Designing for culturally responsive social robots: An application of a participatory framework.

Integrating cultural responsiveness into the educational setting is essential to the success of multilingual students. As social robots present the potential to support multilingual children, it is imperative that the design of social robot embodiments and interactions are culturally responsive. This paper summarizes the current literature on educational robots in culturally diverse settings. We argue the use of the Culturally Localized User Experience (CLUE) Framework is essential to ensure cultural responsiveness in HRI design. We present three case studies illustrating the CLUE framework as a social robot design approach. The results of these studies suggest co-design provides multicultural learners an accessible, nonverbal context through which to provide design requirements and preferences. Furthermore, we demonstrate the importance of key stakeholders (students, parents, and teachers) as essential to ensure a culturally responsive robot. Finally, we reflect on our own work with culturally and linguistically diverse learners and propose three guiding principles for successfully engaging diverse learners as valuable cultural informants to ensure the future success of educational robots.

Indulging interactivity: a learning management system as a facilitative boundary object.

With the recent global pandemic, education institutions including higher education have shifted to offering online instruction for a prolonged period of time. Faculty and instructors have had to transform the content of face-to-face instruction into a format fit for distance education. In the virtual space, understanding or facilitating interactivity is a key component of online teaching for sustaining engagement and social interactions; promoting active learning between participants; and providing resources, tasks, and activities. The learning management system as a facilitative boundary object makes pivoting to online classes more tactical when adopting cultural-historical activity theory as an analytical lens, which can be used as a guide to re-envision how interactions can be implemented in e-learning or online courses and how instructors can repurpose resources and tools to maximize their instructional practices. Examples of interactivity and the implications for practitioners are synthesized, and the multiple components at play in the online and hybrid space are characterized in order to promote the exchange of practices and knowledge mobilization.