My central takeaway from the MSU MALXD program is not what I expected it to be. I came in believing I was going to learn how to become a leader in instructional design. I am leaving with the understanding that I have been actively inhabiting this work for a long, long time — and inhibiting its inherent scalability. My resume tells the story of someone who repeatedly stayed where the work was instead of pursuing positions designed for what I inevitably do on top of the work.

When the familiar is uncomfortable

I walk into complex systems designed to produce outcomes that do not align with their own stated goals and recognize the disconnect with a comparative latency approaching zero. I have always done this— not just before the MALXD program or before 20 years of professional experiences, but even before graduating college— before entering adulthood, itself.

That is precisely why I needed the experience this program has provided. Unlike common higher education practices, this program did not allow me to meander endlessly in a maze of theoretical questions and thought exercises. Unlike traditional, instructional design methodologies, this program could not be summarized as training me on training tools. It asked me to grapple with all the underlying assumptions and overarching structural inequities that endlessly reproduce the stratifications generated when a system says some people get to ask questions, infinitely pondering, and some people must follow directives, infinitely producing. Then it asked, most audaciously, “What are you going to do about it?”

Inevitably, this question forced me to recognize the many times I have already done the doing— have already seen, have already built the theoretical constructs for interpreting, have already formulated actionable plans, have already worked to change systems. When you facilitate a learner realizing that they already know, but have never had the language to make themselves legible or the perspective to recognize how broadly they could have been applying their skills, you make them very uncomfortable. That is what this program has made me.

Beginning at the End, Again

I had spent over a decade fighting to open access to institutions I believed were meritocratic. Then I carried that history into CEP 813, where I encountered Unequal by design: High-stakes testing and the standardization of inequity (Au, 2009) and realized that the institutions I had been fighting to open were themselves built on exclusion — that the College Board knew about race-based discrimination in the norming protocols of its crown jewel assessment, the SAT, and was continuing to derive a profit from it.

This disappointment, fortunately, was replaced by quite an edifying encounter: discovering Backward Design and realizing I was not alone. I had previously come to the same conclusion. When asked, as part of my application to this program, to describe my own process as a learning designer, I headed the section with “Beginning at the End” and wrote,

“When designing a learning opportunity, I always begin at the end: what is the minimum desired takeaway? This answer should always be measurable, leading to my second question: how will I measure learner acquisition? From this one question, an entire complex, open, living system of inquiry is generated, with branches of considerations and curiosities growing and splitting off in a myriad of directions like the nervous system that enables human learning itself.”

As you can imagine, therefore, finding out that a famous learning design framework had prescribed essentially the same thing was quite affirming. Equally so, I spent a weekend of that semester reading Joe Feldman’s Grading for Equity and found myself reading a published version of the realizations I had quietly experienced somewhere in my fifth or sixth year as a classroom teacher, when I began deleting the default categories preloaded in our district’s grade book platform and replacing them with the specific learning domains my class was intended to teach (Feldman, 2019). This reading, and the understanding that my neighborhood school district was undergoing a strategic transformation guided by Feldman’s principles, is what inspired the organizational change management instrument I designed as the capstone project of the course. Spending a summer reading about, thinking about, and writing about assessment inevitably led me to designing an assessment that would drive system-wide, sustainable patterns embodying the backward design philosophy in an immediately applicable way.

This allowed me to consolidate my own understanding that the best performance measurement instruments and practices fortify the learning they are designed to measure. Of course, I wouldn’t have the language to describe it as such for another few semesters, but what I had built was not simply an assessment of assessment design — it was an organizational change management instrument. It trains its own users, manages stakeholders through collaborative self-evaluation, survives turnover by design, improves itself every cycle, is infinitely scalable, and is a sector-agnostic diagnostic — adaptable to any setting where supervisors or trainers measure anyone else’s performance, and would therefore benefit from evaluating their own evaluation process.

Operationalizing Accessibility

The course I completed concurrently that semester, UX 835 Accessibility and Design, repositioned accessibility in my thinking entirely. I had entered believing it was a morally necessary part of the design process. I left understanding it as the mechanism by which design reaches its full potential — because accessibility asks all the most essential questions: What good is this? Who could benefit? Who might already be benefiting from something similar, and more importantly, who isn’t? Why? These are the design questions that produce excellence — and not only in education. Products and services that haven’t been tested for inclusive design are, by definition, guaranteed to cap their own earning potential. Every organization asking why adoption is low, why engagement is flat, why turnover is high could start by asking who their systems were never designed to perceive. These are the questions I would soon operationalize when I built We See Us — a sector-agnostic organizational change management methodology designed around the premise that organizational culture cannot be healthy when people are unable to recognize each other, and that the inability to perceive is not a personal failure but a structural one.

Life as a Design Constraint

Finally, I arrived at the semester that demanded I apply the depth and complexity these and other classes had increased. I began CEP 856– Learning Design Leadership and CEP 857– Current Topics and Trends in Learning Design, and the only time throughout the program in which inputs and outputs from each concurrent course bled entirely together, carrying— and sometimes threatening to drown—me on the rapids-filled river of organizational change management.

My personal context means I have witnessed and needed to advocate against bias-based bullying for well over a decade. My former professional context means I know why, having been among those forced to surrender instructional time to canned SEL curriculum and subsequently to manage fallout and restore psychological safety destroyed by the hyper-organized bullying campaigns SEL-equipped students wage. So, when that week finished blowing up around me, I had a lot of thoughts.

