How Researcher Identity Shapes the Research
Tags: Equity, Identity, Research, Youth, Education

When studying Equity and Access in educational research, it is important to consider the positionality of the researcher. Positionality is how qualitative researchers think about facets of their social identity including class, citizenship, ability, age, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender in relation to the populations, individuals, and environments they are studying. Researchers at foundry10 often reflect on their social identities and how they show up in their work with youth. Below, we explore how critical thinking about positionality has influenced and changed the tenor of research at foundry10.

Race Cars and Psychological Safety

Connecting kids with automotive technology is one of the exciting ways we create direct value for youth at foundry10. The Trades program team has provided local high schoolers with resources to build an electric dragster, studied how kids learn physics using electrical circuit boards, and flown students all over the country to watch professional races.

But five years into the Trades program at foundry10, a question nagged at the research team: What was automotive education like for young women? In program evaluation surveys, young women consistently reported that their gender had an enormous impact on their program experience, while young men didn’t think gender factored into their experience at all.

This discrepancy in responses wasn’t entirely surprising. When students traveled to professional races, the only women represented in the auto industry were Weather Tech Girls, the motorsports equivalent of cheerleaders. Condescension in the classroom was rampant. Disrespect under the hood was blatant. How could we make automotive education more inclusive of young women? Researchers Anna Cechony and Lisa Castenada decided to investigate.

“The best research is applied back into practice and iterated on,” says Cechony. “So being at foundry10 was, and continues to be exciting because we make research accessible to communities and work together to measure things that matter to them.”

Foundry10 launched a pilot study, speaking to women working in other male-dominated trades. One woman who worked in ship manufacturing shared a series of traumatic experiences she’d endured on the job. It became clear that gender-based discrimination and violence was going to be part of many women’s stories. The positionality (identities, contexts, experiences, and perspectives) of the investigators speaking with research participants required thoughtful consideration to create psychological safety.

“After that, we made the conscious decision that if we’re asking women to share about their experiences as women, we’re not going to have men interview them,” said Cechony. The researchers asked over 40 women in automotive careers to share personal stories, advice and what they’d like to see change within industry to better support the successful development of women (read the results of the study here: Women in Auto).

While the Trades team was able to share the findings of the study with CTE instructors and offer general insight on how to make automotive education more inclusive of young women, Cechony reflected that there was a missed opportunity.

“There’s honestly a lot more that we could have and should have done around different identities within womanhood. We interviewed queer women, women of color, women who English wasn’t their first language, and didn’t capture those identities in our analysis,” says Cechony. “The way we wrote about it in the report largely centers white, cis, straight womanhood.”

Foundry10’s willingness to listen, critically reflect, and change has served the organization well as it’s grown over the past seven years. “Early on, we were trying to make programming that works for everybody. Educational methods and curricula that worked for everybody,” says Mike Scanlon, foundry10 researcher. “Centering the experiences of youth with specific identities, particularly youth from under-resourced communities is something we’re getting better and better at,” says Scanlon.

This more nuanced understanding and approach to equity and access can in large part be attributed to organizational expansion. As the staff at foundry10 has grown and become more diverse, team members have learned from one another and the research has deepened and improved.

“Personal identity informs my approaches to research, from the creation of the research question to the analysis of data,” says Jennifer Rubin, foundry10 researcher. “For example, my identity as a woman and person of color influences how I ask survey questions — is wording reflective of a variety of experiences? And the analysis of data — if there are differences between groups of students, what are some social and historical reasons as to why these differences exist?”

Objectivity in social research is a hot button issue. To remain objective, researchers should stay impartial to the outcome of the research, acknowledge their own prejudices and operate in as unbiased and value-free way as possible. But even the most self-reflective researcher can’t maintain total neutrality.

“I think it’s important to highlight that very little research in the social or educational field is or can be completely value-free. Our experiences will inevitably shape the research topics that we are interested in and even the interpretation of data,” says Rubin. “This doesn’t mean that researchers aren’t objective when conducting research; rather, the researcher’s beliefs are fundamentally present in their approaches to research overall.”

For example, in 2015, foundry10 investigated how middle and high school students perceived the process of making video games in a game development course and how their viewpoints differed from that of professional game developers (explore the research here Perception, Equity and Accessibility: Comparing Student and Professional Perspectives on Game Development Courses). Among their findings, researchers Tom Swanson and Lisa Castaneda reported that young women in the class weren’t fully engaged in the process of game creation:

“Our data shows that young women still feel alienated and removed from video games, which affects their ability to engage with the course. Whether it be due to a lack of other young women, erroneous perception of who game developers are, or some other issue, the clear indication is that young women are less likely to feel comfortable in a class on game creation. This was true not just in schools, but in almost every situation we observed where young women were making games.”

