Never be so kind, you forget to be clever.
Never be so clever, you forget to be kind.

Taylor Swift

Swift, T. and Dessner, A. (2020). Marjorie. On Evermore. Republic.

Welcome to my Doctoral era–who? little old me? what now? In many ways, I am as bewildered as you may be, but alas the twists and turns of my “tortured” story has led me here. This is not the doctoral program I envisioned for myself at 24 – that aspiration naively involved some vague notion of water imagery in Canadian fiction. However, I have spent the last 34 years enmeshed in higher education and have come to realize that my true passion lies in helping others reach their goals through the affordances of education and mentorship.

This Digital Research Pathfinder is both a wayfinder and a resource as I undertake this journey through the University of Calgary’s Doctorate of Education in Learning Sciences. Above all, I value an ethic of care in my being and my practice and through this learning opportunity I hope to explore how these values can be translated even more explicitly and impactfully in my work.

My professional path has indeed been a long and winding road. I play on a less obvious meaning of “tortured” in the title for this site–the notion of something being warped and distorted. Our intentions and values as educators may at times be altered or distorted by our constraints. My hope through my research is to find strategies to lessen this distortion and, as a result, to enable IDs to be even more resilient as we are buffeted by demands, changes and constraints beyond our control.

Here you will find a collection of thinkers and researchers who are influential to me, as well as relevant conferences, associations and websites. I’ll also be gathering literature resources that are foundational to my research into instructional design practice, as well as literature that is pertinent to my chosen research topics.