Over the course of nearly a decade, I served as a teaching assistant for thirteen course-semesters across the University of Minnesota's sociology curriculum. These ranged from large-enrollment introductory lectures with over a hundred students to upper-division seminars, writing-intensive courses, a senior capstone, and substantive electives spanning social theory, criminology, food politics, sexualities, and social movements. In most of these appointments, my role extended well beyond leading discussion sections and grading: I consulted with faculty on assignment design, built and maintained Canvas course infrastructure, developed grading standards, and informally onboarded newer TAs into the workflows and expectations of each course.
What makes this experience relevant to instructional design is not any single course, but the cumulative pattern. Working across that many courses, with that many different instructors and pedagogical structures, builds a particular kind of expertise — the ability to see what works and what doesn't across contexts, to identify where students consistently struggle regardless of subject matter, and to translate those things into concrete design recommendations.
The clearest example of this collaborative design work involved an upper-division course with a community engagement component. The original assignment asked students to volunteer with a local community organization for a set number of hours during the semester, then write a reflection connecting their experience to course concepts. On paper, the assignment was well-intentioned — it brought students into contact with real communities and real social problems, which is exactly the kind of applied learning that sociology courses benefit from.
The problem was visible in the student work. After grading several semesters' worth of similar assignments across different courses, I had developed a fairly clear sense of when an assignment was producing genuine analytical thinking and when it was producing performative compliance. This one leaned toward the latter. Many students were turning in reflections that read as obligatory accounts of showing up — thin on analysis, heavy on narration, and disconnected from the course's theoretical framework. Some students struggled to complete the assignment at all, not because they were disengaged, but because the logistics were genuinely prohibitive: coordinating schedules with organizations, navigating the social dynamics of cold-contacting a new institution, and managing the time commitment alongside other coursework. Students with social anxiety, demanding work schedules, or limited transportation faced disproportionate barriers that had nothing to do with their capacity to engage analytically with community-based work.
The core issue was a misalignment between the assignment's structure and its learning objective. The goal was for students to engage sociologically with a community organization — to observe how it operated, who it served, what structural conditions shaped its work, and how those observations connected to course material. But the volunteer-hours format prioritized participation over analysis, and the barriers to participation were unevenly distributed across the student population.
I proposed an alternative pathway that preserved the community-engagement dimension while shifting the mode of engagement from service to inquiry. Instead of volunteering, students could choose to conduct structured interviews with people involved in a community organization — staff, volunteers, or service users — and produce an analytical report situating the organization's work within the sociological frameworks covered in the course. This gave students hands-on experience with qualitative research methods (designing interview questions, managing an interview interaction, analyzing responses) while maintaining the course's commitment to connecting classroom learning with community realities.
The key design move was making this an option rather than a replacement. Students who wanted to volunteer still could; the interview-based pathway was an alternative for those who found it a better fit. This preserved the spirit of the original assignment while removing the assumption that a single format would work equally well for every student in the room.
The faculty member adopted the redesign, and a substantial number of students opted for the interview pathway in the following semester. I was not teaching the course at that point, so I don't have direct comparison data on the quality of the resulting work. But the fact that students chose the alternative in significant numbers suggests that the barriers I identified were real and that the option addressed a genuine need.
This assignment asks you to engage directly with a community organization and produce an analytical paper connecting your observations to the sociological frameworks we have developed throughout the course. The goal is not simply to describe what an organization does, but to analyze how and why it operates the way it does — attending to the structural conditions, institutional dynamics, and social relationships that shape its work. You will choose one of two pathways to complete this assignment.
Volunteer with a community organization for a minimum of 15 hours over the course of the semester. Your paper should draw on your direct experience as a participant-observer: what did you see, who did you interact with, and how does the organization's day-to-day work reflect (or complicate) the theoretical concepts from this course?
Your paper should include:
Conduct 2–3 semi-structured interviews with individuals connected to a community organization — staff members, long-term volunteers, or people who use the organization's services. Your paper should use these interviews as primary data, analyzing what your respondents' perspectives reveal about the organization's social role and the structural conditions it operates within.
Your paper should include:
Both pathways require a paper of 8–12 pages (double-spaced, 12-point font, standard margins). All claims should be supported with evidence — either from your direct observations, your interview data, or assigned course readings. You must cite at least four course readings substantively (not just in passing). A complete bibliography is required.
This redesign illustrates a backward-design principle: when an assignment's structure creates barriers that aren't intrinsic to the learning objective, the structure should change, not the objective. The goal was community engagement and sociological analysis; the volunteer-hours format was one path to that goal, but not the only one. Identifying this required the kind of cross-course pattern recognition that comes from grading at scale — seeing the same friction points across different semesters and course contexts, and being able to distinguish between assignments that are difficult because they demand real thinking and assignments that are difficult because they're poorly designed.
The assignment redesign was one visible instance of a broader pattern of collaborative work that spanned my time in the department. Across thirteen course-semesters, I developed fluency with the operational infrastructure that keeps courses running — the work that instructional designers do routinely but that rarely gets framed as design.
Built and reorganized Canvas course shells, configured gradebook structures and assignment weighting, created submission workflows, and migrated course content between semesters — including setting up module prerequisite chains, conditional availability rules, and integrated rubrics. In several courses, I was the person translating a faculty member's pedagogical intentions into a functional digital architecture
Graded thousands of papers across a wide range of assignment types, course levels, and student populations. This builds a detailed understanding of where students struggle, which prompts produce strong analytical writing, and how small changes in assignment framing shift the quality of student work.
Provided feedback on assignment design, module sequencing, and course structure to faculty across multiple courses. The assignment redesign above is one example; the broader pattern was ongoing dialogue about what was and wasn't working, informed by direct observation of student performance.
Informally onboarded newer teaching assistants into grading standards, Canvas workflows (particularly SpeedGrader), and the judgment calls that grading requires — when to hold a standard and when to recognize that a student is struggling with the assignment's design rather than the material itself.
The work described on this page maps directly onto the collaborative dimension of instructional design: consulting with subject-matter experts (faculty) on course and assignment design, managing LMS infrastructure, developing and calibrating assessment standards, and mentoring team members. The distinguishing feature is that this work was sustained across nearly a decade and across a wide range of course types, which means the skills are not tied to a single pedagogical context but are transferable across disciplines and modalities.