Dreams and Contestations: Minoritized Youths’ Redefinitions of Computing

• In Event: The Role of Emergent Technologies in Equitable Futures: Navigating Between Entrenched Injustices and Expansive Possibilities

Abstract

Computing education often attends to the ways advances in computing impact what young people ought to learn. As this symposium makes clear, it is equally important to examine the ways in which young people come to understand and question the field of computing and the ways in which it is used (Vakil, 2018). This yields the question: Under what conditions are youth supported to dream about the purposes of computing within computing education contexts?
We focus on two instances across different projects in which participants explicitly redefined concepts that underpinned our computing education research. Like much computing education research supported by funders with interests in broadening the computing workforce (e.g. CS for All; 2016), both projects shared several characteristics: They (1) sought to provide culturally-sustaining computing experiences for minoritized youth; (2) were directed by teams of white and multiracial researchers at predominantly white universities; and (3) involved collaborative design between researchers, educators, and participating youth.
The first instance of redefinition is drawn from a summer workshop that introduced youth to data science as a means to explore, and practice advocating around, local environmental justice issues (Reigh, et al. 2022). One rising 7th grade Latine participant, B, challenged our definition of “environmental racism” as a geospatial and ecological phenomenon, though this definition was necessary for our planned exploration of a large, publicly available GIS-linked dataset. Racism, they argued, was “environmental” in its omnipresence for People of Color, and should be explored using data about civic awareness and engagement. The second instance of redefinition occurred during an after-school program to engage youth in Computer Science (CS) and racial justice through historical reauthoring (Roberto, 2020) or remixing computational artifacts to highlight the histories and experiences of Black and Indigenous People of Color. Moving away from defining the workshop as about reauthoring CS artifacts, participating educators and youth redefined the goal of the workshops as using CS to service a caring community. CS was initially backgrounded by participants to address immediate needs such as food, compensation, and psychological safety. As trust and community stabilized, CS took a more central role as students engaged in storytelling about racialized encounters with police and critiquing Artificial Intelligence’s impact on their own lives. Both redefinitions reflect dreams, taken up by each learning community toward computing as a means to directly serve racial justice as proximal and defined by participants, rather than for more abstract definitions of racial justice or other goals.
Drawing from video records, fieldnotes, and student digital artifacts, we detail the emergence of these powered redefinitions from a micro/onto/sociogenetic perspective (Saxe, 1999; Philip & Gupta, 2020). We attend to moments that mark the inadequacy or tension of working definitions; instances that highlight participants’ construction of redefinitions to accommodate those needs; and episodes of sociogenesis highlighting presentation and uptake of those redefinitions among peers and educators. Preliminary findings uncover the role of clear (though inadequate) definitions, which are then contested through dreaming and re-defined to orient to participants’ daily racialized experiences.

Authors

• Michelle Hoda Wilkerson, University of California - Berkeley

• Collette Roberto, University of California - Berkeley