I didn’t come into my first PhD semester at the University of Oklahoma expecting to be changed.
I expected rigor. I expected hard work. I expected new vocabulary, new theories, frameworks, and methods. I expected the constant feeling that I’d be catching up.
But I didn’t expect a semester that would rearrange how I see education itself: not as a neutral space, not as “content delivery,” not even as “instruction,” but as a deeply human practice, which is ethical, political, cultural, and profoundly consequential.
This semester had its share of personal struggles. Life outside the PhD didn’t pause just because I started a program. There were days when just staying focused felt like a victory. But that’s also what made the semester memorable: despite the heaviness, I felt something steady underneath it all: purpose. And a big part of that purpose came from two professors who modeled what scholarship can look like when it’s both brilliant and deeply human.
Dr. Amy Bradshaw and Dr. Mohammad Shams Ud Duha didn’t just teach me content. They showed me what it means to become a scholar-practitioner.
The First Turning Point: Meeting a Professor Who Made Ethics Feel Urgent
Some professors teach you a subject.
Dr. Amy Bradshaw made me feel like the subject was teaching me.
Her work on ethics in educational technology wasn’t just “interesting.” It felt life-changing, because it named what I had sensed for years but didn’t have the language to articulate: that education and technology are never neutral, and pretending they are can be harmful.
This was the semester where I stopped seeing “ethics” as an add-on, like something you mention in the limitations section of a paper, and started seeing it as the center.
Concepts like dominant culture, unearned privilege, structural inequities, intersectionality, and miseducation stopped being theoretical vocabulary and started becoming interpretive tools; lenses for making sense of real learning environments and design decisions.
And it was through that lens that Dr. Bradshaw led me directly into Paulo Freire.
Freire Entered My Semester Like a Mirror
Reading Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) wasn’t just “a reading assignment.” It was a mirror.
It helped me name patterns I’ve experienced as an international scholar and as someone who has moved across different communities of practice like TESOL, corporate training, edtech, and now Learning Experience Design & Technology. Freire’s ideas about praxis (reflection + action), cultural invasion vs. cultural synthesis, and dialectic didn’t feel abstract. They felt like descriptions of everyday educational life.
And Freire didn’t come alone. He opened a door. From there, I found myself pulled toward other critical voices that extend and complicate critical pedagogy:
- Henry Giroux on education, power, and resistance
- bell hooks on engaged pedagogy and teaching as a practice of freedom
- Kimberlé Crenshaw on intersectionality
- Charles Mills and Linda Alcoff on epistemologies of ignorance: how not knowing is produced and protected
This wasn’t just “reading.” This was a shift in my academic identity: I began to understand that the questions I’m most drawn to aren’t only about how learning works; they’re also about whose learning is made possible, whose knowledge is legitimized, and what kinds of ignorance are quietly taught through design and policy.
The Second Anchor: Dr. Duha and the Meaning of Systematic Design
If Dr. Bradshaw pushed me to see learning through ethics and justice, Dr. Duha grounded me in something equally important: method.
If I had to describe Dr. Duha in one phrase, it would be this:
He is what ADDIE and Instructional Design mean when they’re done with discipline.
This semester, Instructional Design became more than frameworks in a textbook. It became a way of thinking: systematic, methodical, careful, evidence-driven, and still flexible enough to work in real contexts.
In my concepts and reflections, I kept returning to the tension between “clean” models and “messy reality.” ADDIE looks linear on paper, but real design work often moves like rapid prototyping: iterating, testing, revising, looping back. This semester helped me stop treating that messiness as failure and start seeing it as design reality, with a responsibility to still be rigorous.
And nowhere did that become more real than our semester-long group project.
The Project That Made Everything Real: AI Literacy Workshop for GTAs
The AI Literacy Workshop Development for Graduate Teaching Assistants wasn’t just a project. It was the place where all the reading stopped being theoretical and started becoming practice.
