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Teaching & Learning Positionality in HCI education: reflecting on our identities
as educators and facilitating the discussion in the classroom
LILIAN G. MOTTI ADER∗,Dept CSIS, Lero, Interaction Design Centre, University of Limerick, Ireland
JENNYFER LAWRENCE TAYLOR, School of Computing, Australian National University, Australia
CRISTIANO STORNI, Dept CSIS, Lero, Interaction Design Centre, University of Limerick, Ireland
LESLEY-ANN NOEL, College of Design, North Carolina State University, U.S.A.
UX designers and practitioners acknowledge users’ dierent skills and try to address their needs to design better products and
experiences. As HCI educators, we searched for tools to help our students to recognize that they might have dierent perspectives
from the users they will be designing for, generating bias and assumptions in the design process. Positionality refers to the personal
and social constructs that dene our identity, shaping how we see and interpret the world around us, as well as the way the world sees
and interprets us. Practicing positionality in HCI education is a meaningful way to reect on our teaching approaches, our measures
and expectations of students’ performance and engagement. For the students, learning about positionality and reexivity can have an
impact on their design work and research, raising awareness on relationships of power and subjectivity. During this Masterclass, we
present tools and methods that can be used for teaching and learning (T&L) activities about positionality. We invite attendees to create
their positionality statement and share their experience, facilitating a discussion about the challenges that are common both to T&L
and interaction design, such as ethics, privacy, stereotypes and stigmatization.
CCS Concepts: •Social and professional topics
→
Computing education; •Human-centered computing
→
Human computer
interaction (HCI);•Applied computing →Interactive learning environments.
Additional Key Words and Phrases: Positionality, Reexivity, Inclusion, Diversity, Representation, Design
ACM Reference Format:
Lilian G. Motti Ader, Jennyfer Lawrence Taylor, Cristiano Storni, and Lesley-Ann Noel. 2023. Teaching & Learning Positionality
in HCI education: reecting on our identities as educators and facilitating the discussion in the classroom. In EduCHI 2023: 5th
Annual Symposium on HCI Education (EduCHI ’23), April 28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6 pages. https:
//doi.org/10.1145/3587399.3587400
1 INTRODUCTION
Positionality refers to a self-reection and description of a personal identity, involving many factors that can inuence
in dierent ways how we position ourselves in a social, cultural, political or educational context [
3
]. It inuences our
interests, motivations, choices and also helps us to understand how we are perceived in a particular context. Good
practices in interaction and user experience design acknowledge that designers might have dierent perspectives from
the users, and in order to address users’ needs and expectations, user-centered approaches have been developed. Indeed,
involving users from early stage as much as possible, through methods of participatory design, co-design or personas can
mitigate and try to address dierent perspectives in the design process. However, positionality would provide additional
∗Corresponding author
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Manuscript submitted to ACM
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EduCHI ’23, April 28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany Moi Ader et al.
skills for designers and UX practitioners to recognize bias and assumptions, leading to better and more inclusive
products and approaches [
2
,
6
,
8
,
9
,
11
]. Our goal is to raise awareness of positionality among the Human-Computer
Interaction (HCI) community as it aligns with SIGCHI goals of self-reection and towards more diverse representation.
We invite people involved in teaching and learning (T&L) activities in HCI to review, evaluate and develop new tools to
inform and discuss the impact of representation in user studies and human factors of technology design. Our inuences
include published literature on reexivity and positionality in HCI such as [
7
,
8
] and related areas, our disciplinary
backgrounds (e.g., in anthropology), and our beliefs as educators that positionality and representation are key topics for
HCI curricula. T&L positionality brings an important contribution and should be further explored in higher education
courses such as Interaction Design, Software Engineering, Computer Systems. In the following sections, we present
further justications on how positionality contributes to better HCI education, relevant practices of T&L on positionality
and our proposal for the Masterclass.
1.1 Positionality and Universal Design for Learning (UDL)
Positionality is encouraged for people involved in education as it helps to reect on our teaching approaches, our
measures and expectations of students’ performance and engagement [
4
]. Recognizing our own position as educators
should help us to avoid unintentional exclusion, diversifying the resources we provide to students and accepting their
individual contributions to the class community. In addition to positionality as educators, helping students to reect on
their identities within and as a group can facilitate group work. As they acknowledge dierent needs and expectations
from peers, this could help to address concerns raised in HCI education [
13
]. As they perceive that individuals bringing
dierent perspectives facilitate the development of creative and innovative solutions, positionality can have a positive
impact in creating a sense of belonging. Furthermore, when students learn about positionality, it prepares them to
reect on the group’s diversity or lack thereof, and its implications on the design process.
