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This study explores ongoing research into self-mapped learning pathways that students utilize to move through a course when given two modalities to choose from: one that is instructor-led and one that is student-directed.

Process mining analysis was utilized to examine and cluster clickstream data from an online college-level History course designed with dual modality choices. This paper examines some of the results from different approaches to clustering the available data.

By examining how often students interacted with others, whether they were more internal or external facing with their pathway choices, and whether or not they completed a learning pathway, this study identified five general tactics from the data: Individualistic Internal; Non-completing Internal; Completing, Interactive Internal; Completing, Interactive, and Reflective and Completing External. Further analysis of when students used each tactic led to the identification of four different strategies that learners utilized during class sessions.

The results of this analysis could potentially lead to the creation of customizable design models that can assist learners as they navigate modality choices in learner-centered or less-structured learning design methodologies.

Few courses are designed to give the learners the options to follow the instructor or create their own learning pathway. Knowing how to identify what choices a learner might take in these scenarios is even less explored. Preliminary data for this paper was originally presented as a poster session at the Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference in 2019.

Since the 1950s, the closet has been the chief metaphor for conceptualizing the experience of sexual minorities. Social change over the last four decades has begun to dismantle some of the social structures that historically policed heteronormativity and forced queer people to manage information about their sexuality in everyday life. Although scholars argue that these changes make it possible for some sexual minorities to live “beyond the closet” (Seidman, 2002), evidence shows the dynamics of the closet persist in organizations. Drawing on a case study of theme park entertainment workers, whose jobs exist at the nexus of structural conditions that research anticipates would end heterosexual domination, I find that what initially appears to be a post-closeted workplace is, in fact, a new iteration: the walk-in closet. More expansive than the corporate or gay-friendly closets, the walk-in closet provides some sexual minorities with a space to disclose their identities, seemingly without cost. Yet the fundamental dynamics of the closet – the subordination of homosexuality to heterosexuality and the continued need for LGB workers to manage information about their sexuality at work – persist through a set of boundaries that contain gayness to organizationally desired places.

Gender, race, and class-based meanings inform longstanding divisions and status hierarchies within the culinary profession, such as those between public and private and amateur and professional cooking. Private and personal chefs’ work in homes disrupts these divisions and hierarchies. Given their precarious position, how do these chefs negotiate their standing within the profession?

This chapter draws on interviews with 41 private/personal chefs. Eight were primarily private household employees, while all others were primarily self-employed.

The chefs negotiated their status by making distinctions between themselves and commercial chefs, along with other private/personal chefs. The chefs both challenge and reinforce the dichotomies and criteria shaping status evaluations within the culinary profession. Similarly, they both contest and reinforce gender, race, and class hierarchies.

The chefs’ conceptual distinctions can potentially (re)produce or challenge material inequalities. Moreover, while the fields of private/personal cheffing create opportunities for more adults to cook for a living, the traditional status hierarchies remain largely the same. It is likely that as long as those hierarchies persist, the chefs’ conceptual distinctions will continue to challenge and reinforce them.

Research on private/personal chefs has been minimal, so this chapter fills this gap. It also adds to scholarship connecting workers’ status struggles and gender, race, and class inequalities. The case of private and personal chefs sheds new light on how gender, race, and class intersect to inform status evaluations within the culinary profession.