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We Are the Earth: Ancestral Computing for Sustainability

Fri, April 28, 8:15 to 10:15am, Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, Floor: Meeting Room Level, Room 221 C

Abstract

Purpose
Despite the nation’s immediate agenda to exponentially increase diversity in computer science education (CSE), there is a dearth of research on how to engage students’ learning (and civic engagement) of 21st century skills. Access to CSE has been kept for an elite band of youth nationwide. For example, in Arizona, only 190 students took the Advanced Placement Computer Science (APCS) High School Exam in 2013: among them were 100 White, 22 Mexican American, and 2 American Indian students (The College Board, 2014). These numbers reflect national trends in the computing profession (National Center for Women in Technology, 2013). These statistics make evident the need to engage diverse learners in CSE. Diversity matters. Not just to meet statistical quota, diversity of cultural worldviews matters. The study follows one student, Itzel, across three learning ecologies, and examines identity formation, CSE and agency as she makes sense of multiple epistemological approaches to learning and weaves them together in and outside of her CS course.

Theoretical framework
Ancestral computing for sustainability (ACS) is a framework that weaves critical Indigenous studies and CSE for social, economic and environmental sustainability. ACS affirms that students have their own set of historically cultural worldviews that can set a foundation to collectively and responsibly addressing complex global problems. Ancestral computing was born out of a three year research study that is weaved by Iztel’s participation in various settings. ACS involves establishing a relationship with the Earth through ancestral knowledge systems together with learning the multiple facets of CS.

Methods
In order to broaden the study of Mexican-descent peoples in CSE, this study uses storytelling as a familiar way of knowledge (re)production (Delgado-Bernal, 1998; Delgado-Bernal et al., 2006; Solorzano & Yosso, 2002). Narrative inquiry captures and leverages participants’ interpretive and inventive processes of thinking and acting, particularly in areas of identity and agency.

Data sources
I collected and examined field notes from site visits, interviews and student artifacts. The student artifacts were results of the culminating task of the unit.

Results
I found that ancestral stories, coupled with computational inquiry and purpose, equipped Itzel to accomplish four significant feats. First, she increased her computational thinking practices, such as abstraction and data analysis, and second, she participated in civic engagement, including public expressions of her native culture. Third, she affirmed her academic identities, and finally, she developed patterns of emotional and scholarly intelligence. Itzel’s leadership intersected with a movement towards health and participated in transforming an abandoned lot on her high school campus into a community garden. Itzel led by example in that she became increasingly aware of her Indigenous identities and found purpose in revealing Indigenous practices in school-wide assemblies and a conference community presentation.

Scholarly Significance
Critical Indigenous approaches to learning are conspicuously absent in the dominant methods of CSE. My action research, thus, aims to inform the ways in which underrepresented female students positively engage in CS production. Itzel’s identity formation, learning, and civic engagement have broad implications in how Indigenous students make meaning in segregated fields.

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