I wrote an organizational diagnostic examining the structural inequities that guarantee violence will be an aberration at some schools and a routine at others. Because, prove me wrong: comparative swim team sizes can be used as violence risk metrics. I drafted a formal statement to district leadership citing evidence that explicit instruction regarding invisible disabilities has been proven to reduce discrimination against those who have them. Then I opened the assignment descriptions asking me to do exactly what that crisis week inside my context had already rendered the first two from me like cold-pressed juice.

I had not entered this district as a customer, but as a collaborator. I had been reading newsletters, attending school board meetings, volunteering on curriculum adoption advisory boards as a community stakeholder, listening closely to administrators and educators in this district for years — not just as a parent, not even just as a fellow educator from a neighboring district, but as a guest learning experience designer and facilitator bringing the supplies from my small business, Green Heritage Hatchery, to run standards-aligned interactive labs that culminated in students performing animal husbandry for chicks they had watched hatch before their eyes inside their own classrooms. And, of course, I had interviewed my own children during hundreds of apprehensive morning rides, hundreds of dinner table chats, hundreds of conversations after hard days. Then I was required to create an organizational profile and complete empathy mapping regarding an identified problem and once again, I already had more information than I needed.

Normally, I stand between my family and the district, translating in both directions — explaining my autistic children to the system, explaining the system’s constraints to my children. That semester’s coursework stripped that mediating role away. It demanded I hold both at full weight simultaneously: my children’s words about what was happening to them, and the organizational reality of an under-resourced district staggering under community vulnerability, violence, and the resource diversion caused by systemic racism itself. Neither perspective got to be abstract. Neither got the relief of the other being the problem.

My Accidental Magnum Opus

What emerged was We See Us — a district-wide organizational change management methodology I had no intention of building:

• Root cause analysis
• Intervention design framework
• Change proposal with stakeholder resistance mitigation plan
• Four-phase implementation architecture with sequenced milestones and projected costs
• Coaching and governance framework codifying hierarchy inversion across four SME types
• Recursive quarterly learning cycle differentiated K-12, scaffolded across identity domains
• Administrative demo in Storyline
• 30-item culture and climate survey
• Progress tracker sequencing its administration
• KPI gap analysis matrix disaggregating by role, building, and grade band
• Annotated bibliography (~120 sources)

I had not planned to build any of it. I had planned to advocate for the district to adopt something I assumed had already been proven effective (Maguire et al., 2018; Bezyak et al., 2024). Weeks into the semester, a realization I kept cycling back to finally crystallized: I had been operating under the assumption that the grown-ups were in charge, and I had arrived at the edge of that assumption and discovered there weren’t any. The integrated system I had assumed existed — one that used identity-based learning experiences as a Tier 1 intervention, embedded evaluation infrastructure that could actually see bias-based victimization, and decreased district load rather than adding to it — had not been built. The individual components had evidence behind them. The assembly did not exist.

My 857 instructor paused me mid-semester to tell me I was working at a scale multiples greater than expectation. I misunderstood her feedback to mean I was doing something wrong, and scheduled an appointment to learn how to do it right. That was not what she meant. She meant what I had built was novel — assembled from already-proven research across adult learning theory, intrinsic motivation, attribution theory, community co-design, and culturally sustaining practice in a combination no one had put together before. She began a side project trying to find funding to pilot it.

Applying

We See Us sits in my Google Drive. It is, by any measure I can find, the most comprehensive integration of evidence-based components targeting bias-based bullying that has been assembled. It is in common company: within this past year, I created two other diagnostic instruments just as novel as the one at the center of its performance evaluation suite — and a second robust organizational change management system that would produce results just as sustainably transformational. Every subsequent step — piloting, publishing, partnership — requires something I have never had to do with my work: building a new reputation — not just a solution — grounded entirely in what I have actually been capable of all along but that has never been in my titles. I will need to accumulate a body of documented results that belong to me, and negotiate my value instead of donating it to organizations like the ones that, before now, happily metabolized them. Ask. Apply. Accumulate rejections. Build relationships with strangers who have no reason to trust that a practitioner with no institutional backing, no funding, and no formal research credential built something worth their time or budget. Until I am able to make myself legible to organizations not designed to easily parse someone with my resume — with the persistent disconnect between role titles and achievements within those roles — everything stays in my Drive.

Ultimately, by requiring me to work through designing to support the cycle of continuous improvement, the MALXD program required me to apply it to myself. I can no longer operate within the supposition that what I do so effortlessly is universally easy and happening everywhere. Nor can I pretend that my skillset only belongs in strategic designs for my polycultural production hobby. Completing the MALXD program has made the full weight of my responsibility to leverage this resource tangible. Recognizing what I’ve been looking at for decades means now I’m able to envision not just my career pathway, but my civic duty to take it. I need to design for the support of my own continuous improvement. That demands designing a continuously higher stakes professional trajectory.

References

Au, W. (2008). Unequal by design: High-stakes testing and the standardization of inequality. Routledge.

Feldman, J. (2018). Grading for Equity. Corwin.

Bezyak, J., Versen, E., Chan, F., Lee, D., Wu, J., Iwanaga, K., Rumrill, P., Chen, X., & Ho, H. (2024). Needs of human resource professionals in implicit bias and disability inclusion training: A focus group study. Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation, 60(3), 311–319. https://doi.org/10.3233/JVR-240015

Maguire, R., Wilson, A., & Jahoda, A. (2018). Talking about learning disability: Promoting positive perceptions of people with intellectual disabilities in Scottish schools. International Journal of Developmental Disabilities. https://doi.org/10.1080/20473869.2018.1446497

W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. (2018, November 9). The business case for digital accessibility. https://www.w3.org/WAI/business-case/