Dr. Suraj Uttamchandani is a visiting research scientist at the Indiana University Center for Research on Learning and Technology. In today’s episode, we’ll discuss his experience as an undergraduate mathematics major and how policies in the United States like Religious Freedom Restoration Act directly informed his scholarship, which is at the intersection of educational equity, the learning sciences, and critical qualitative methodologies.

In our conversation, we talk about educational intimacy – a construct that came out of his dissertation, as he was trying to put a finger on the forms of the learning that were happening in an LGBTQ+ youth group. We talk about his participation as a volunteer in the group, and how his methodological training within and outside of the learning sciences prepared him to take on this work. He is currently exploring non-Western orientations to learning and development with the South Asian learning sciences Research collective.

What I found most compelling in this conversation with Suraj is the invitational nature of his work, and the connections between his lived experiences and how he goes about his research. We also talk about the revisionist nature of learning – how what we put down on paper is just a mere capture of our current thinking, and how taking a retrospective lens to our own work helps us see how we’ve moved forward or deepened our initial ideas. I hope you enjoy this episode and look forward to your reactions and responses to our conversation.

As always, email us with your comments, questions. Our email is HumansLSpod@gmail.com.

Episode transcript.

Works discussed:

Uttamchandani, S. (2018). Equity in the learning sciences: Recent themes and pathways. In J. Kay & R. Luckin (Eds.), International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) 2018, Volume 1 (pp. 480-487). International Society of the Learning Sciences.

Uttamchandani, S. (2021). Educational intimacy: Learning, prefiguration, and relationships in an LGBTQ+ youth group’s advocacy efforts. Journal of the Learning Sciences 30(1), 52-75. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2020.1821202

Tuck, E. (2009). Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities. Harvard Educational Review, 79(3), 409–428. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.79.3.n0016675661t3n15

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