Holistic Reflection of my catalog of scholarly writing throughout my LTEC masters program.
Wow, what a fun memory lane to travel down. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a formal writer or, for that matter, communicator. Humor, passion, opinion, and beliefs are what fuel me as a person and as a learner. But, similarly to the story I tell of curating the most loving and joyful classroom my first year of teaching only to be met with the harsh reality that without data driven instruction my students could not meet their full learning potential; I know that my quests into research and scholarly writing have only made my humor, passion, opinion, and beliefs that much more solid and actionable. As I reflect back on my early writings in this program, I can see where I was working to connect my schema to what I was on track to learn. With each step, or next course, my schema grew and the picture of where my interests in Learning technology would land and flourish.
In my first sample from LTEC 5030 in April 2022 you can see me starting to wrap my brain around what I was in pursuit to study, Learning Technology. I intertwine my past k-12 education experience using the principles of constructivism and discuss how to apply them in the digital landscape with learning technologies. Then, in December of 2022 I moved into critiquing existing research papers for LTEC 5610. I focused on the effects of a computer-based early reading program on the literacy skills of kindergarten students. Through this analysis, I learned how to develop a complete research article and what components built a strong piece of writing and research. In March of 2023, I expanded on my introductory writings where I evaluated principles of constructivism and applied them to learning technology, by looking deeper into how we learn through the study of cognitive psychology. LTEC 5300, Learning and Cognition, is where the puzzle pieces started to come together for me. The science of how we learn, as I explored in this paper set me up to fully explore an idea that had been percolating in the back of mind for years. In April of 2024, I wrote my research proposal for LTEC 5704, where I proposed enhancements to the application I helped to develop, Regions 10’s TEKSbank Classroom, using Artificial Intelligence to integrate principles of Cognitive Load Theory (CLT).
I think it is profound to reflect on a learning trajectory where I connected my prior knowledge to what I was endeavoring to learn, then developed the skills to present and write a research proposal and paper by analyzing others, then was inspired by the science of learning and how I could apply to my domain, and then arrived at my own research proposal based on every step I had taken in my education up to that point.
View each writing sample here.
