Focus
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I work in teacher education because I want to effect change on a larger scale. When I first moved into academia, my research focused on pre-service teachers' expectations of teaching. I wanted to know what they thought teaching was going to be, and I wanted to know how they were going to respond when faced with the realities of classroom life. My research during this time involved creating a theoretical framework and survey instrument for measuring, categorizing, and evaluating these expectations. This line of inquiry has led to international partnerships and ongoing work with pre-service teacher associations in Europe and Africa.
My current research focuses on helping organizations develop healthy and sustainable educational ecologies. Human beings are not machines, and although AI and other mechanized processes can be potent educational tools, they must be used sparingly and cautiously. As we build contemporary learning systems, we need to keep the humanity of the learner in mind. How do we maintain human learning systems when learning is increasingly mechanized? Is there a limit to how fast people can learn? If learning is supposed to be transformative, does there reach a point of diminishing returns if we go too fast? What are the long term learning effects of outsourcing basic cognitive functions to AI? What happens if students become dependent on the very machines that are theoretically supposed to free them? |
