Curriculum Performance Campaign

I was asked to create a performance campaign on the topic of my choosing. I focused on an initiative to decolonize & Indigenize Ontario's curriculum.

I was asked to develop performance interventions by producing a detailed needs assessment and high-level design plan for decolonizing & Indigenizing the Ontario curriculum. From the design plan, I selected one intervention to develop draft materials and evaluation documents for.

​​

​I chose to focus on the resource portal as it involves all performers at every level and is crucial to achieving the desired performance. The current curriculum documents are minimal and not specific for local communities. Additional resources are scarce and involve following external links from a poorly designed intranet or searching external websites. The portal will be an intuitive central repository for high-quality, approved resources that are relevant for the local communities.

Davide De Simone

I was able to apply my research and project development skills throughout this project. As a Research Assistant and Quality Assurance Manager, I was responsible for assessing complex problems and developing strategies to tackle them. I was also able to draw on skills developed from other courses. Fundamentals of Instructional Design taught me how to conduct a thorough needs assessment and create evaluation plans. Introduction to Digital Media and Designing and Developing Interactive Instruction provided me with visual design and user experience skills that I applied to designing my roadmap and resource portal intervention.  

This course, Fundamentals of Human Performance Technology, allowed me to enhance and develop a further skill set. Through the performance needs assessment, I gained tools and knowledge to analyze the problem from a systematic perspective. It pushed me to investigate how to evaluate non-instructional interventions. The high-level design challenged my visual design skills to create an overarching picture of the interventions, performers, objectives, and the relationships between them. It taught me how to best summarize a performance campaign plan to present to stakeholders. The detailed design forced me to revaluate my summative evaluation plan and further discover new methods for evaluating non-instructional interventions.

​

From the projects, I learned my research, attention to detail, and design skills are strengths for developing performance improvement campaigns. I also learned that evaluation is an area I need to focus on and further develop. Evaluating instructional interventions is relatively straight forward but non-instructional interventions are more challenging. Especially during the needs assessment phase when the focus should not be on specific interventions. I plan to enroll in the Evaluation in Education and Training course next semester however, I expect that I will need to seek out additional opportunities to develop more competency in evaluation of non-instructional interventions.

Another large challenge from this project was feeling unsure if it was my place to tackle Indigenizing the curriculum. As a white woman, I constantly second guessed whether I had picked an appropriate topic – especially since I didn’t reach out to indigenous people. Outside of school, I would have done that and created a collaboration from the outset. I went to a few events on campus that reassured me this was something I could tackle as it should not be up to indigenous people to fix our colonial practices. However, one sentence Iako'tsi:rareh Amanda Lickers (2020) stated stuck in my brain: “Nothing about us, without us”. I hope my project would be viewed as appropriate to complete by myself.

​

My main takeaway from this project is to trust my instincts. I found the lack of instructions compared to Fundamentals of Instructional Design to be challenging. In the other course, I knew exactly what was expected and had templates and examples to follow. In this course, I questioned if I was meeting expectations for what these documents should look like. After receiving feedback for each assignment, I felt more confident I knew what to produce.

I enjoyed targeting the systemic issues in an organization, rather than developing training and would like to eventually work in a human performance context. To continue to develop my skills, I will seek out opportunities at work and externally, and search for more complex and detailed case studies.

Lickers, Iako'tsi:rareh A. (2020, February 5). Indigenous solidarity: Best practices [Workshop]. First voices week: Wake up! Re-storytelling the land, Concordia University, Montreal, QC.