Coding for Meaning, Identity, Joy, and Justice

• In Event: Dis/Connecting With Computing: Designing for Critical Identities and Equitable Inquiry in K–12 Computer Science Education

Abstract

Objective: This poster reframes the “CS for all” movement towards one that centers a critical lens to computational thinking that seeks to create digital products with students of color and other historically marginalized populations that address issues directly impacting them and their community.

Framework/Perspective: This poster highlights youth learning anchored in two frameworks. The first is Critical Computational Literacy (CCL) (Lee & Garcia, 2014; Lee & Soep, 2016), which combines computational thinking (Wing, 2006) 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 Freire (1996), 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. Our youth collaborators envision, design, and develop digital projects for dissemination to 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. 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. Our youth create projects that critique what’s gone wrong in their communities or missing in the world around them and develop a clear vision of what a better world might look like as a result of coding for accountability, insight, expression, joy, and justice.

Methods & Data: Both authors are embedded ethnographers within a department that bridges storytelling, coding, data, and design housed within a national network organization of youth multimedia creators and producers. We analyzed 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. As participant researchers, we collected data through field notes, analytic memos, youth-produced artifacts, audio recorded discussions and focus group interviews during eleven week sessions. Utilizing a grounded theory approach, audio recordings are transcribed and field notes and artifacts are coded into categories and themes, which are iteratively analyzed for findings.

Results & Significance: Findings demonstrate sophisticated, meta-reflective analyses between youth and adult collaborators intersecting computational thinking practices (abstraction [problem formulation], automation [solution expression], and analyses [solution execution and evaluation]) and an attunement to macro sociopolitical issues (wealth inequality, social implications of artificial intelligence, LBGTQ+ rights) through their products.

Authors

• Elisabeth M. Soep, Youth Radio

• Clifford H. Lee, Mills College