Professional Identity and Field Caution

This week I appreciated the tying of the ongoing theme of these articles regarding the field and how it is taught and what it produces to professional identity development. Tracey in Chapter 12 discussed not only how an ID can design from a place of self integration as a valid and effective method of creating designed solutions to educational needs, but also how that same approach can work to help students learning and training to become IDs find and center their ID professional identity foundation. She uses readings from Nelson and Stolterman, 2003 to back her up saying "Those who view design from this lens [the lens outlined in the first paragraph p.93 as counterpoint to model or process learning], and who study how it occurs in practice, present design not as a smooth systematic process but instead as that designer's values, belief structures, prior experiences, knowledge and skills, and approach to design affect the final outcome" and later adds "Developing a professional identity that is aligned with design thinking will exert an ongoing influence on designers' professional actions, values, beliefs, decisions, and commitments." Together I think these quotes sum up my feelings on how I think she makes a compelling case for how these are iterative processes that fit well together to the benefit of the individual and the field.

However, I also appreciated very much that Hokanson's pushback with what he termed 'Instructional Science' (p. 99). I felt it gave Tracey room to clarify that her call for a sustained shift in the focus being an evolution from the ways of process alone, not a replacement. I do think she swings a little idealistic in the idea that approaching it that way will not eventually lead to more theories, more operationalizing attempts, and more future battles for sustained holism fighting that shift back to what might be called a 'newer more human-centered ADDIE!' that can come with people over-eager to create operationalized processes. I think it's important to be realistic about that possibility, so that she could address it in her response. I am disappointed she did not grapple with that idea further. Especially since in the past we have had chapters in which the authors did have conversations about projected inevitabilities and those led to cautions about intention and the ways that building self-checks in the field are necessary. I am not sure any method or approach - no matter how human centered - can escape the need for built-in methods of self-reflection, review of 'the times', and guidelines for catching changing needs of human learners so that they are not missed by the field until the field is beholden to responding to the world as it is from a place of surviving rather than thriving.

What I found in the Merrill and Tracey discussion was that it felt a bit beyond my sense of the field. In summary it seemed to me that Merrill was insisting that undergraduate programs needed to take on the task of training up IDs for the field and that IDs should pursue Master's degrees for the sake of becoming researchers and theorists. I can appreciate that this method of conducting the long-term establishment of a field seems like a well-known approach. However, it felt rather antithetical in nature to everything else we'd been reading. If undergraduates are the ones primarily being trained to be IDs, then the undergraduate programs would need to be fundamentally different than most are right now to be effective. The strengths identified in ID education is that they are working in lab or field situations from the get-go, but this would not be possible in the typical undergrad experience, as one example. Undergraduates are still in high flux about their identity, which would make professional identity development of a holistic nature and based on designer strengths more difficult for another. I also couldn't help but feel like ultimately the two authors were reinforcing each other rather than it being the two of them challenging each others ideas. Their thrill seemed to be in IDs prepared to launch into corporate situations and take the world by storm. It all felt a bit out of touch with what we'd been reading previously, I thought - but that is why I preface the reflection on this chapter with the piece about it feeling outside my sense of the field.