Join CodeJoy's Director of Learning, Amanda Jeane Strode, as she sits down with the newest addition to the team, Dr. Jordan Mroziak. Discover Jordan's fascinating journey from music and the arts to instructional technology and his passion for exploring how technology enhances our human experience. Get ready to learn about his international work in AI education, his unique perspective on curriculum design, and what excites him most about his new role as CodeJoy's AI & Education Learning Designer.
Amanda Jeane Strode (AJS): Who are you and what do you do?
Jordan Mroziak (JM): My name is Dr. Jordan Mroziak. I never really use the Dr. part…I generally feel as though the only people who I may ask to call me doctor are my older brothers. All kidding aside, I got my doctorate in instructional technology, but I went to school for music. The arts are kind of a primary passion for me. I tend to view everything through the lens of art and aesthetic education. I taught in a university setting for just over 15 years; history of rock and roll, history of hiphop classes, in addition to, more traditional graduate level pedagogy and research classes.
AJS: Tell me more about your music career. Are you an instrumentalist? Are you a music theory person? What's your means of music?
JM: My entry point was music technology and sound recording. So, I had studied piano as a child and then switched to electric bass in high school. Thirteen-year-old Jordan knew for a fact that you could not be in a band and play piano -a youthful, flawed assumption. I studied electric bass in college as well as sound recording. Then, after my graduate studies were in curriculum design and pedagogy, I was really interested in the sociocultural history of pop music which is the nerdy sweet spot for me.
AJS: What kind of work have you been doing more recently?
JM: I look at technology through the lens of the humanities and the arts, and have always been interested less in specific pieces of technology and more with how technology enhances our core dispositions of what it means to be human, right? Leverage greater creativity? How does it help us to be more curious? How does it bring us more community and connection and joy? So, I'm a bit of a black sheep in that way, but I really love the idea of emphasizing what technology means for us as being people alongside one another. I eventually found my way to Carnegie Mellon University where I worked for a few years in community engagement work. I have a deep and abiding appreciation for what it means to work in the intersectional justice space alongside other people. And again, that vision of teaching and learning has always been front and center for me. Over the past six years or so I’ve been working on and thinking about AI in teaching and learning ecosystems and I’ve had the joy of working internationally in that space for the past three years or so, as well. That work was initiated at CMU’s Create Lab where I explored bringing engineers, designers, educators, and community members together with some brilliant co-workers of mine. Then, sort of more formally in the past few years, I’ve been doing international curriculum design. I have done some work in Portugal, Saudi Arabia, and was recently in Slovenia on a Fulbright specialist position. I was working with one of their national organizations on a digital transformation plan for the country. I enjoy dabbling and working across disciplinary boundaries, but have really been interested in this moment of AI.
AJS: I'm super curious how other countries are different from the United States in our education system. What was it like to work with your international partners?
JM: I had the fortune of working in these really cool places: Portugal and Saudi Arabia, then most recently Slovenia. I’m always excited to see the cultural differences. I mean, travel is its own form of education, and so I think that there's an inherent quality to bearing witness to different ways of being and seeing the world. The schools that I worked in were generally international baccalaureate schools so very similar to what one might expect to see here in the states. They had many of the same features in both surface ways, and also deep ways, around what curriculum is and that type of thing. There were a few schools in Riyadh that I had a chance to go to that were more traditional Saudi schools, so I saw the separation of genders by virtue of their physical construction and how they're school day is framed there.
In all these various locations, I worked on designing K - 12 learning opportunities for learners in artificial intelligence. But of course, I always preface with the fact that I am not a computer scientist by trade. I dabble and I understand foundational concepts of coding and the like, but am not an engineer and would never want to build something on my own. My approach in those situations tends to be through inquiry and project-based approaches. If we can understand that AI generally involves a piece of technology perceiving the world, creating representations using forms of logic, and interacting with the world…there's a lot of ways that we can expand upon that. We are looking to understand how AI might try to emulate what we do as people when we reason and think about the world around us, and also working to critically acknowledge that these pieces of technology - various forms of AI - have an ethical impact, right? Any piece of technology is designed by people and people are, if nothing else, flawed individuals, right? All technologies are imbued with the values of their creators and the societies that bring them forth. And so what are the ethical decisions being made in the design, development, implementation, etc.?
