during the post-ChatGPT period (2023-2024), and among the early systematic offerings in the field nationally. The pioneer claim is not biographical decoration; it is the precondition for the methodological framework Chapter B adopts. Analytic autoethnography requires complete member researcher status at the setting being studied. My pioneer status at the CU generative-AI teaching site is what licenses the methodological choice, and the claim does not depend on being absolutely first; being among the earliest is sufficient.

The biography is short, sourced primarily to my own first-person essay (RE), and consequential for the chapters that follow.

Index