College of Education and Human Development

Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development

People

Meg Fitzgerald-Sisk

  • Senior Lecturer

My scholarship examines how adults develop expertise for complex work, particularly in settings where knowledge is tacit, situated, socially learned, and continually evolving.

    DEGREES

    Ph.D., University of Minnesota, work and human resource education
    B.A., University of Chicago, ancient history (Egyptology)

      AREAS OF INTEREST
      • Development of expertise and professional capability
      • Workplace and situated learning
      • Faculty learning and development
      • Instructional design and undergraduate learning
      • Human–AI collaboration and responsibility boundary work
      • Maritime hospitality workforce development
      • History of human resource development
      • Futures studies and futuring methods
        BIOGRAPHY

        Profile

        I am a Senior Lecturer in Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development at the University of Minnesota. My work is grounded in a longstanding interest in how people become capable of performing complex work, especially when much of what they need to know cannot be fully captured in formal instruction or a procedural manual.
        Before joining the University of Minnesota, I accumulated more than 20 years of experience in human resource development in business and across all levels of education, from preschool through graduate education. These experiences gave me opportunities to observe how teachers, instructors, trainers, and other professionals are prepared through traditional education, alternative licensure, apprenticeship, on-the-job learning, and train-the-trainer models.

        My research applies a shared set of questions across several professional and organizational settings. These include how university faculty learn to teach and perform the broader dimensions of academic work; how undergraduate learning environments can be designed to support meaningful, applied learning; how employees in maritime hospitality and historically significant private residences learn highly situated forms of work; and how adults learn to collaborate responsibly with increasingly capable non-human cognitive partners. I am also interested in the history of human resource development and in what historical societies can teach us about the preservation and transmission of expertise.

        I teach primarily in the undergraduate Human Resource Development and Business and Marketing Education programs, particularly in project management, advanced project management, and futures studies. My teaching emphasizes experiential, participatory, and integrative learning. I view teaching not simply as the delivery of information, but as the deliberate creation of conditions in which students can develop judgment, capability, and confidence.

        Learning is at the center of my work, whether I am teaching students, studying how expertise develops, collaborating with colleagues, or exploring how people and organizations prepare for changing futures.
         

        Updated July 28th 2026

        Meg Fitzgerald-Sisk