1. Introduction
This blog reports the development of an intervention which encourages positionality-related thinking in Computer Science (CS) students. The hope is that through developing their own positionality and self-reflecting, a plurality (Sturdee et al., 2021) of students’ experiences can be brought forth to the classroom. This would support inclusive practice by ensuring that all people’s voices are heard regardless of their intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989).
My own positionality is that, as every student will have a unique background informed by their own combination of disabilities, faith, religion, belief, and race, encouraging students to speak to their own personal experience will allow for more meaningful sharing of ideas within the class. This is a challenge where CS as a discipline often reinforces hard-science techniques that categories the world into measurable outcomes and attempts to generalize from homogenous samples (Garibay, 2015; Wong et al., 2021).
2. Context
The teaching context is brainstorming sessions. I’ve run these for 2nd year and MSc CS students at the CCI. The sessions involve students generating ideas to evaluate their experiences of a technology. The general process I’ve been using follows Lucero (2015), visualized in Figure 1. The utility of the intervention is that it can increase diversity of student perspectives and allow them to bring their own individualism to course discussions.
3. Intervention Iteration 1
3.1 Inclusive Learning Literature
Inclusivity in my teaching context is crucial to ensure that all voices and perspectives are brought forth. Students often do not contribute equally to the group work contexts of my teaching (link), meaning individuals can dominate the discussion and direction of the activity.
CS is also a male dominated discipline. Whilst groups such as the QMUL Women+ of Stem Society (2025) have built communities to support women in CS, often males dominate discussion in classes (Holden, 1993). This is reflected in my own teaching practice (link).
CS students are also stereotypically introverted (Pocius, 1991). Allowing these students to better understand their professional themselves and feel confident bringing forth ideas in group discussions is thus crucial.
Education literature suggests methods for more comprehensive student. Engaging students in storytelling and inviting stories from their own personal perspectives (Unin and Bearing, 2016; Medaille and Usinger, 2019) can help CS students better connect with tasks as they offer their own, diverse, lived experiences. Holden (1993) suggests using groups of mostly boys or mostly girls to increase fruitful. However, I think this poses a risk of creating an alienation effect (Mann, 2001) and reinforcing gender imbalances. Writing-tasks that give space for students to articulate their thinking before engaging in discussion can also support participation (Medaille and Usinger, 2019); for example, the think-pair-share method (Kaddoura, 2013) gives student’s space to consider ideas.
3.2 Intervention Design
Based on the literature in the previous section, I extended the brainstorming approach in Figure 1. The update is shown in Figure 2.
The key decisions were to: frame the task as interested in student’s own perspectives, to allow self-selection of groups cf. Holden (1993), to give space for students to prepare ideas before speaking cf. Kaddoura (2013), and to offer a route for feedback outside of class if students do not want to speak publicly.
3.3 Reflection on Intervention
Upon reflection, there were limitations to the intervention that I wanted to build on. I felt that the intervention was simplistic; whilst likely to make a marginal difference, there were deeper questions on how to capture and bring forth personal perspectives from students. In particular, the instruction to “frame the task as being interested in student’s own perspectives, experiences and voices” was open-ended; discussion with my peers revealed that there would likely need to be more direction given for students to introspectively identify and bring forth their ideas.
I also felt that the intervention require students to be motivated to spark their introspection and reflection (Slovak et al., 2023), without myself giving reflective prompts. As CS is dominated by hard-science methods (Garibay, 2015; Wong et al., 2021), often these more open-ended and qualitative brainstorming activities are met with little enthusiasm. Indeed, students have commented to me in feedback sessions that they want to be doing more “serious” and “technical” activities e.g. coding. This is despite this holding back their more unique pluralistic perspectives, which I want to harness for a more inclusive practice.
The feedback from PGCert tutors highlighted a couple of new literature resources, as follows. Grieve et al. (2021) highlight that presentations can negatively impact student experience, with greater supported needed in showing students how to give presentations. In the current intervention, there is an assumption that students already understand how present. Bayeck’s (2022) research emphasizes how positionality shifts based on interactions between people in groups. This made me reflect on how people’s positionality might shift in the group contexts of my own courses.
