Role of Care and Emotion in Learners’ and Facilitators’ Interactions With Computational Models of Ethnocentrism

• In Event: Centering Care and Affect in Computing Education

Abstract

The entrenchment of computing education in imperial, colonial and racist ideologies has been noted by several scholars (Philip & Sengupta, 2021; Ames, 2019; Ryoo & Margolis, 2022; Vakil, 2018). In particular, our work is concerned with White Innocence (Gotanda, 1994; Guttierez, 2006) in computational models of racial segregation (Sengupta et al., 2022), which mutes the role of intentional, institutional and systemic racism, instead positioning segregation as an inevitable and emergent phenomenon that emerges through prisoner’s dilemma (Schelling, 1980) interactions of co-operation and non-cooperation between hypothetical agents belonging to different groups. How might computing educators engage in the ethical work of repair (Star & Ruhleder 1996; Mikalsen et al., 2018) of such code alongside learners, so that such models do not lead to enacting and perpetuating symbolic violence (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990) on racialized learners (Sengupta et al., 2022)? In order to answer this question, we present an investigation of how facilitators of color engage ethically with immigrant learners of color as they interact with a computational model of ethnocentrism.
This study was conducted in a public walkway in a large Canadian university. A large touch screen displayed a multi-agent simulation based on Hammond and Axelrod’s (2006) ethnocentrism model, while the adjacent touchscreen displayed the census-based map of racial segregation in Canadian cities. Participants interacted with the simulation through manipulating sliders that (among other variables) adjusted immigration rates, birth/death rates, cost/benefit to cooperating, as well as through interacting directly with the underlying code. Effects of these interactions were visually presented through population changes of different colours of agents over time.
Participants were 10 post-secondary students in education and social sciences who are immigrants of color. Each participant’s interaction with the simulation was facilitated by two research team members and video-recorded. Using a constant comparative approach (Glaser & Strauss, 2017), two salient themes were identified across these interactions: a) how each participant made deep connections between the simulation using personal narratives; and b) the critique and suggested redesign of the simulation - ethical repairs - based on participants’ identification of symbolic violence, i.e., elements in the code that were racially othering (Said, 1991).
A key finding was that participants used their personal histories as a lens for interpreting the different strategies of cooperation in Hammond & Axelrod’s (2006) model, as well as reimagining possible ethical repairs of the simulation. Racialized emotions (Bonilla-Silva, 2019) - in particular, feelings of loss of language and culture, as well as humiliation - played a central role in their interpretations, and another complementary finding was the establishment of solidarity (Banerjee & Connell, 2018) between learners and facilitators of color. In particular, several participants noted that fundamental assumptions of “agency” of immigrants and marginalized peoples were deeply flawed, and proposed changes to the simulation that would make explicit the role that institutions and policies play, both implicitly and explicitly, in shaping our social interactions.
Our work advances scholarship on facilitation of computing in informal spaces (Hladik et al., 2023), and also offers a contrapuntal orientation for the work of “repairing” in the context of computing education.

Authors

• Simren Trehin, University of Calgary

• Apoorve Chokshi, University of Calgary

• Pratim Sengupta, University of Calgary