Building and Sustaining Community Partnerships for Justice-Centered Computing Education

• In Event: #TheMoreYouKnow: Critical Data Practices With New Digital Media and Technologies Toward Justice

Abstract

Introduction
This paper explores the possibilities and tensions of community-based technology education. We share findings from the Young People’s Race, Power, and Technology Project (YPRPT), a program to engage undergraduates, high school students, and community organizations in critical inquiry around technology, data, ethics, racism, politics and society. We explore youth and adult experiences in YPRPT, focusing on how participatory design and our partnership shaped learning opportunities. Through an extended case study of how YPRPT was implemented at one partnering community site, we highlight possibilities and limitations of justice-centered technology education in informal contexts.

Perspectives and Background
Activists and scholars have highlighted limitations of university-sponsored technology education initiatives organized narrowly around the politics of access and equity (Authors, 2018; Authors, 2017) and are taking up ethics, power, and social justice as conceptual frames (e.g., Jayathirtha, Chipps, & Morales-Navarro, 2021; Shaw & Kafai, 2020; Sullivan & Gresalfi, 2020; Authors, 2020). These projects support learning that makes visible technology’s multiple entanglements with interlocking systems of power, while supporting youth in reimagining the possibilities of technology toward liberatory futures.

Crucially, many efforts have sidestepped formal schooling in favor of partnering with community-based organizations. We aim to better understand how these contexts are designed, how they support or constrain learning in justice-centered computing, and participatory design practices, methods, and frameworks necessary to sustain these projects. We leverage theories of participatory design research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Kirshner, 2015) and standpoint theory (Harding, 2004) to answer research questions:
1. What are the unique affordances and constraints of community-based youth organizations in advancing justice-centered technology learning?
2. How does a university-initiated participatory design process shape the objectives, pedagogical practices, and possibilities of technology education?
3. How is a university-initiated participatory design process experienced from the perspective of youth and adults within partner organizations?

Method, Context, and Findings
YPRPT launched in Summer 2019 through a partnership with Family Matters, a community-based organization serving youth in a high poverty neighborhood on the Northside of Chicago. Pre-pandemic, YPRPT was in the basement of Family Matters, and they continued as a key partner. Drawing on surveys, interviews, focus groups, identity reflection journals, and two documentaries developed by youth from Family Matters, we employ an inductive, grounded approach (Charmaz, 2011) to construct a case study of YPRPT@FamilyMatters. Initial insights from our case study suggest YPRPT created a context where youth learned about politics of technology in ways that directly activated their sociopolitical experiences and identities. Further, YPRPT is creating new ways for Family Matters to fundraise and develop their portfolio of tech-focused youth programming, though the terms of partnership with the university are being negotiated. Overall, our two-year partnership with Family Matters illuminates how a community-based educational context provides a generative but contested space to support learning about technology, race, and power.

Significance
Learning about the politics of technology, and the technologies of power, is emerging as a critical need in education. Community-based partnerships become viable and vital spaces to support youth in thinking through complex and consequential developments in our post-pandemic, technologically-saturated society.

Authors

• Sepehr Vakil, Northwestern University

• Alisa Reith, Northwestern University

• Natalie Araujo Melo, Northwestern University

• Christopher Spence, Family Matters