When Rubin joined the foundry10 team in 2020, she recognized that she could expand on the background literature, framing, and language used in the original study. She hopes to conduct a follow-up study citing research on the backlash women often face when entering in the male-dominated gaming industry and adding in critical analysis of how the class was taught by the teacher.

“It’s quite possible that some of the teaching techniques signaled gender bias to the students, leading young women to disengage,” says Rubin. “What examples were used in class? Did the games that they play show only male characters? How were women characters portrayed? What types of posters were on the wall? All of these teaching components could very well affect young women feeling comfortable in that space.”

Rubin’s positionality allowed her to take a look at the study from a fresh perspective and give input on how the Games & Learning Team at foundry10 might conduct research moving forward. In turn, the organization’s openness to feedback and enthusiasm to engage in systemic restructuring allows for ideas around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in research to continue evolving in a forward direction.

Untangling Social Justice Education and Empathy

Teaching artists at foundry10 developed a Social Justice Theater program for high schoolers with the goals of promoting discussion of social justice issues, fostering empathy, and creating an environment where it was safe to be vulnerable — that is, where students could make mistakes or show emotions in the classroom setting.

Inspired by Brazilian theater artist and activist Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, foundry10 teaching artists worked with teachers at local high schools to facilitate social justice-focused performing arts activities. For example, 11th graders in an English class at Nathan Hale High School adapted scenes from the graphic novel, March, John Lewis’s first-hand account of the civil rights movement, and expanded on them, writing monologues, scenes and letters to the author and the Seattle city council.

Foundry10 researchers Sam Bindman and Ella Shahn collaborated with the drama teaching artists to code survey responses and analyze the data. A total of 116 students from 3 schools in grades 9 through 12 completed surveys. Notably, 50% of the survey respondents were white. At the end of the program, students reported a greater awareness of social justice issues. Many students felt the program helped them understand what it feels like for others who have identities different than their own.

“I think the most challenging part and the part I enjoyed most was trying to untangle this idea of what is effective social justice education and are we even measuring what we thought we were trying to measure. I came away with much more nuanced ideas,” says Shahn. The study specifically raised new questions for Bindman and Shahn about the definition and value of empathy as a vehicle for social change.

Bindman wondered: “Is empathy the goal that we should be working towards or is it something else? Is empathy the stepping stone we need to get to action or is it something else?” The researchers read the work of empathy scholars to gain a better understanding and revisited the question for a research study on Virtual Reality in the classroom.

The definition of empathy that they used in the Virtual reality study was described by Bertrand et al. 2018. These researchers define empathy as: “feeling the same emotion as another observed individual without mixing it with one’s own direct experience.”

Cechony and Shahn surveyed 81 middle school students in 3 classrooms across the U.S. Students participated in a range of VR experiences — some intentionally designed to build empathy (such as Notes on Blindness, Becoming Homeless, and Charity: Water), and others that focused more on exposing students to new experiences (such as Coffee Trainer VR and Rollercoaster VR). They asked the students to define empathy and to share their thoughts on whether VR helped them connect to other people and build empathy.

The researchers found that VR experiences designed to make participants more empathetic towards people from marginalized groups might actually be doing the opposite. After using the VR, many students conflated empathy with sympathy. Their VR experiences seemed to magnify feelings of pity without enhancing their understanding of how other people feel.

After completing research on social justice theater and VR in the classroom, researchers came away with a more nuanced understanding of empathy. Empathy alone, while important, isn’t a substitute for educating youth about social context or training students on how to take action on social justice issues. It’s also important to consider the identities of the students and educators in the classroom. The role of empathy will likely play a very different role for a student with more marginalized identities.

Lived Experience and Lessons in Identity

While attending the 2019 International Society for Research on Identity conference to share foundry10 research on adolescent identity development in a student-led Dance program, Cechony had a revelation. As a researcher shared findings on redemption narratives in illness, Cechony was struck by the disconnect between the researcher’s analysis of the data and her own lived experience. The researcher purported that people who have more positive attitudes about their illness feel better physically. Cechony has a chronic illness and knows that the questions, data collection methods, and analysis the researchers used for the study were different than the ones she would have selected given her positionality.

“I realized that in my own research, there are some people who I interview who I will never really understand. Because I don’t share their experience. I’m just never, ever going to get it,” says Cechony.

The lesson? Continue approaching research with openness, curiosity, and humility about the human experience.

How does your identity influence your approach to research and working with youth? Connect with us at research@foundry10.org. To learn more about foundry10, follow us on social and subscribe to our monthly Newsletter.

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