1.2 T&L activities for Positionality
In social sciences, anthropology and qualitative research, it is good practice to teach students the meaning of positionality
and reexivity, which is the process of reecting and dening the complex values of our subjectivity, on their roles
as researchers. Some methods, tools and learning activities include positionality statements [
1
,
8
,
10
], role-play [
12
],
identity maps [
5
,
6
,
8
], and reexive writing [
4
], which can be used in many situations involving subjectivity. There are
several challenges and risks in teaching topics relating to positionality and representation to HCI students, which include
concerns about ethics, stereotypes and stigmatization. For example, the Positionality Wheel [
8
] includes dimensions
that may be sensitive to discuss such as ethnicity, gender and sexuality, ability and disability, and students might only
feel comfortable disclosing certain aspects of their identity to the teaching team and other students in collaborative
discussions, but not others. It is important to remind that the focus is not on the characteristics dening identities,
but a reection on how this shape our perspectives and their implications for the design process. Positionality has
several facets and layers, each more or less relevant to a specic context, and should be used to embrace and value
individuals and their subjectivity. Another challenge is how to include these tools and activities in the classroom to
empower students to talk about their positionality on their own terms, and create a safe space for these conversations.
The explicit collection of personal information relating to positionality by a university either in through assessment
submissions, or use of online tools for T&L that retain data such as online whiteboard or brainstorming tools, could
also pose potential privacy and data protection issues.
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Teaching & Learning Positionality in HCI education EduCHI ’23, April 28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany
1.3 Proposed Learning Outcomes
The structure of the Master Class applies a constructive alignment approach. The main learning outcomes (LO) for
attendees are to:
•learn about the elements that shape their position and how these might dier from students;
•review and critically analyse existing tools and practices in T&L on this topic; and
•gain insights and develop skills to prepare, plan and implement T&L activities about positionality.
Learning activities include individual and collaborative approaches, where attendees can: reect and share experiences
on current practices of T&L for raising students’ awareness of the importance of representation, diversity and inclusion
for the design process; discuss existing tools and their suitability for dierent context of T&L and design; and identify
how these can be improved.
2 ORGANIZERS
Dr Lilian G. Motti Ader is a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Limerick, Ireland, aliated to Lero –
Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software, and the Interaction Design Centre (IDC). She holds a Bachelor
of Image and Sound, Universidade Federal de Sao Carlos, Brazil, a Masters in Arts and Digital Media, University of
Paris, France, and a PhD in HCI at the University of Toulouse, France. She has experience on interdisciplinary research
in technologies for aging, digital health, and more recently 3D interaction for Augmented and Virtual Reality.
Dr Jennyfer Lawrence Taylor was previously a Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at the School of
Computing, Australian National University (ANU), and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). She
currently works in industry.
Dr Cristiano Storni is lecturer and senior researcher in Interaction Design at the University of Limerick, Ireland.
He is a core member of the IDC in the department of Computer Science and Information Systems. He is a trained
ethnographer and his research lies at the intersection of design and social sciences. He practices a Human-centred
and Participatory approach to the design and evaluation of novel digital technologies in various domains, including
self-care practices and technologies in chronic-care, especially diabetes in both adults and children. More recently, he
has developed an interest in neurodiversity and inclusion.
Dr Lesley-Ann Noel was trained as an Industrial Designer at the Universidade Federal do Paraná, Brazil. She holds a
PhD in Design from North Carolina State University and a Masters in Business Administration from the University
of the West Indies. She is an Assistant Professor at the College of Design at North Carolina State University. She is
co-Chair of the Pluriversal Design Special Interest Group of the Design Research Society. She is one of the co-editors of
The Black Experience in Design for Allworth (2022) and has created several design tools for critical reection such as
The Designer’s Critical Alphabet and the Positionality Wheel.
3 PROPOSED FORMAT AND STRUCTURE
3.1 Target audience
The Master Class activities are designed to support interactive learning during an online session ( 60min), targeting
people involved in Teaching & Learning (T&L) activities in HCI and related areas (i.e. professors, lecturers, teaching
assistants, and others who are teaching or interested in teaching human factors in software development, engineering,
design). We believe the activities we designed for this workshop will be of benet for future, early career and experienced
HCI educators willing to include this topic in their practices and reect on the way they teach.
