E-Textiles in Exploring Computer Science: Promoting Equity Through a Making Curriculum for High School

• In Event: 14.015 - Making Spaces for Youth From Nondominant Communities: New Approaches for Supporting Equitable and Consequential Experiences

Abstract

While many educators and researchers have created making-spaces in- and out-of-school as a way to disrupt marginalizing school practices, we turn to public school classrooms as a way to promote greater equity in making (Collins & Halverson, 2009). Having worked for five years to develop and apply electronic textiles (e-textiles) activities in self-selected informal and semiformal learning environments, we partnered with the Exploring Computer Science (ECS) team to build an eight-week formal curriculum unit for high school classes. ECS has already had great success in diversifying one of the least diverse disciplines in K-12 education: computer science (Goode & Margolis, 2011). Our goal in introducing e-textiles into this year-long curriculum was to further promote equity and diversity by involving all students in provocative ways of engaging in computer science.

Because making centers around the process of creating original artifacts, the perspective of cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) (Cole, 1996) provides a lens for understanding the mediating role of tools and objects in relation to people’s roles, cultural values, personal goals and outcomes. Drawing on CHAT we considered and coded for the overlapping and conflicting goals, materials, tools, techniques, roles, and values students and teachers brought into the e-textiles unit. In particular we consider the ways that introducing e-textiles disrupted traditional roles and practices in the ECS classrooms, and what made it stand out, according to teachers and students, as an unusually motivating curriculum unit within the already non-traditional practices of ECS.

During Spring 2016, five ECS teacher-leaders from Southern California engaged in three full days of professional development on the e-textiles curriculum over three months. Two of these teachers piloted the curriculum during the last two months of the school year, using it as an alternative to either the data or robotics units in the overarching ECS curriculum. Data include pre- and post-interviews conducted with the five teacher-leaders plus two final interviews conducted with the two teachers who piloted the unit. Additional data include classroom observations conducted three to four times a week in each class and small-group interviews conducted with students at the end of the unit.

Our analysis suggests that bringing e-textiles into the curriculum bolstered equity and interest. Teachers reported that the e-textiles unit changed the power dynamics in the classroom by valuing a set of practices around crafting not previously emphasized in their instruction. Nearly all students interviewed spoke very positively about the unit, being creative, making meaningful objects, and reporting a new view of computing as something that had relevance off the screen and was applicable to their personal lives.

This e-textiles curriculum is the first of its kind and one of the first ‘making’ curricula for formal classrooms, specifically computer science. Structured as a set of increasingly complex projects with creative constraints to promote student agency, diversified expertise, and core knowledge and skills necessary for later projects, it provides a form of making that facilitates equity in the classroom by disrupting traditional notions of computing and ensuring equitable access across all students to key knowledge and skills.

Authors

• Deborah A. Fields, Utah State University

• Yasmin B. Kafai, University of Pennsylvania

• Tomoko M. Nakajima, University of California - Los Angeles