My name is Adrian Granchelli. I was born in Italy, before moving to North Vancouver, Canada where I grew up in a traditional Italian household with extended family. I am a settler to all the lands I have called home, from the greater Vancouver area to the Kootenays and currently live on Vancouver Island in the Comox Valley, the unceded territory of the K’òmoks First Nation.
In this very moment of writing, I am pursuing a PhD in Educational Studies, specializing in educational technology at the University of Victoria (UVic). This is the result of a long series of disparate experiences centred around:
- my desire to make, design, and utilize technology, and
- to learn, teach, and empower others.
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
– Steve Jobs
My journey into the fields of technology began through a love of making and figuring out how things work. This evolved into a passion for science and woodworking in high school, and then a Bachelor of Applied Science in Mechanical Engineering at the University of British Columbia. Mech 2 remains one of the best educational experiences I’ve had. It was incredibly challenging, with weekly three-hour exams, yet every course was deeply integrated (e.g., the mathematics content was directly applied to kinematic physics and electricity), and included breaks from coursework for intensive project-based learning challenges. I truly loved what I was learning; though as I progressed through the years, I found most of the teaching practices lackluster. I grew jaded with my educational experience and for the most part skipped class and taught myself.
A second guiding force arose from my passion for sports and the outdoors. In high school, I was introduced to dinghy sailing and then enrolled in summer camps at the Hollyburn Sailing Club, a tiny grassroots organization at Ambleside Beach in West Vancouver. I enjoyed sailing and the culture so much that I volunteered and eventually became a sailing coach. Year after year, through high school and university, I would return and expand my qualifications. Eventually, I taught the most advanced classes as well as the race team. Looking back, my passion for sailing was my gateway to education.
Promptly after graduating from my bachelor’s in 2015, I developed and instructed courses in physics and math at the British Columbia Institute of Technology Marine Campus where I got my foray into formal education. This came to be through a strike of luck as a personal connection recognized my combination of technical skills and education experience. From 2016 – 2019, I was a sessional instructor where I developed two courses and taught them alongside several others. The position was part-time, but I did not seek full-time employment, even though I loved it. There was something lacking for me that I didn’t quite know how to place.
I first experienced a makerspace in 2018 and I was hooked. At this time, I began working for MakerLabs, in Vancouver, Canada’s largest makerspace, and gained a deep understanding on the inner working of makerspaces, on self-driven and community learning, and design and manufacturing processes. In real time, I was able to watch and experience skill development and projects coming to life. It is incredible when many makers of various media, working in proximity, influence one another—a manifestation of ‘idea spillover’. MakerLabs remains one of the most inspirational places I have experienced, where it feels like anything is possible. I spent two years there developing and delivering workshops, coordinating education and curriculum, and most importantly, making.
Further exploring the crossroads of my passions for technology and teaching/learning through formal education was a logical next step. A remote, part-time Master of Educational Technology at UBC fit nicely into my life, where I learned about a variety of educational technologies while utilizing the very same technologies to learn. It allowed me to explore educational experiences through not just words but also design. Design of open educational resources, experiences, stories, and games.
I was just over halfway through my degree when COVID-19 began. At this time, most school and work across Canada shifted online, validating my career direction of educational technology. I pursued two opportunities: one as an online learning designer at The Learning Centre in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at the University of British Columbia and the other as the education director at Wachiay Studio, a screenprinting social enterprise in Courtenay, BC.
At The Learning Centre, I supported instructors with the rapid shift to online learning utilizing a variety of tools such as the Canvas learning management system and Zoom. I coordinated weekly Lunch & Learn sessions and facilitated a couple of my own topics through this series.
At Wachiay Studio, a screenprinting expert and I developed a low-cost online resource for screenprinting that doubled as a learning management system called Screen the World. We also designed and offered facilitated a remote ten-week Screenprinting for Entrepreneurs course, where we taught four cohorts with a flipped classroom model over Zoom, leading to several students successfully launching small businesses.
In 2022, I began working with Grey & Ivy as the educational technology lead, where I was once again able to combine my passions for design and education. Grey & Ivy works at the intersections of architecture, technology, and education to cocreate systems for architectural development. I supported and coordinated Design+Build workshops delivered both in person and virtually to remote Indigenous communities in Manitoba and Ontario. These workshops integrated Western design practices, Indigenous design paradigms, and land-based learning, creating a reciprocal and place-responsive experience. With Grey & Ivy, I co-authored my first peer-reviewed publication in Greening Construction Trades in Canada, edited by Colleges and Institutes Canada.
In November 2022 I was one of the millions of people around the world in awe of the public release of the large language model, ChatGPT. My Master in Educational Technology touched on artificial intelligence and machine learning, yet it did not feel tangible. With this new generation of generative A.I. tools, my curiosity was piqued, and I still enjoy experimenting. I wrote an opinion piece on generative artificial intelligence early in 2023, which I think holds up even years later, as the technology continues to advance.
Professionally, I want to be part of the conversation of utilizing this revolutionary technology in education. At Grey & Ivy, I experimented with generative artificial intelligence in all parts of the educational process, from curriculum development to supporting students’ use such as with conversing about the design process, brainstorming, and image generation for conceptualization. As an independent contractor in 2025, I developed a multi-agentic workflow to convert educational content into fully formatted and uniformly stylized webpages. To truly enter the conversation, further education and research emerged as the best option.
I am in my first semester in the PhD in Educational Studies at UVic and already feel this is the right place for me. It’s challenging, engaging, and full of opportunities. I am actively building out my experience and addressing personal gaps in becoming a researcher. While my master’s degree gave me a strong foundation of theory and application, it was not thesis-based. This has resulted in a lack of publications and a gap in the application of research methods. Additionally, a part-time master’s degree afforded few opportunities for scholarships or awards, resulting in a gap of recognized academic achievement on my CV.
My network, including by supervisors and peers at UVic, are giving me the opportunity to work with my passions of technology, design, and education, to sharpen my research skills, and to deeply explore this new, evolving world of generative artificial intelligence and education. I’m excited to be part of this moment, connecting the dots and adding new ones along the way.
