I am currently enrolled in a PhD. 
My thesis title is: Constructive Alignment as Constructivist Learning: Investigating Course Design as a Site of Teaching Academic Development

The Motivating Proposition

Higher education institutions broadly adopt constructive alignment (CA) as a framework for course design, yet its implementation in practice is widely reported as inconsistent, superficial, and frequently reduced to a compliance exercise (Hadjianastasis, 2016; Ruge et al., 2019; Trigwell and Prosser, 2014). The literature identifies numerous barriers to meaningful engagement, including insufficient time, limited training, and competing institutional pressures. This thesis further argues, through a separate positional paper, that the perceived association of CA with neoliberal governance agendas may represent an additional and underexamined deterrent. Together, these barriers point toward a more fundamental problem that the literature has not adequately examined: the possibility that the field treats course design as a technical process of arranging components rather than as an epistemological one.

This thesis is motivated by a proposition that has not been empirically investigated: that the cognitive work genuine CA course design demands, including deconstructing intended outcomes, mapping interdependencies between components, iterating when the system reveals its own inconsistencies, and constructing a coherent whole from parts that resist easy alignment, may be structurally analogous to the constructivist learning process CA is designed to produce in students. Just as a well-designed CA course asks students to actively construct understanding through engagement, reflection, and iteration, designing such a course may require Teaching Academics to undertake the same kind of cognitive and epistemological work. If this is the case, the process of CA course design may not be merely analogous to learning; it may constitute learning in its own right.

This proposition is not yet established. It emerges primarily from a collaborative autoethnographic study documenting the experience of two Curriculum Designers (CDs) supporting TAs through large-scale CA course redesign during a university merger. The study is significant not only for the conceptual innovations it surfaces, namely conservation of alignment and flexible entry points in course design, but for what it demonstrates about the nature of deep engagement with CA itself. The journey the two CDs undertook, wrestling iteratively with course components, questioning assumptions, and constructing new understanding of how to bring TAs into genuine engagement with CA through sustained reflection and dialogue, is precisely analogous to the learning journey this thesis argues TAs need to undertake and mirrors the work any teacher undertakes in considering how to engage their students. The study therefore operates at two levels simultaneously: as a demonstration of the constructivist learning the thesis proposes CA course design can produce, and as a reflection on the conditions that enable others to access that learning. In this sense, the autoethnographic paper is not merely evidence motivating the investigation; it is a lived instance of the central proposition. 

A separate positional paper, employing critical realism and retroductive analysis, examines the structural and ideological conditions that may deter practitioners from engaging with CA genuinely, including its perceived association with neoliberal governance agendas. Neither paper, however, constitutes empirical evidence of how widespread these patterns are across the broader field, nor do they test whether interventions designed to enable deeper engagement produce the educator development the proposition anticipates. These are the questions this thesis will investigate.