ELEVATING MARGINALIZED VOICES IN TECHNOLOGY

Angela Stewart

Angela Stewart’s love of technology was born in the classroom, specifically her middle school computer classroom where the teacher first introduced her to the basics of coding. 

So, it’s fitting that her work now focuses on the classroom, too. Stewart, an assistant professor in the School of Computing and Information and a researcher at the Learning Research and Development Center, conducts research at the intersection of education, artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, using data and technology to study learning and to create more equitable and inclusive educational spaces.

Her work seeks to support the agency of classroom teachers and students, particularly the girls and people of color whose voices and perspectives have been marginalized in the tech world. 

The most tangible example of this work is a summer camp hosted by Stewart and her collaborators from other universities, including Carnegie Mellon University, and the Manchester Youth Development Center in Pittsburgh. The goal of the camp is to study the ways in which participants—particularly Black girls—understand and interact with technology. 

Using Hummingbird Robotics Kits and craft supplies, the students build personal robots with whatever materials they wish. Meanwhile, Stewart and her team observe and react to the students, both in real time and by tracking their choices, to better understand the multitude of ways they express engagement. 

Sometimes, the way a student shows interest isn’t obvious. For example, several students attending a recent online camp session appeared to be checked out, with their cameras off and microphones muted. But after looking at the data the team collected during the session, they found that those students were working in the software, experimenting with the very topic the teachers were discussing.

In traditional technology education, those students may have been dismissed as disinterested and their abilities never nurtured. But Stewart’s program ensures that the students are recognized and their engagement is reinforced. 

Stewart’s research is built upon examining how some learners are marginalized in relation to dominant social and educational structures and what changes are needed to remedy the problem. And while that perspective is imperative to her work, she finds that it’s also limiting.

“There’s another frame,” she says. 

“We don’t always create out of struggle or oppression. We also create out of joy and fun and playfulness.”

In fact, Stewart believes, creating learning spaces that foster joyful, collaborative interactions among teachers and learners is likely to better support learning.

“There’s this view that learning has to be difficult, but I don’t think it has to be,” she says. “It can actually be fun.”