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.1

Literature survey

In this chapter I situate myself as a practitioner-pioneer of generative-AI instruction at a research university, and I situate the four-theme curriculum architecture I built as the analytic lens this appendix uses to supplement the main document's curriculum-design principles. The literature survey is short because the appendix's supplementary posture rests on a single framework (analytic autoethnography per Anderson 2006, established in Chapter B alongside the main document's design-based research). The survey's purpose is to position the pioneer instructor as an autoethnographic site worth studying and to locate the gap that the appendix fills.

A.1.1 Analytic autoethnography as the supplementary framework

The main document of the dissertation operates under design-based research (McKenney and Reeves 2018) grounded in constructivist learning theory and self-determination theory. This appendix supplements that primary methodology with analytic autoethnography (Anderson 2006). Chapter B lays out the supplementation rationale and how the two methodologies operate together. The relevant point for this chapter is that analytic autoethnography is the framework that lets me treat my own practitioner-pioneer position as an analytic resource alongside the DBR-grounded curriculum-design principles, surfacing theoretical findings the DBR analysis developed in the main document does not surface. The chapters that follow apply the autoethnographic supplement to my biography and curriculum (this chapter), to methodology (Chapter B), to the four iterations (Chapter C), and to the theoretical findings the autoethnographic analysis surfaces (Chapter D).

A.1.2 The pioneer instructor as an autoethnographic site

The literature on practitioner-pioneer instruction in emerging-technology fields is thin. Generative-AI pedagogy at the university level is a young area; the first systematic course offerings emerged in 2023, and the scholarly literature on how those first courses were taught is mostly forthcoming. Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009) argue more broadly that practitioner inquiry is an underused source of theoretical insight in education research, and that the practitioner's own position carries information that external research cannot recover. Anderson's (2006) framing of the complete member researcher is a methodologically specific instance of the same claim.

I draw on this background to make a simple positioning claim. My pioneer-instructor role is itself a site at which analytic autoethnography can do work that other methodologies could not. The four iterations of my course are not a controlled experiment, and they are not a comparative study of multiple instructors. They are a single practitioner's pioneer practice, documented from the inside, across three years and multiple institutional contexts. The literature has few examples of this configuration treated analytically.

A.1.3 Generative-AI pedagogy in higher education

The early literature on generative-AI in higher education has moved quickly. The initial wave of scholarly response (largely from 2023 and 2024) focused on academic-integrity questions, on the system limitations of large language models, and on policy and governance frameworks for institutional adoption. A second wave attended to curriculum design and instructional practice: Mollick and Mollick (2023) offered the most widely-circulated practitioner-facing essay on assigning AI to undergraduate work; Long and Magerko's (2020) earlier "What is AI literacy?" framework was retrofitted by many instructors to the generative-AI moment; Touretzky, Gardner-McCune, Martin, and Seehorn's (2019) AI4K12 "five big ideas" framework remained the dominant K-12-facing reference. Most of the published work in this second wave is conceptual or framework-oriented rather than empirical.

The empirical literature on what actually happened when an instructor designed and delivered a generative-AI course from scratch in 2023 or 2024, on how the course evolved across iterations under tool turnover, on how learners across age groups engaged with the same conceptual architecture, and on how the instructor's practice spread across multiple delivery channels, is what my dissertation contributes to. I claim a documented practitioner-pioneer record (Iterations 1 through 4, plus six additional delivery channels) of a kind that the early literature has not yet produced.

A.1.4 The gap I locate

I locate the gap as follows. The methodology literature offers analytic autoethnography (Anderson 2006) as a framework for treating the complete-member researcher's insider position as analytic data. The practitioner-inquiry literature (Cochran-Smith and Lytle 2009) argues that practitioner positions hold information unavailable to external research. The generative-AI pedagogy literature, however, has not yet produced empirical practitioner-pioneer records of the multi-iteration multi-channel kind. My dissertation occupies that gap. It applies an established methodology to a new site (generative-AI pedagogy at a research university in 2023 through 2025), documents the pioneer-instructor practice across four iterations and eight delivery channels, and develops three nameable theoretical findings that emerge from the cross-iteration analysis.

That is the contribution claim my dissertation makes. Subsequent sections of this chapter develop the practitioner-pioneer biography (§A.2), the institutional positioning (§A.3), the four-theme curriculum architecture (§A.4), and the cross-context theme stability (§A.5) that together establish the work as standalone scholarship within engineering education and HCI.

Index