Toward Critical Digital Invention: Building Critical Computational Literacy With Civic Imagination

• In Event: Reclaiming and Remixing Their Stories: Amplifying Youth Literacies Through New Media Production, Distribution, and Invention

Abstract

This paper takes up the notion of “Critical Digital Invention” through close analysis of a learning environment where young people produce innovative digital products--e.g., mobile apps, interactive infographics, media-rich maps--for distribution via social media as well as national broadcast. These young people are predominantly youth of color who contend with poverty and other structural drivers of inequality. They collaborate with adult designers, editors, and developers through an after-school program in California with youth contributors and organizational partners from across America. We are both participants and researchers, helping to design and lead programs while carrying out observations, interviews, focus groups, and surveys. The data collected for this research took place over three ten-week sessions.

Our analysis of this learning environment is anchored in two frameworks. The first is Critical Computational Literacy (CCL), which combines computational thinking (Lee & Garcia, 2014; Lee & Soep, 2016) with culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2014). The view of computational thinking that informs CCL accounts for complex analytical and interpretive practices that go well beyond the mechanics of coding (Grover & Pea, 2013; Wing, 2006). Indebted to Paulo Freire (1996), of course, as well as more contemporary work in literacy studies (Morrell; 2008; Shor, 1999), CCL centers marginalized points of view and creates conditions for young people to break silences, reveal obscured truths, and challenge unjust systems and conditions. Working with peers and colleagues, our youth collaborators envision, design, and develop digital projects for mass audiences. In the process, they invent new genres (e.g., the illustrated commentary, the Instagram-native dynamic infographic) that push them to form new multiliteracies, participate in civic life, and engage their communities as co-creators.

The second framework that shapes our analysis is “civic imagination” (Jenkins & Zimmerman, 2016). The imagination is what allows young people to look “through the windows of the actual, to bring as-ifs into being,” said aesthetic philosopher Maxine Greene almost 20 years ago. We are struck by the emancipatory value of imagination--specifically, civic imagination--for today’s computer science and digital media education. Over the past decade, there has been a major national push to bring computer science and STEM education to students from historically marginalized backgrounds (e.g. Obama administration’s Computer Science for All, Black Girls Code, Exploring Computer Science) (Hernandez et al., 2013; Ryoo et al., 2013). Amid calls to teach “Code for all!,” a question we don’t ask enough is “Code for What?” This is where civic imagination becomes key, in the formation of CCL. For the young people in our research, creating the projects we describe here entails both forming a critique of what’s gone in their communities and developing a clear vision of what a better world might look like as a result of the digital products they create (Ginwright, 2015).

In the paper, we analyze young people’s moment-to-moment interactions and reflections on the making of a series of digital projects, and draw out implications for our understanding of computer science learning as itself an exercise in civic imagination.

Authors

• Elisabeth M. Soep, Youth Radio

• Clifford H. Lee, Saint Mary's College of California