Using and adapting the Association of Learning Technologists (ALT) Learning Technologist’s Anti-racism toolkit.

Positionality statement..

I thought that I would revisit the positionality statement that I wrote at the start of the courses as there have been some changes due to what I have learned on the course and due to circumstances in my career.  I definitely feel that I have a better grasp of what it means to be anti-racist and that I need to be more proactive when I’m confronted by racism and advocate anti-racism, I’ve now become a manager and I not only need to make sure that the work I and my team do is not discriminative and accessible.

I have always found racism to be abhorrent, I now see that I have not spent time thinking about what that means and have not been proactive in being anti-racist. This unit has shown me that I need to ‘open my eyes more to listen and digest more information and to really understand where I am and what I can do, as an individual, as a parent, and as a member of an educational institution to make the society I live in a fairer place.

I am now in a position where I can potentially affect change across the University, this artifact is an example of something that I can champion that I hope will have an effect on how we create resources, not just ones my team makes, but all staff and students within the University.

I have always championed digital learning as a great leveler when it came to accessibility, as a person with dyslexia, helping staff and students to use technology that helps all students achieve their potential is why I love digital learning so much. Over the pandemic, I found that what I actually thought of as a great leveler could in fact be a bit of a closed community and wasn’t as inclusive as I first thought. My assumption was that most students would have access to technology, however, there is still a percentage of our students that comes from a situation where they cannot afford the technology that enables student experience to be as equitable as possible. Over the lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 due to Covid 19 research has shown that students of Colour fell behind considerably with their work, there were a number of reasons for this, however, the large intersection between students from lower-income households and students of color, shows that there is work to be done to make sure that the work we do is truly equitable. Some of this is beyond my field of expertise and professional scope, where the university can make funds available to students to purchase the needed technology. I can however make sure that the products we create work on any type of device, new or old.

What is the Article?

The Article is an Anti-Racism toolkit that has been designed by Alister Cooper for the Association of Learning Technologists (ALT). The toolkit is now in its third iteration, having been condensed down from 40 questions down to a much more manageable 12 Questions

The Questions are designed to introduce discussion and reflection o the work you are doing and to help us to understand how to better establish anti-racist practices within Digital Learning.

The Sections are as follows:

• Self-Care
• Communities
• The Project team
• Learning Content
• Tools and Platforms
• Post Project Reflexion

Self-Care

The Self-Care section is about having a support structure in place so that you are able to have open and frank discussions where you may encounter uncomfortable feelings within yourself or potentially be exposed to attitudes and responses that may make you feel isolated or marginalised. It’s important to think about how you can support yourself and others by reflecting on any potential places of support you have when engaging with this type of work.

Communities.

Making sure that we understand what we create has implications for a range of different communities, these communities range from ones of exclusion through to ones of privilege.

Project Team

It’s important to look at the makeup of the project team and to acknowledge its makeup, what is the make-up of gender, race, and religion. The idea is to effectively create a positionality statement for the team. The example they give of a non-diverse group creating car seat belts were created by men using male crash test dummies, and as a result, women suffer greater injuries in crashes  (Kilden, n.d.)

The Learning Content

Looking at the importance of creating equitable resources that enable students from any background and community to get the most out of the content.  

Tools and Platforms.

Again a lot of this is around discussions around equitable access, however, it goes further than that and looks at the platforms and looks to see if they are fit for purpose, they talk about how systems and platforms are created by people and can continue those person views. It gives examples of how many forms of AI perform worse for women and people who aren’t white. (Vincent, 2018)

Post-project reflection.

It’s important to not only get feedback from the students and staff associated with the project or piece of work to see what went well and what didn’t. It’s important

How are we using it?

Within the Camberwell, Chelsea, and Camberwell (CCW) Digital learning team we have created and started to trial a checklist of points. This checklist serves as a shared internal resource and aims to provide an accountability measure for our commitments to anti-racism, decolonisation, inclusion, and accessibility.

The goal of the checklist is to provide a consistent, collaborative framework for our team and to provide a transparent quality check on our products and digital artifacts so that staff and students know our work strives towards our commitments and delivers our team’s mission and values.

We found that the checklist was a really useful discursive tool, allowing us to really look at the work we were doing and make sure that the quality was consistent. However, it is lacking in addressing issues around decolonisation and racism. The advent of the Anti-racism toolkit has enabled us to add more depth to our checklist making it a better quality tool.

Over the next 6 months, we are looking at fully integrating the checklist with the Anit-racism toolkit, I believe that this will address the areas of the toolkit that is lacking. This will initially be done within the CCW digital learning team, once we have got a fully workable template we will be looking to include a number of different voices and departments from across the University. I believe the more people look at this template and help codesign it, the better the Artifact can be.

My main goal is to help create something that is meaningful and easy to use. It’s important to have a toolkit that staff and students engage with and see meaningful results from it, as well as something that is easy to understand and use.

Long-term plan?

Working with a wider team.

We are looking at creating a fully formed digital learning toolkit/checklist that encompasses the teams values and at its core is a tool that makes sure that the products we create are fully accessible and anti-racist. We have had interest from the other Digital Learning Teams in the other UAL colleges in the Anti-racism toolkit and I will look to set up some meetings with the other teams in the new academic year to see who we can do this

Other iterations.

In the feedback I got from my peers, they were really keen to use a tool like this with their students and they talked about making it as simple as possible and talked about the double diamond model for design (www.designcouncil.org.uk, n.d.). The idea of turning this into a simple one-page visual is appealing, I can definitely see the benefit of this, especially when using it with students. Something that is simple to understand and picked up and can be used straight away would be really useful. However, having said that, these aren’t simple concepts, and as we found from using our checklist, it’s not as easy as ticking a box. We got the most out of this when it was discussed as a group so that everyone had a say and contributed to it. that also gave us the opportunity to really tease out the questions and give more rounded and useful answers. This needs to have meaning and not just another box-ticking activity.

Another aspect that we could use this with, is as a simple digital temperature check for projects. Temperature checks are a really important part of any project, it makes sure that everyone is working towards the same goals. Creating a temperature check that has anti-racism running through could have real value. It will make sure that staff will have had the opportunity to discuss and evaluate their resource and help them to make any course corrections that they may need with regards to accessibility and anti-racism.

Bibliography

CNN, F.K. (n.d.). People of color have a new enemy: techno-racism. [online] CNN. Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/09/us/techno-racism-explainer-trnd/index.html.

Dorn, E., Hancock, B., Sarakatsannis, J. and Viruleg, E. (2020). Mind the gap: COVID-19 is widening racial disparities in learning, so students need help and a chance to catch up | McKinsey. [online] www.mckinsey.com. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/covid-19-and-learning-loss-disparities-grow-and-students-need-help.

Google Docs. (n.d.). Changes for ‘version 3’ of the tool. [online] Available at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/153mpN6NEnB-13HTmRzGKRAIuw54LERQbtNv3bI67P-0/edit#heading=h.fgn5897gtmoo  [Accessed 28 Jul. 2022].

‌Kilden. (n.d.). Cars are still designed for men. [online] Available at: https://kjonnsforskning.no/en/2019/06/cars-are-still-designed-men.

Vincent, J. (2018). Google ‘fixed’ its racist algorithm by removing gorillas from its image-labeling tech. [online] The Verge. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-gorillas-photo-recognition-algorithm-ai.

‌ www.designcouncil.org.uk. (n.d.). The Double Diamond: A universally accepted depiction of the design process. [online] Available at: https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-work/news-opinion/double-diamond-universally-accepted-depiction-design-process/#:~:text=The%20Double%20Diamond%20is%20a.