Under Dr. Duha’s guidance, we didn’t simply “make slides.” We did the real instructional design work:
- Clarifying the purpose and audience
- Defining what “AI literacy” should mean in a teaching context
- Structuring learning outcomes
- Designing activities that foster higher-order thinking, not just tool use
- Aligning assessments with objectives
- Thinking through evaluation and implementation constraints
This is where books like Morrison et al. (2019) and Gagné et al. (2005) became tangible.
How we implemented what we read (not just referenced it)
1) We treated design as a system, not a list of tasks.
Our approach reflected systematic design and alignment thinking: goals → strategies → assessment → evaluation.
2) We designed for motivation, not compliance.
ARCS (Keller, 1987) pushed us to think: How do we capture attention without sensationalizing AI? How do we build relevance for GTAs across disciplines? How do we support confidence without creating dependency on AI tools? How do we leave participants with satisfaction that is ethical—not just “AI makes life easier”?
3) We prioritized authentic activity and assessment.
Instead of abstract discussion, we gravitated toward authentic tasks and authentic assessment (Herrington et al., 2014; Wiggins, 1998); the kinds of real decisions GTAs will face: designing assignments, responding to AI use, setting expectations, and reflecting on policy and equity.
4) We intentionally designed for higher-order thinking.
The project forced us to make a choice: Are we training GTAs to use tools, or to think critically about them? HOTS and Bloom’s revision (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) mattered here: analysis, evaluation, and creation were the real targets.
5) We treated AI as distributed intelligence, not a magic solution.
Pea’s notion of distributed intelligence helped me see AI not as “the tutor,” but as one actor in a socio-technical learning system: useful, risky, and always dependent on task design and human judgment.
And the most important part? I learned all of this not alone, but with people.
What My Peers Taught Me That No Book Could
Both group projects taught me something I want to carry throughout my PhD: learning is relational.
My teammates in Instructional Design taught me how:
- design disagreements can become design clarity
- feedback can be care, not criticism
- collaboration is not dividing tasks—it’s co-constructing meaning
And in Learning Sciences, our group work on Epistemological Ignorance in Our Lived Experiences made this even deeper.
That project gave a name to something that many of us have lived: that ignorance isn’t just “not knowing”, it can be produced, protected, and normalized through curriculum, institutions, and dominant narratives (Mills, 1997; Alcoff, 2007).
It also made me ask:
What does instructional design unknowingly teach people not to see?
That question alone will follow me far beyond this semester.
Books and Readings That Defined My Semester
Here are some of the texts that didn’t just sit in my Zotero this semester—they shaped my thinking and entered my design decisions:
- Freire (1970) — Pedagogy of the Oppressed (praxis, cultural invasion/synthesis, dialectic)
- Morrison et al. (2019) — Designing Effective Instruction (systematic design, strategy selection, alignment)
- Gagné et al. (2005) — Principles of Instructional Design (nine events, conditions of learning, sequencing)
- Herrington, Reeves, & Oliver (2014) — authentic learning environments
- Wiggins (1998) — educative/authentic assessment
- Pea (1993) — distributed intelligence
- Gorski (2011) + Gorski & Swalwell (2015) — deficit ideology and equity literacy
- Mills (1997) + Alcoff (2007) — epistemologies of ignorance
- Crenshaw (1989) — intersectionality
- Hoadley & Campos (2022) — design-based research
This list isn’t just a record of what I read. It’s a record of what I’m becoming.
Where This Semester Leaves Me
I began the semester thinking my PhD would sharpen what I already do. I’m ending it, realizing my PhD is changing what I believe design is.
Dr. Bradshaw’s work made it impossible for me to treat edtech as neutral. Dr. Duha’s mentorship made it impossible for me to treat design as casual.
And the two projects: the AI Literacy Workshop and Epistemological Ignorance, showed me what doctoral learning feels like at its best: challenging, collaborative, deeply meaningful, and directly connected to the real world.
Even with personal struggles, I can say this with full honesty: This was a great semester. Not because it was smooth, but because it was fruitful. Not because it was easy, but because it was alive.
And if this is what one semester can do, then I’m genuinely excited for what comes next.
Mahbub Amin 