Coming to America, Again
Fasika Minda Melese—M.S. Teaching & Curriculum ’19; C.A.S. Instructional Design Foundations ’18—is an IDD&E first-year doctoral student from Ethiopia.
My inspiration for studying Instructional Design (I.D.) came from teaching computer science undergraduate courses for several years at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. At that time, it appeared many freshman students within our department struggled to understand the basics of coding due to a lack of instructional strategies that could facilitate their learning. Hence, I began to advocate for a change in the curriculum because it was failing instructionally to support every student’s learning need.
As an advocate, I joined some friends and senior year students to design a Winter school (June, July, August) Computer Science for High Schools program in my alma mater high school. At the end of the program in 2014 we created an 8-minute documentary about it. I also collaborated with the gender office on giving tutorial classes to female freshman students on programming topics to minimize the high number of female dropout rate during their first year. With the results from those projects, I thought I couldn’t just do this at one school or only with one group to make a change. It was not sustainable. And the first step towards sustainability was to equip myself with the right skills and knowledge. In 2017, I joined Syracuse University as Open Society Foundations Fellow to pursue my M.S. in Teaching and Curriculum (T&C). It is at this point in my academic career that I discovered the world of I.D. and fell deeply in love with it. Concurrently with my M.S., I got my Certificate of Advanced Studies in I.D. Foundations.
Afterwards I went back to Ethiopia and started working with an international N.G.O. called Educational Development Center (E.D.C.) on a project named READ II. Having a foundation in I.D., my role on the project began as the Production Coordinator. I was responsible to facilitate the production of 20 English interactive audio instructions that aimed to support college students with their English speaking and listening skills. While at this job, I started my Ph.D. application to join the Fall 2020 cohort. My supervisor at E.D.C. was supportive throughout this process and pushed me to finish the application. She believed I demonstrated an ability to continue working in a research-oriented environment. I got my acceptance letter to join the Ph.D. program, but the COVID-19 pandemic hit globally, and I couldn’t travel to join in Fall 2020. I had to defer my admission and my advisor Dr. Jing Lei and office coordinator Rebecca Pettit were supportive in guiding me through all this process.
During the Fall 2020 semester, it was just a waiting game with the U.S. Embassy in Ethiopia because nobody knew when it would open to process visas. In hindsight, I am so thankful for that time because I got to spend it with family and friends which gave me the energy that keeps me going now. The embassy opened in December 2020, and I was able to move back to the U.S. by the end of January 2021.
Coming back to ‘Cuse was like coming back home. Everyone was welcoming and everything was as I knew it before. Except now, I am joining a new family that is the IDD&E Department and Project Advance—the office in which I am currently working as a graduate assistant. As part of the Ph.D. cohort, I am lagging one semester behind, but the other Ph.D. students are supportive and open to help me in any way. I have been talking to one Ph.D. student every week since we started the Spring 2021 semester through the IDD&E Spotlight podcast, and it has been wonderful and enjoyable. At Project Advance, I am working with Dr. Rob S. Pusch and the team on re-designing video tutorials originally made by Dr. Marlene Blumin. This is literally a dream job. Because during my master’s program in T&C I discovered Project Advance through SU website, and it resonated with my passion project of working with high school students. Now to be able to work with Dr. Rob’s team is a dream come true.
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