Youth of Color Authoring a More Rightful Presence in Computer Science and the World: Critical Witnessing With/Through Computer Science

• In Event: Humanizing Computer Science Education: Addressing Critical Issues for K–12 Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Objectives
This paper explores how youth-of-color from low-income communities engage in computer science (CS) in two informal, STEM-rich making clubs. We attend to when/how youth move/co-opt what they are learning in CS to amplify their lives/concerns, seek transformative social change and the resultant impact of such modes of engagement. Given that the cultural and structural regularities of both CS and makerspaces marginalize youth lives, understanding how and why youth engage CS in these ways, and how they are supported is an important and timely justice-oriented issue. We ask: When, how and why do middle-school-aged youth in two community-based STEM-rich makerspaces take up CS? How did taking up CS in particular ways impact the consequentiality of youths’ developing CS expertise and their experiences at the community clubs?

Framework
We draw on the Rightful Presence framework, centered on three integrated tenets: 1) the right to reauthor rights through allied political struggle; 2) making injustices visible through presence and 3) the necessity of collective disruptions of guest/host relationalities (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2019; 2020). We unpack how historically marginalized youth-of-color authored a rightful presence in CS, focusing on both coding processes and how the made artifacts (e.g., movies and games on Scratch, Python, and ozobots programming) were taken up and impacted social norms.
The rightful presence lens is complemented by a focus on equitably-consequential learning (Hall & Jurow, 2015; Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2018) that highlights the importance of human, material and spatial aspects of learning.

Methods/Data
We engaged in longitudinal critical ethnography (Madison, 2010) across two community making spaces. Data include field notes, videos of select sessions, interviews and youth-produced artifacts. We report on two nested cases where youth worked weekly on coding projects (90-150 minutes/week) for up to 9 months.

Results
Two cases show how youth drew upon community wisdom (Yosso, 2005) to engage in CS. In the first case, youth worked to “teach a computer to speak testimonies of what makes [Green Club] a welcoming and non-judgmental space where we do science that matters” as an interactive experience for visitors who first step into Green Club. This making-present practice hybridizes community wealth with CS how-to in creating a uniquely community-oriented artifact that works to further amplify community STEM values. A second case illustrates another making-present practice: Creating spaces for increased recognition and witnessing of youths’ community wealth and CS skills. Youth moved CS artifacts into different spaces and shared those artifacts as community CS teachers to community members. Implications to youths’ identity work as coders are considered, with a focus on the role making-present practices play.

Significance
This study highlights the relationalities between youths’ lived lives in community, their emerging expertise in CS and how authoring a rightful presence impacted their learning in multi and inter-scalar ways across space, time and with different stakeholders. How spatiality, materiality and relationality might be implicated in youths’ authoring of a rightful presence in CS is important to unpack to lend insights in supporting youth-of-color who have been historically marginalized in CS.

Authors

• Edna Tan, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Angela Calabrese Barton, University of Michigan