It is an interesting turn of events when a teacher once again becomes the student. For Full Sail graduate Katie Hanifin, this role reversal was one of the most difficult and rewarding experiences in her life. After a series of long-shot decisions, she’s come a long way from her teaching days in the classroom and now finds herself collaborating with an instructional design team overseas.
“After getting my bachelor’s degree in Spanish with a focus in business and public affairs from Indiana University, I returned to New York and started working in marketing for the American Heart Association,” Katie says. “At first, I thought this was my dream job, but I wasn’t really in contact with a volunteer base, and my role was more administrative. That wasn’t the work I wanted to do.”
While reevaluating her career path, Katie heard about a rising demand for foreign language teachers in her area. A speaker of three languages, Katie jumped at the chance to teach Spanish and French at Canastota Junior/Senior High School in upstate New York, and immediately fell in love with teaching.
“From my business background and job experiences I held before teaching, I found myself incorporating technology aspects into my classroom,” Katie says. “I became a bit of a specialist with education technology and video games in the classroom. The [school district] was very accepting of my crazy, non-traditional endeavors. My budget would always have off-the-wall items listed, such as bouncy balls and a Wii console. But all of my ideas were based on research. It was about motivating and engaging kids.”
Katie based her classroom instruction on the Multiple Intelligence Learning Theory that explores the different ways we process information. Aside from reading or writing, this research finds we learn based on movement, visuals, music, and even playing games. She was half way through another education master’s program when she discovered the Education Media Design & Technology Master of Science Online Degree Program with Full Sail University. While enrolled in the program, Katie continued to work full time as a teacher.
“It was challenging, but in a good way. The materials we were learning were so fascinating that it didn’t seem like a chore to do the program,” Katie says. “I would have been content after graduation to return to the classroom and implement all the ideas that I learned from the program. But Career Development at Full Sail later contacted me about an opportunity to work as a consultant on instructional design with a company in Spain. I sent my application in on a whim, and got the job. Now I commute from New York to Spain once a month.”
Katie works with an international team in Spain to build 3D video game simulations for health and safety training. The team includes a French project manager, a Brazilian subject matter expert, and a Spanish technical director.
“My projects start by forcing really good instructional techniques onto the subject experts, since they’re not familiar with instruction. I have to bridge their knowledge into something that I know people can learn from,” Katie says.
“It’s amazing how much the skills I learned from Full Sail’s online platform transfer into this job. Since I am working with professionals overseas, it’s not like we can meet in the library everyday. Online collaboration is how I function on a daily basis at work now.”
From career change to cross-continental collaboration, Katie has made quite the departure from the traditional classroom. But she hasn’t given up on returning to teaching forever.
“I wrote my Education Media Design & Technology masters thesis project on how to use video games in a high school setting. I developed this idea for a wide-scale video game that could extend across [multiple] curricula and be used in every high school across the U.S., “ Katie says. “My goal is to do the exact work I am doing now, but to do it with video game project [with students].
“The more we explore how the brain likes to process information, the greater the argument for [technology] in education.”
