Crossroads: a transgender education platform for Greek life students

Abstract

Individuals who identify as LGBTQ+, particularly transgender individuals, face unique challenges on college campuses, and these challenges are further exacerbated by Greek Life, a college sub-community founded on gender. LGBTQ + training and educational materials exist on many college campuses but fail to reach the entire Greek student body due to optional attendance and limited motivation in Greek circles. This paper presents findings from a year-long human-computer interaction study examining one university’s Greek environment in which we employ participatory design to create a prototype for a mobile educational platform, called ‘Crossroads,’ that is more accessible to cisgender Greek students. Crossroads is characterized by short lessons with follow-up reinforcement challenges, and results suggest that it has a positive effect on participants, enables longevity of learning, and relieves the burden of educating from transgender and nonbinary individuals.

Keywords:

• Transgender
• nonbinary
• Greek Life
• educational technology

Acknowledgements

This work would not have been possible without the guidance of our stakeholders. Southern U’s students and faculty, Greek Life leaders/administrators, and LGBTQ+ Resource Center staff took time out of their busy schedules multiple times throughout our research and design process to provide us with guidance and feedback. We are incredibly grateful for all their help and support.

We would also like to offer our sincere thanks to all the student participants in this research. We recognize that, especially for our transgender participants, engaging in this research required them to share intimate details of their life experiences with us. We are honored that they placed their trust in us and helped us design a platform that directly addressed their needs.

Finally, this work would not exist without the support of our peers and professors in our HCI program, our friends, and our family members. Thank you so much for helping us grow as professionals, follow our passions, and use HCI for social good.

Disclosure statement

In accordance with Taylor & Francis policy and our ethical obligations as researchers, the authors report that we have no financial or business conflicts of interest.

Notes

1 Human-computer interaction is a multidisciplinary field of study focused on creating human-technology interactions so that computers and machines can best serve humans.

2 One Greek Life leader did not respond to the invitation to participate after the initial session.

3 After completing this evaluation, the authors became aware of the controversy surrounding Killermann likely plagiarizing the Genderbread Person and claiming it as his own work. As such, future research that would utilize a tool to educate on the difference between gender and sex should utilize the Gender Unicorn (Trans Student Educational Resources, 2015. “The Gender Unicorn.” (https://transstudent.tumblr.com/post/128070497924/genderunicorn)) instead.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephanie Baione

Stephanie Baione is a user experience researcher at Verizon Connect. She holds a Masters in Human Computer Interaction from the Georgia Institute of Technology (2021) and a B.S. in Computational Media with concentrations in media and interaction design from the Georgia Institute of Technology (2019). Her research interests focus on the use of human-centered design to create tools and environments that serve underrepresented communities. During her time as a student, Stephanie worked with Focus Brands as a UX consultant through coursework (2019) and with Verizon Connect as a summer intern (2020), and her industry experience includes projects focusing on user engagement, customer retention, and usability metrics. In her current role, she is working to educate about and integrate the principles of inclusive design into the Verizon Connect Experience Team’s research methodology.

Yiming Lyu

Yiming Lyu is a user experience designer at MathWorks. He holds a Masters in Human Computer Interaction from the Georgia Institute of Technology (2021), a M.S. in Architecture (2016) and a B.S. in Architecture (2013) both from Southeast University, China. His research interests focus on UX design and data visualization for enterprise-based applications. During his time as a student, Yiming worked with Focus Brands as a UX designer through coursework (2019) and with VMware as a summer intern (2020), and his industry experience includes projects focusing on user research, interaction design, and usability testing. In his current role, he is working to create better data visualization tools that aim to help millions of engineers and scientists better perform their research tasks in industry and academia.

Audrey Reinert

Audrey Reinert was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oklahoma’s Data Science Institute for Societal Challenges (DISC Center). She holds a PhD in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University (2019), a Masters in Human Computer Interaction from the Georgia Institute of Technology (2015), and a Bachelors in Cognitive Neuropsychology from the University of California, San Diego (2012). Her research interests lie at the intersection of human centered computing, data visualization, and human machine interaction. She is a member of IEEE, HFES, and the AGU and can be reached at [email protected]. She has championed and participated in human factors projects related to social justice including serving as a member of the OU carceral studies consortium and studying the effect of AI on the safety of LGBT+ individuals.

Jessica Roberts

Jessica Roberts is an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing. She holds a PhD in Learning Sciences from the University of Illinois-Chicago with a concentration in geospatial analysis and visualization and a B.S. from Northwestern University with a concentration in theatre design. Her research examines how people learn through, with, and about data in out-of-school environments such as museums and citizen science activities and how interactive technologies mediate social, informal learning experiences. Her work on the design of interactive learning technologies has been exhibited at venues including the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the New York Hall of Science. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Dr. Roberts conducted postdoctoral research at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and the Tidal Lab at Northwestern University.