My Festschrifts for Randi Engle's Situative Design Principles

By Daniel Hickey

It has been over a decade since Randi Engle lost a two-year battle with pancreatic cancer at age 45.  I did not know Randi very well.  But I know some of her close friends and former students well and they all said she was a great friend and mentor. As elaborated in this memorial, Randi completed her Ph.D. at Stanford in 2000.  She spent five years as a postdoc at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburg before joining UC Berkley.

Randi's design principles for productive disciplinary engagement (PDE) and expansive framing are among the most useful and used to emerge from what I call "stridently situative" perspectives. Thanks to some super-helpful mid-career mentoring from James Gee, the second half of my career has been essentially continuing the work Randi started and moving it into the realm of online learning and social justice.  My colleague Eric Freedman and I and our advisees are advancing multiple systematic reviews of the nearly 3000 publications that build on these two distinctive frameworks.  

In the meantime, we have published four recent papers that build very directly on PDE and expansive framing.  Unfortunately, two of them are inaccessible to most of the public and many scholars. I am starting to get a few requests because they are tuning up in search.  So let me post them here with a bit of context.

Hickey, D. T. (2022).  Productive disciplinary engagement and expansive framing: The situative legacy of Randi Engle.  In M. McCaslin & T. Good (Eds.) Routledge Online Encyclopedia of Education. 

This is a flat-out festschrift in the style of European academic tribute.  I wrote it in part to offer a very readable summary of the "five explanations" of expansive framing in Engle, Lam, Meyer, & Nix (2012).  These explanations blew my mind in 2012 as I had already spent a few years incorporating PDE into my emerging framework for online learning.  Expansive framing argues that "personally authentic" learning environments will result in generative learning that transfers readily and widely to new contexts.  They indirectly explain why "professionally authentic" environments (as is common in problem-based learning) are likely quite alien and unwelcoming, especially to diverse learners.

Hickey, D. T., & Lam, D.  (2023).  Evolving and emerging perspectives on the transfer of learning. In A. O'Donnell & J. Reeve (Eds).  Oxford handbook of educational psychology.  Oxford University Press.  

I have some regrets about contributing this chapter to this handbook. The promised external reviews never materialized and very few libraries subscribe to it. It took me two years to write and I broke new ground by extending Randi's ideas about expansive framing and transfer into social justice and equity.  These ideas are going forward in several other areas  I am quite excited about an emerging sociocultural consensus about learning transfer that takes into account race and marginalization

Hickey, D. T. (2023). Designing for productive disciplinary engagement and responsive assessment with situated cognition and expansive framing. In B. Allman, H. Leary, & R. Kimmons (Eds), Theories to influence the future of learning design and technology. (pp. 9-21) Ed Tech Books

This essay won the second place prize in the "Theory Spotlight" competition at the 2022 meeting of the Association for Educational Communication and Technology.  I was really trying to drive home the point that situated cognition ≠ authentic learning.  Thanks to the influence of Jan Herrington and Tom Reeves, many communities (particularly the AECT community) frame situated cognition as an argument for constructivist professionally authentic instruction and assessment.  Randi's ideas about expansive framing argue otherwise.

Hickey, D. T., Chartrand, G. T., & Andrews, C. D. (2020).  Expansive framing as a pragmatic theory for instructional design.  Educational Technology Research and Development [Special issue on The crucial role of theoretical scholarship for learning design and technology] 68 (2), 751-782.

This chapter was in a special issue of AECT's flagship journal edited by Rick West.  We introduced Participatory Learning and Assessment to the AECT community.  PLA embeds Randi's design principles into the multi-level assessment framework that emerged in the first half of my career.  We translated the five theory-laden PLA design principles into 15 discreet steps for instructional designers who are likely grounded in cognitive theories of learning.