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
§B.7

Reflexivity performed

In this section I perform reflexivity rather than declare it. Three short reflexive memos make explicit how my position shaped my analytic choices, and a closing memo names my investment in the success of the work.

B.7.1 The K-12 to undergrad arc as researcher origin

My research began not in a university lab but in a high-school art classroom. I was an English-language-arts and high-school art teacher when I first encountered generative-AI tools as instructional resources. As part of that teaching practice I led a professional development for a school district in Colorado on how to incorporate DALL-E, Midjourney, and NightCafe in art and writing classrooms (RE-Q2). During my first year in the PhD program I designed and ran the Charles Burrell School of Arts diptych art contest, in which high-school students produced a hand-drawn image and a generative-AI-prompted image as paired pieces (RE-Q3, AP-2024-05-16). The contest drew more than sixty students.

This arc matters reflexively because it shaped what I noticed when I designed the CU undergraduate course. I came to the engineering classroom with a teacher's eye on accessibility, on student-produced work, on whole-child engagement, and on the rhetorical dimensions of prompting. I did not come from a computer-science research lab with a system-evaluation lens. The four-theme architecture that recurs across my iterations (Education, Industry, Ethics, Accessibility) is the visible trace of my teacher's eye. So is the recurrence of named student outputs in every opening session deck, the K-12 outreach work I sustained alongside the undergraduate teaching, and the public-facing newsletter and podcast practice. Another researcher entering this work from a different origin would have noticed different things and made different curricular choices.

I name this so that a reader can calibrate how my position shaped the framework. The four-theme architecture is not a neutral analytic category. It is the architecture I built into my teaching from the K-12 origin onward, and I subsequently confirmed against external sources (the UW KidsTeam children's independent surfacing of the same themes in KT-THEMES, the Aspen Public Radio framing in AP-2024-05-16, the Luma feedback patterns in LF-3, and my online learners' responses in TR-4.D1 through TR-4.D5).

B.7.2 Navigating the practitioner-pioneer position

I am a practitioner-pioneer in the strict sense: I taught what I have documented to be the first generative-AI course at the University of Colorado Boulder (RE-Q3), and I sustained that pioneering position across the four iterations and the cross-iteration channels. This position carries its own reflexive demands.

First, the position is unrepresentative by design. Pioneer practice is rare, and no comparison-group instructor at CU Boulder was running the same course at the same time. My findings are therefore claims about pioneer practice rather than claims about typical instructor practice, and I frame them that way in Chapter D. The compression-as-curriculum-maturation claim, for example, is a claim about how pioneer practice matures under fast technological turnover, not a claim that any well-taught course of any topic must mature by compression.

Second, the position confers an information advantage. Because I have been the instructor at every site, I have access to materials no external researcher could obtain at the same depth (the Weekly Updates Prelim Document, the structured reflective journal, the public-facing newsletter, the podcast, the federal webinar). The advantage is real, and analytic autoethnography licenses its use. I make a point in §B.5.3 of subjecting each anchor concept to multi-source testing across artifact types so that the advantage does not become a license for unfalsifiable claims.

Third, the position interacts with my membership in the engineering-education program (ENED) at CU Boulder. My disciplinary home is not computer science, and my course is taught from the College of Engineering side rather than from the CS curriculum. This positions my work within engineering education and HCI rather than within computer-science curriculum scholarship. The contributions I claim are calibrated to those literatures.

B.7.3 The methodological supplementation itself as autoethnographic data

The choice to supplement the main document's design-based-research analysis with an analytic-autoethnographic posture (§B.2) is itself an autoethnographic datum. The judgment to read my own iterations not only through DBR's curriculum-design lens but also through the autoethnographic lens of an instructor at the pioneer-entrant moment of a fast-moving field is a piece of practitioner-pioneer reasoning that the dissertation now treats as part of the work.

I narrate the supplementation here as part of the work, not as a backstage adjustment. The supplementation followed from my honest reading of what the four iterations were producing alongside the DBR analysis. The Weekly Updates Prelim Document recorded reflective observations (such as the Week 1 ChatGPT-quiz hallucination noting) that the DBR framing did not have a natural way to read as theoretical material. The cross-iteration channels (the Keep Up Newsletter, the podcast, the federal-research webinar) carried reflective content that sat outside DBR's curricular focus but was rich autoethnographic material. The choice to bring these into an autoethnographic supplement is itself the kind of move a complete-member researcher is positioned to make.

The supplementation also adapts the supplementary thematic-coding work the proposal had specified. The proposal anticipated a thematic-coding analysis of student-interview data that the iterations did not generate in IRB-governed form. Rather than retrofit thematic coding to the data the iterations did produce, this appendix substitutes a methodologically coherent alternative: analytic autoethnography reads the same artifact corpus that the DBR primary analysis reads but asks a different analytic question of it. The substitution is principled and is named here rather than concealed.

B.7.4 Acknowledgment of my investment in the work

I have a stake in this work succeeding. The dissertation is the document by which I become a doctor of philosophy in engineering education. The four-iteration course is the work I have built over three years. The findings I claim in Chapter D are claims I would like to land as scholarly contributions. Any reader of an analytic autoethnography must factor this investment in.

I respond to my investment in three ways. First, I source every substantive claim to specific artifacts and quote IDs so that any reader can audit the basis of the claim against the evidence-table document. Second, I name the asymmetries and limits of my data in §B.6.3 and §B.6.4 rather than concealing them. Third, I rely on my chair and my committee, who have visibility into the setting through their guest-lecture and seed-grant roles (and through my proposal-and-defense process), to test my interpretations against the same data I have. This is what analytic autoethnography asks of an invested practitioner-researcher.

I do not claim neutrality. I claim that my investment has been disciplined by multi-source evidence, by named limits, and by the chair-and-committee dialogue that has shaped this revised dissertation.

Index