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EduCHI ’23, April 28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany Moi Ader et al.
3.2 Tentative agenda
To meet the learning outcomes, the following activities are proposed:
(1) Brief intro (5 mins)
(2)
Exploring your Own Individual Social Identity as Educators, collaborative brainstorming (15 mins): There are
the dierent factors that dene a person’s position inside the overall spectrum of the characteristics of people
they will be working with or designing for. Attendees will be invited to join a virtual whiteboard for an online
brainstorming session (5min). Then facilitators will work with them to identify and dierent categories of
characteristics describing how diverse or representative a group of people can be.
Expected output: Previous discussions led to the identication of dierent categories regarding the sense of
agency of factors describing a person’s position, and we would like to verify if this within the attendees. Results
of this activity will help attendees to situate their current practices and visualize how these factors would apply
or change in dierent T&L or design contexts.
(3)
Presentation of a selection of tools and references to discuss positionality and reexivity, talk (15 min): To address
the fundamentals of positionality, we will present a selection of works from literature in HCI, social sciences,
qualitative research a brief review of methods and T&L practices on assessment of diversity awareness (10min).
Author L.A.N. will share the original idea, her experience and feedback on the “Positionality Wheel” [8].
Expected output: Attendees will gain insights and practical tools for including positionality and reexivity in
their teaching practices, raising students’ awareness and understanding of diversity and representation, and
creating a safe space for students to develop a critical approach and learn. Our main goal is to warn attendees of
potential risks for stigmatization and stereotyping that could raise when diversity is discusses in an educational
setting, and help them to achieve positive results, for students acknowledging and accepting diversity in a group,
and how benecial representation is for designing better solutions.
(4)
Challenges for T&L positionality, breakout rooms (20min) We will moderate a discussion to learn from attendees
and share our experiences of how topics such as diversity, inclusion, representation and positionality are taught
in our current T&L practices. Attendees will be divided into groups in breakout rooms (5-10 people) and each
group is invited to share notes on a virtual whiteboard (10min). Then facilitators will select a few to be presented
during the session (10 min).
Expected output: each group will share a denition or statement on what representation and positionality means
to them and their cohorts of students, and this result will be shared with all attendees.
(5) Wrap-up (5 min), access and availability of resources for attendees, and invitation for future collaborations.
4 DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Some discussion questions that we would like to bring to participants in the Masterclass session include:
•
How are educators in HCI, design, or cognate disciplines currently including/presenting/representing/assessing
positionality and representation in their teaching and learning?
•
How to educators balance the facilitation of open and collaborative discussion about positionality with issues of
student privacy and potential sensitivities?
•
What elements of identity are important when teaching students about positionality and reexivity in design
practice? What other categories might be possible beyond those oered in existing activities (e.g., familiarity
with technology, peer support etc)? Should issues of agency relating to identity be considered?
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Teaching & Learning Positionality in HCI education EduCHI ’23, April 28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany
•
What are the additional considerations we need to include in HCI education to engage with T&L in this topic, i.e.
ethics, privacy, stigmatization, stereotypes? How do we create a safe space for discussion?
•
How do you currently engage with your own positionality in teaching and learning as HCI educators? Can these
activities assist you as educators to think through your own presence in T&L activities?
•
How can we adapt classroom activities on positionality and reexivity from other disciplines to support education
in HCI and design? Are more HCI discipline specic approaches needed?
•Should we assess students’ awareness in this topic, and if so, how?
5 IMPACT
At the end of the session, attendees will gain access to resources to reect on their own positionality as educators and
how this shapes their teaching practices. They will be able to compare and contrast approaches to teaching positionality,
apply methods that are appropriate to their own context and facilitate activities for teaching positionality and reexivity
in class for HCI and related elds. Our goal is that the HCI educators attending the session will be able to support their
students to position themselves amongst the broad range of socio-cultural-economic characteristics of the users they
might be designing for in the future, to acknowledge and accept diversity and representation in the class community,
and to understand the impact of lack of representation on activities related to design of technologies. We believe
that including discussion on positionality in HCI education and practice can help to increase student engagement in
class, improve students’ condence to discuss terms related to diversity and inclusion, and raise awareness about the
importance of representation, or lack thereof, in design activities. Attendees will be invited to explore further resources
on this topic, and to work collaboratively towards future publications.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This publication has emanated from research conducted with the nancial support of Science Foundation Ireland under
Grant number 21-IRDIF-9858.
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