These projects abroad were fantastic experiences and it was an exciting chance to travel and see schooling and education in different places. And it's impossible not to bring that back to my work nationally here. The journey changes you. It should change you.
AJS: I have this picture of teenage rockstar Jordan in my mind. Then, I have a picture of adult Jordan who is involved in learning and education now. What was your journey into education?
JM: I think two things occurred. One, I graduated and realized that I deeply hated working in a recording studio. It was not a set of skills that I had nurtured. When I say skills, I don't mean the actual setting up of a microphone or tuning a drum set and that kind of thing. I mean the experience of having to go in and EQ something to the nth degree. That level of attention to detail was not where my heart or my mind was. I'm much more prone to big idea thinking and philosophy by nature. So, it was really difficult for me to picture myself in that grind every day. Whereas, I know that other people thrive in that environment…I just knew that I didn't have that set of dispositions to exist in that space. Then secondly, when I went to graduate school, I was really interested in designing a history of rock and roll class because one did not exist in the school that I was in. I threw myself and my master's work into designing this class from the ground up. I eventually got to teach that class, which was a super fun, early feather in the cap.
But, I think the thing that got me interested in education as a path of study was the fact that curricula and pedagogy establish cultural norms. It was an interesting, very early observation for me to see what kinds of knowledge are regarded as ‘valid’ or ‘valued’. Even after I taught the history of rock and roll for 15 years, the class was not offered inside the school of music. My class was for non-majors so students in the school of music could elect to take it but were not required to. We teach certain things and certain things are left out. When certain things are left out, the implicit message is that they don't matter, right? I think in a way, my venture into education was a journey to validate my own experience, because that was the music that I cared about and lived with and all my friends listened to. My early journey into education was seeing it as a form of cultural validation and personal expression.
Only later on did I think - and I realize probably far too late in the process - but the privilege of ONLY having had this invalidating experience AFTER I got to college. This type of invalidation and marginalization is a lived experience that many people have far earlier in their life. My feeling of not being seen or represented in the curriculum - thats when the political endeavor of education kind of took off for me. I had the luxury of going through 20 some years and seeing myself represented in virtually every other way, shape, and form in teaching and learning spaces. Many people certainly don't have that experience. And so, I think that was where threads of my studies around music, education, history, and philosophy really started to get tied together for me.
AJS: What was your meet-cute with CodeJoy?
JM: There was no magic rom-com moment. I think of a, perhaps, more genuine love story. It was something that evolved over time. My initial interactions were through BirdBrain because Tom Lauwers, founder of Birdbrain, was initially at CMU Create Lab. I had interacted with some of his ongoing research, even though he had left by the time I joined. I think the initial pathways occurred at that point in time. Then - fast forward a couple years - because of my work at CMU Create Lab, I was deeply invested in the work of ABCreate, a local education consortium. Matt and Kelsey were obviously involved in PD offerings there, and so, again, we kind of twisted around one another. Then - fast forward again - to very recently where I had coffee with Colleen Smith, who previously led ABCreate. She informed me that she was working alongside Matt and Kelsey with CodeJoy. Then, I was like, "I'm doing some AI stuff, and I see that you're doing AI stuff. We should talk." We find ourselves in this moment. It was a dance of a few years, but we landed here.
AJS: It is amazing how many of the connections go all the way back to BirdBrain. Many of our CodeJoy stories begin there; we have a lot to be thankful for from them for sure.
JM: Observationally, I think that there is both a real connective tissue of relationships and also a deep connection in the way the work happens. Matt and Kelsey have carried through some of that philosophy from BirdBrain, that there can and should be joy in the work. Learning is not a task, right? Although that's what we've often framed it as, this kind of trek that we have to take, and is required of us. I think that it's just as easy to reframe it around the joy of genuine curiosity and exploration, and what that means for being a human. So I see that carried through in each one of those places.
AJS: What is your new role at CodeJoy?
JM: The work that I'm interested in doing, and the work that seems most vital, is really about designing learning experiences around artificial intelligence for learners of all ages. Then, fostering relationships in local and national ecosystems that best support the growth of CodeJoy. I’ll be helping CodeJoy out as their new AI & Education Learning Designer.
Learn more about Jordan on LinkedIn