The Inconvenient Dilemma of Intimacy: Conducting Robotics and Values Research in Religious Schools (Poster 3)

• In Event: Practice and Positionality: Critical Instantiations of STEAM Education and Research

Abstract

What happens when you as a researcher witness teachers doing something harmful? Crumpler, Handsfield and Dean (2011) ask this question and push researchers to consider how their research designs may ultimately position them as complicit in reinforcing problematic constructs. In the situation Crumpler et al. found themselves in, they were thinking in terms of their silence in the face of the teachers’ deficit perspectives towards bilingual students. In my case, I am thinking about all of the questions that emerge when one is researching a community she knows intimately.

In 2019 I was involved in a curricular intervention study to help teach beginner block programming and design thinking with the Positive Technology Framework. Four schools of different faiths were involved and then came together for a shared gallery of final projects intended to showcase the programming and computer science skills they learned, practice the social-emotional skills developed through the integration of the Positive Technology Framework and its 6 Cs, and express to the world the core values of their school and classroom communities. The curriculum gave teachers the opportunity to think creatively with their classes about how to use their KIBO robots to best represent themselves as a school community.
The Jewish school in particular developed a final project that had their robot programmed to traverse a map of Israel and dance to a song about building the land. The choice of a map of modern Israel as the single represented value of the Jewish school elided the fact of how nuanced and tense perspectives are about the role of Israel in the identity of the faith. It made an assumption about national identity that many Jewish people would not assume is critical to engaging in Judaism.

This final project and my positionality relative to it had four layers:

Layer 1: My own ambivalence about what the role of Israel should be in Jewish education (Hassenfeld and Hassenfeld, 2015)
Layer 2: My relationship with this school (I was a teacher there and I knew they were not taking their final project seriously).
Layer 3: My suspicion/concern they were overstating the role of Israel precisely because there were non-Jewish schools in the room (as a sort of “dig” at other faiths).
Layer 4: My role as a postdoc in a lab where there was pressure to produce standard research papers.

This paper explores each of these layers and what each one meant for not only me as the researcher but the project as research. In her beautiful essay, “Moving Words and Worlds: Reflections from ‘the Middle,’” Orellana (2007) writes about negating her identity as a mother during her doctoral research: “I had internalized the idea that it is more important to cite academic texts than to name personal experiences a source of knowledge... that certain aspects of our lives and experienced are not understood, values, or at times accepted within academia,” (p. 123). This paper brings to the fore my many identities to reopen unexplored paths within the data.

Author

• Ziva Reimer Hassenfeld, Brandeis University
  Presenting Author