Following my reflections on research methods for my project (blog post link), I set out to create a teaching observation grid. With the grid, I could look at moments of positionality in a more objective way. It was important to ensure that the chart would include broad categories and ensure that in my analysis I didn’t mistakenly single out people for their characteristics – taking a broad-brush approach.
The goal of the chart is to check my own teaching and ensure that students reflect different aspects of their positionality holistically. A revised research question is thus:
- RQ: How can I create a check for myself to ensure that students reflect on their positionality holistically throughout my course’s crits?
To develop the chart, I found five research papers which discussed positionality and the different aspects that it includes. A brief summary of the papers is as follows. Finlay (2002) discusses positionality in relation to the reflexivity required by qualitative researchers and discussed ways that researchers could “out” themselves. This is similar to Rankl, Johnson and Vindrola-Padros (2021) who identified ways to bring forth reflexivity amongst research teams working on collaborative projects. Tong, Sainsbury and Craig (2007) include a checklist which includes positionality-related aspects for encouraging reflexivity in qualitative focus groups. Ortiz et al. (2018) focuses more on ways to encourage students to bring forth their positionality and emphasises the need for teachers to be open and authentic, bringing forth their own stories and reflections on their power, privilege and oppression; this encourages students to also become more comfortable with bringing forth their own lived experience and perspective. Singh et al. (2025) emphasised different aspects of positionality through an analysis of positionality statements included in HCI research, which is the context of my course.
In reading the papers, I followed a process similar to many qualitative analysis methods, e.g., thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) or affinity diagramming (Lucero, 2015). First, I captured the various aspects of positionality mentioned onto post-it notes, shown in Figure 1. This ranged from considering personal experience, showing vulnerability, focusing on assumptions, as well as protected characteristics and emotion work.
To then create the categories for analysis I sorted these into topics, shown in Figure 2.
These topics were used to create the first coding scheme, shown in Figure 3. The three scoring points were selected inspired by discussions with my tutor, and to emphasise the importance of ensuring that mention of positionality is not just performance but enacted into student work. The example quotes at the initial stage were speculative, but updated with examples based on the student’s own crits throughout the project.
References
Braun, V. and Clarke, V. (2006) ‘Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology’, Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), pp. 77–101.
Finlay, L. (2002) ‘“Outing” the Researcher: The Provenance, Process, and Practice of Reflexivity’, Qualitative Health Research, 12(4), pp. 531–545. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/104973202129120052.
Lucero, A. (2015) ‘Using Affinity Diagrams to Evaluate Interactive Prototypes’, in J. Abascal et al. (eds) Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2015. Springer, Cham (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), pp. 231–248. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22668-2_19.
Ortiz, A.P. et al. (2018) ‘Positionality in Teaching: Implications for Advancing Social Justice’, The Journal of General Education, 67(1), pp. 109–121.
Rankl, F., Johnson, G.A. and Vindrola-Padros, C. (2021) ‘Examining What We Know in Relation to How We Know It: A Team-Based Reflexivity Model for Rapid Qualitative Health Research’, Qualitative Health Research, 31(7), pp. 1358–1370. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732321998062.
Singh, A. et al. (2025) ‘Exploring Positionality in HCI: Perspectives, Trends, and Challenges’, in Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery (CHI ’25). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713280.
Tong, A., Sainsbury, P. and Craig, J. (2007) ‘Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research (COREQ): A 32-Item Checklist for Interviews and Focus Groups’, International Journal for Quality in Health Care, 19(6), pp. 349–357. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/intqhc/mzm042.