4. Intervention Iteration 2
Through reflection on the first iteration of my intervention, the following main limitations stood out to me: i) the task lacked clear guidance for students to articulate their personal perspectives and positionality, ii) the task assumed presentation skills without providing adequate support, and iii) overlooked how students’ positionality shifts within group dynamics. I further wanted to try to better support student’s reflection on their positionalities in a way that fit with the epistemological hard-science bias of CS.
4.1 Inclusive Learning Literature
To address the need to scaffold student’s in articulating their positionality, I explored more literature. Ashcroft, Severes and Martinez-Perez (2025) contributed cards with reflective prompts to help researchers in considering intersectionality and positionality. However, many of their prompts were focused on how to incorporate reflexivity into research paper writing or system designs – not supporting reflection-on-self per se.
A resource that stood out to me was The Positionality Wheel (Noel and Paiva, 2021). It presents an “activity created to help designers and researchers reflect on their identities and their teams’ composition before starting their work” (pg. 67). It contains 12 prompts that help people to write their own positionality statements. It is shown in Figure 3. I can immediately see how this could help students to think about a variety of facets – from race, gender and age, to class and education. I was also excited that it was designed for group work, as it could help with gleaming how people’s positionality was based on other’s group dynamics cf. Bayeck (2022). The challenge here is how to ensure that use of this tool is later reflected upon in the brainstorming context, which is more systems related.
I also considered how a more CS-styled activity migh help people build their positionality. I reflected on how algorithms in technology learn about us – from targeted adverts and curated Instagram feeds (Thompson, 2018), to AI models such as ChatGPT which mimic our ways of speaking (Farah, 2025). An idea for an activity which was developed in discussion with PGCert tutors and peers, was to have students create “digital selves” – writing their positionality in code as computer algorithms. However, I felt that this was best suited to a more longitudinal assessment, than in the single brainstorming sessions. Similarly, autobiographical design (Neustaedter and Sengers, 2012), where students can reflect on themselves and integrate this into their products, I thought would be well suited to helping students develop their positionality with technology. However, I felt this approach would require more time and didn’t suit the brainstorming context.
4.2 Intervention Design
Based on the literature above, I refined the brainstorming practice further, shown in Figure 4. The key additions were to incorporate the positionality wheel task at the start (to prime students) and end (to apply the wheel to the rest of the brainstorming activity). I also added that presenting tips would be sent out before the lecture, to give students information on how best to do this, as recommended in Grieve et al. (2021).
5. Action
I propose that the intervention could form the basis for my brainstorming sessions. For my teaching practice, this would help students to think more critically on their own positionality and perspectives. The hope is that students would learn more about themselves and each other. This could also nurture their intrinsic motivation to engage in learning, as the task are more directly related to their own interests. Furthermore, I hope that it could foster students comfort in recognising their own unique backgrounds, and in bringing forth these experiences.
6. Evaluation
From this process, I learnt that it is important to give space for students to foster ideas. I also recognized that specific guidance is both important to ensure that students have structure to be able to engage in deeper reflection, and to connect with themselves and bring forward their perspectives and critiques.
If I were to implement the activity, I would need to assess the types of information that students bring forth on their own personal perspectives and try to capture how their self-reflection and positionality changes within the group working context.
I also hope to explore the ideas which are more in line with the type of activity CS students tend to ask for such as to code their own positionality as algorithms. However, I think these would be better suited to an intervention that I could integrate throughout my courses.
7. Conclusion
My key takeaway is that inclusive interventions require structured scaffolding – such as the Positionality Wheel, reflective writing tasks, and alternative feedback mechanisms –to support students in articulating their own perspectives. This process has informed my practice by demonstrating how thoughtfully designed activities can foster positionality-related thinking, and could be consider within the epistemological constraints of CS.
References
Ashcroft, A., Severes, B. and Martinez-Perez, M. (2025) ‘Suggested Prompts for Reflexivity: Navigating Intersectionality in HCI and CSCW Research’, Interacting with Computers, p. iwaf007. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwaf007.
Bayeck, R.Y. (2022) ‘Positionality: The Interplay of Space, Context and Identity’, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 21, p. 16094069221114745. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069221114745.
Crenshaw, K. (1989) ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), pp. 139–167.
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QMUL Women+ of STEM (2025) ‘Official Instagram Profile’. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/qmulwostem/.
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