Dynamic researcher positionality in the human and political endeavor to study learning

Through this workshop participants will attune to researcher positionality across the research process in the learning sciences. There is no neutral research process or researcher; for those who recognize research methods as interpretive, it is explicit that what some may call “bias” and others may call positionality-researchers' shifting identities, values, goals, and relationships with and within a research setting-has everything to do with what gets studied, where, what data get collected, the process and outcome of analysis and interpretation, and what the final representations of findings look like. We consider positionalities to be dynamically shifting across timescales, and constituted by a complexity of multiple identities. While social positionings are certainly historically and culturally situated, they are simultaneously (re)produced, contested, and transformed in ongoing activity and interaction across multiple intersecting axes. Through this pre-conference workshop we aim to gather learning scientists to expansively consider the reasons for and practices of taking researcher positionality seriously in our work with the aim that as scholars with many positions we can (i) share in thinking through ways positionality is shaping current projects and (ii) synthesize from the questions, tensions, and considerations across our projects to articulate steps forward for the field.