Participant: Kate (Pseudonym) - Flexible Learning Environments: Minoritized College Students’ Experiences in HyFlex

Participant: Kate (Pseudonym)
Kate was a doctoral student who was also a practicing instructional designer in higher
education. Kate identified as an instrumentalist, mother of three children, wife of 30 years,
student, and community leader. She played the French horn and was an avid bowler who was
very involved in her children’s education and shared that she has volunteered creating the outfits
for the school’s marching band as an example of her involvement in her children’s school,
jokingly stating, “I’m the uniform mom.” Other intersections of Kate’s identity were: able-
bodied, White, heterosexual cisgender woman, native English speaker, mother, daughter, and
twin sister. Her relationship with her twin sister was very important to her, as she explained,
“That is part of my identity very much so, and she and I are still very close, which is unusual for
adult twins.”
She described her environment growing up as a “pretty typical” middle-class, racially
mixed, suburban neighborhood in Arizona where she said, “we could actually walk to school and
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you know, attend this neighborhood school with the neighborhood kids.” All of this changed
when she started sixth grade when “all the students who were in sixth grade went to the north
side of town” to what was called the Sixth Grade Center. Kate explained this busing of students
must have been when the nation was experimenting with bringing groups together, and even
though this meant she now had a 45-minute bus ride to school every morning, she thought of this
experience as pivotal in her educational development as she explained, “I had an opportunity to
advance a year in math that year.” Kate added, “That was something that ended up putting me on
a trajectory where I was in the highest math and I was good at math and I enjoyed class.” Kate
credited her sixth-grade experience as an opportunity that set her on the path to become an
educator and described herself as a “lifelong educator and lifelong student” much to the credit of
her experience in sixth grade.
Kate had an optimistic outlook in life, and her story featured agency and self-
determination, although she did not explicitly used those descriptors. During the interviews, Kate
mentioned multiple times she valued growth and tried to see opportunities everywhere and seize
them. She explained:
I’m a persistent student and I will be graduating in May, and I guess I just really value
growth. So, wherever I can see opportunities to align myself and to find myself in areas
of opportunity for growth, which is probably very meta for you . . . But if you think about
it, that’s what instructional designers are. Right? We create opportunities for growth and
we recognize the power of growth.
Kate was currently in her graduating year of her PhD program at a public university in Arizona.
She was finalizing the dissertation phase and had completed all her coursework. For her
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dissertation, she was conducting a study on the role of instructional designers in developing
learning experiences for online learners.
In addition to her studies and family obligations, Kate was also working full time at a
university where she hopes to advance and eventually retire. The PhD program she was about to
complete was not her first attempt at a doctoral degree. She has had some setbacks in the past
that forced her to drop out from the first doctoral program she enrolled in even though she was
happy in the program and satisfied with the quality and rigor that the program offered. Kate
explained:
I was working for the university as an employee, there was a significant tuition discount.
And I’ll just leave it at that. And when the layoffs started happening, they let go of my
manager and one of my teammates, and so I knew I couldn’t stay working there um. And
so, I dropped out of the program. When I left it was because I couldn’t afford it, I mean
quite honestly, the program was amazing absolutely like I said.
Kate had started working as a coder many years earlier and eventually became an instructional
designer there until the time when she left the university. As an employee in the university, she
qualified for substantial discounts on tuition for her doctoral program, but when the university
experienced budget cuts in 2018, the institution eliminated the employee discounts, and she
could no longer afford the cost of the program and decided to withdraw.
Because of Kate’s professional and academic background, she had experience with
HyFlex from different perspectives. In her role as instructional designer, she had familiarity with
HyFlex and can offer insights from the perspective of a course designer. As a graduate student,
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she had also completed coursework in a hybrid-flexible format, albeit it was not branded as
HyFlex.
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