Computing for All: Exploring Equity in Access to Informal Computing Learning Opportunities Across Chicago Neighborhoods

• In Event: School and Community Partnerships as Geographies of Opportunity

Abstract

Participation in organized activities outside school plays an important role in adolescent learning and development. Higher levels of participation in team sports, religious activities, academic clubs, and performing arts have been linked to positive approaches to learning, higher rates of academic achievement and to students’ likelihood of attending college (Cooper et al. 1999, Covay and Carbonaro 2010, Durlak and Weissberg 2007, Eccles and Barber 1999, Lauer et al. 2006). In addition, these kinds of activities are associated with positive developmental outcomes, such as improved social skills, greater life satisfaction, and higher levels of volunteering and civic engagement (Durlak and Weissberg 2007, Gilman 2001).

There is not equitable participation in the kinds of organized out-of-school activities, especially STEM-based activities that have been linked to these positive outcomes for youth. Adolescents from low-income families are less likely to participate in organized after-school activities, as are Latino, African American and Asian students (Covay & Carbonaro 2010). Sociologists have drawn attention to these differences in participation rates, arguing that differences in summer experiences may help explain a proportion of the achievement gap between low- and middle-income students (Alexander, Entwisle and Olson 2007) and providing evidence from longitudinal databases that participation in organized activities may actually benefit low-income students more, at least in the elementary years (Dumais 2006).

Much scholarship has focused on analyzing differences in participation rates by attending to parenting logics, perceptions, and characteristics. Lareau’s (2003) well-known study of middle class parents’ logic of “concerted cultivation” may help account for their children’s higher participation rates in organized out of school activities. More recently, drawing on a large, nationally representative dataset, Weininger, Lareau, and Conley (2015) have argued that there is support for both a cultural and material interpretation of class-based differences in participation in out of school activities, finding direct effects of both income and maternal education on youth participation rates.

Much less attention has been paid to the opportunity structures available in neighborhoods that might account for differences in participation rates in out-of-school activities. We posit that the limited access to datasets on informal learning programs offerings, the documentation of sustainable socio-technical infrastructures that support equitable and robust informal learning communities--not just the outcomes and curricular resources resulting from these infrastructures--limits the ability of researchers, practitioners, and community educators to take up successful innovations and spread them beyond their original context of incubation.
In this paper, we a) describe our infrastructure, L3, for documenting a city’s informal learning infrastructure; b)our analysis of the dataset of out-of-school learning opportunities documented in the City of Chicago to explore the equity in informal computing learning opportunities for youth ; and c) overview a framework for helping communities design an ecology of out-of-school learning opportunities to ensure equitable access to computational making learning opportunities (Pinkard et al, 2016). (463)

Authors

• Nichole D. Pinkard, DePaul University

• Sybil Madison-Boyd, Digital Youth Network