There are some biases that are harder to spot than others because they almost characterize the thinking of the field itself. Design is conceived in the real world; it is practiced by people living in the real world. These minds are also educated in design and conditioned daily by the real world.
The power of hegemony is that even something with very limited applicability can be packaged as ‘universal’. You want to explore decolonizing instructional design? Start here with how we define, analyze and characterize people. It is a necessary act of epistemic rebellion to stop using these generational categorizations to describe our learners, as if these have any kind of universal validity.
We come across training design declarations on social media that range from the strange to the utterly unfounded as we all rush to generate content so that we can claim design thought-leadership. All of us who are content creators can sympathize with that pressure, for sure! But, it’s also necessary to be wary because sometimes the claims we make are the result of seriously flawed reasoning.
