Amy’s Voice: Becoming Fully Human in Our Professional Roles

Abstract

I am an associate professor of instructional technology. My scholarly interests include social and cultural implications of technologies; visuals for learning and instruction; scaffolding higher order and critical thinking; and educational philosophy. During my career, I have felt a growing need to better integrate and address issues of access, equity, cultural capital, privilege awareness, and other issues of social justice into my professional work. Although a thread of my scholarly efforts has woven through issues of culture, ethics, and critical consciousness development, those themes are frequently perceived to be at the margins of mainstream Instructional Design and Technology (IDT). Learning theories—and by extension, epistemologies—are central to the field of IDT. However, it seems to me that an epistemology of ignorance (as expounded by Linda Martín Alcoff) permeates our field with regard to issues of equity, inclusion, unearned privilege, and institutionalized oppression, and that social justice issues are largely regarded as not directly relevant to either the IDT field, broadly, or the particular classes I teach, specifically. I think this must change.

“Speak what you think now in hard words and

tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again,

though it contradict everything you said today.”

(R. W. Emerson, Self Reliance)

Selected Publications

• Bradshaw, A.C. 2001. A hermeneutic of ethical teacher-learner interaction. Journal of Thought 36(2): 17–24.

• ———. 2005. Developing instructional materials that communicate: Connecting visual literacy, cognition, and culture. International Journal of Learning.

• ———. 2015. Reviewing the instructional design & technology timeline through a lens of social justice. Workshop at the Annual Conference of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, Indianapolis, IN.

• Bradshaw, A.C., O.C. Keller, and C.H. Chen. 2003. Reflecting on ethics, ethical codes, and relevance in an international instructional technology community. TechTrends 47(6): 12–18, 39.

• Chen, K., and A.C. Bradshaw. 2007. The effect of web-based question prompts on scaffolding knowledge integration and ill-structured problem solving. Journal of Research on Technology in Education 39(4): 359–375.

• Johari, A., and A.C. Bradshaw. 2008. Project-based learning in an internship program: A qualitative study of related roles and their motivational attributes. Educational Technology Research & Development 56(3): 329–359.

• Keller, C.O., and A.C. Bradshaw. 2006a. Conscientização and the culture of fear: Critical consciousness education as a path to media literacy. Presentation at the Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA.

• ———. 2006b. Supporting critical consciousness while teaching media literacy: A critical ethnography. Presentation at the Annual Conference of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, Dallas, TX.

• Xie, K., and A.C. Bradshaw. 2008. Using question prompts to support ill-structured problem solving in online peer collaborations. International Journal of Technology in Teaching and Learning 42(2): 148–165.

• Xie, K., C. Yu, and A.C. Bradshaw. 2014. Impacts of role assignment and participation in asynchronous discussions in college-level online classes. The Internet and Higher Education 20: 10–19.