Institutional positioning

My work crossed institutional boundaries within CU Boulder and reached beyond CU through partnerships with other universities and external programs. In this section I document where the work was hosted and funded at each stage, because the institutional positioning is itself a finding about how pioneer practice survives and propagates at a research university.

A.3.1 My doctoral home in ENED

My doctoral program is Engineering Education (ENED) within the College of Engineering and Applied Science at CU Boulder. The dissertation cover, the Iteration 2 course code (GEEN 3830-001, documented in SY-2), and the Preliminary Exam Part 2 document (PR-PART2) all locate my program in ENED.

I name this because my dissertation is not a computer-science thesis. It is an engineering-education thesis about a generative-AI course I taught. The disciplinary frame is engineering education and adjacent HCI work; the analytic posture is analytic autoethnography of my own pioneering practice; the contributions are calibrated to engineering-education and HCI literatures.

A.3.2 My lab affiliation at the Imagine AI Lab

My laboratory affiliation is with the Imagine AI Lab, led by Prof. Tom Yeh, my PhD thesis advisor. The ForeverGold deck for Iteration 1 (DK-1.FG) names the affiliation on its title slide. The lab's research interests in human-AI interaction and generative-AI tooling provide the immediate intellectual setting for my doctoral work, and Prof. Yeh's advising directly shapes the dissertation.

The Imagine AI Lab affiliation also connects to the K-12 strands that surfaced across the cross-iteration corpus (ST-MURAL, ST-PHOTO, KT corpus, STC). The lab's interest in how learners across age groups engage with AI is what made my K-12 art-teacher origin (RE-Q2 through RE-Q3) continuous with my doctoral research practice rather than discontinuous from it.

A.3.3 The AI-IRT Seed Grant as foundational context

The AI-IRT Seed Grant (AI-PROPOSAL) provided the institutional and funding context within which my dissertation work unfolded. The grant's principal investigators are Tom Yeh (Computer Science) and Diane Sieber (Herbst Program for Engineering, Ethics, and Society). Both PIs serve on my dissertation committee.

The grant's scope explicitly covered K-12, undergraduate, and graduate strands of AI literacy work. My dissertation occupies the undergraduate strand most directly, but the K-12 strand maps onto my Charles Burrell School of Arts contest (RE-Q3) and my STEAM Festival mural (ST-MURAL), and the graduate strand maps onto my HCI summer 2024 guest-lecture series (HC corpus). The grant funded both me and another doctoral student (Mohsena Ashraf) as PhD researchers.

I name the grant context to make a positioning point that the original dissertation draft underplays. My pioneer work did not happen in isolation. It happened within an institutionally-seeded research program co-led by my committee chair (Tom Yeh) and one of my committee members (Diane Sieber), and the grant's scope explicitly authorized the multi-channel work that Chapter D documents as a substantive finding.

A.3.4 Iteration-specific institutional sponsors

The four iterations of my course were hosted under different institutional banners within CU Boulder and through one external partnership.

The cross-iteration institutional movement is a finding in its own right. My course began at ATLAS as an experimental CTD pilot, moved into the College of Engineering as a credit-bearing special-topics course, compressed into a CEAS-sponsored online workshop, and was finally delivered through a non-CU partnership that reached a global audience. Each move expanded the institutional reach of the curriculum while the curriculum architecture itself remained stable (§A.4 below; §C.6.5 elsewhere).

A.3.5 External and partner institutions

Beyond CU Boulder, my practice crossed into other institutional contexts.

University of Washington · KidsTeam and YAB. In July 2024 I participated as a CU-based researcher and collaborator in three-day KidsTeam co-design sessions and multiple Youth Advisory Board (YAB) sessions at the University of Washington (KT corpus). The collaboration produced K-12 research data on children's and teens' reasoning about generative AI in schools (KT-THEMES).

GenAI Works. Iteration 4 (September 2025) was hosted via partnership with GenAI Works, which delivered the workshop through its YouTube channel to a global audience (TR-4.D1 through TR-4.D5). The Day 1 transcript names attendees joining from Nigeria, the United Kingdom, Denver, and Costa Rica within the first thirty lines of session opening.

Rocky Mountain Advanced Computing Consortium and NAIRR Pilot. In March 2026 I delivered a webinar titled "Unleashing Creativity with Generative AI" for the Rocky Mountain Advanced Computing Consortium (RMACC). The webinar was uploaded by the federal NAIRR Pilot program (National AI Research Resource), bringing my work to a federal research audience (WB-2026-03-03).

A.3.6 Boundary-crossing as positionality

The boundary-crossing pattern is itself a positionality finding. I am a doctoral student in engineering education (ENED), lab-affiliated with an arts-and-creativity institute (ATLAS), funded under a seed grant co-led by computer science and engineering ethics (AI-PROPOSAL), teaching first under CTD and then under engineering course numbers (GEEN 3830-001), with external partnerships at a peer research university (UW KidsTeam) and a private education platform (GenAI Works), and delivery audiences ranging from K-12 children at the STEAM Festival to federal research audiences via the NAIRR Pilot.

For my positionality statement (folded into §B.3 of the main document), this means I do not occupy a single disciplinary or institutional position. I occupy a network of positions that sit at the intersections among engineering education, HCI, arts-and-creativity research, and K-12 outreach. The work the dissertation documents is what that network produced.