Dis/Orienting Code Through Centering Affect and Memories of Immigrant Learners of Color

• In Event: Centering Care and Affect in Computing Education

Abstract

Our work advances the call to reorient computing education toward racial justice by making visible and re-orienting the imperialist and colonial ideologies underlying computing and STEM education (Vakil, 2018; Philip & Sengupta, 2021). Migration scholars have noted that racist and colonial ideologies further a top-down imposition of a “risk identity” on immigrant and refugee youth of color in the Global North (Banerjee, 2022; Bernal, 2002; Ray, 2017, 2022), and systemic racism, and racial stereotyping and microaggressions may further marginalize them in computing education (Margolis et al., 2012; Ryoo & Margolis, 2022). In contrast, we argue that by centring historically marginalized learners’ desires (Leander & Boldt, 2018) and their personal, sensory-affective histories can offer a necessary dis/orientation (Ahmed, 2006) of colonial and technocentric approaches to computational modeling (Ames, 2019; Sengupta et al., 2021).
We present a case study of co-designing a computational model with two female youth of color (Nezuko and Yasmine), who are recent immigrants to Canada from a politically disputed region in South Asia, as part of a larger, ongoing research study that seeks to re-imagine out-of-school, youth-centered educational workshops for recently arrived immigrant youth of color. Lunar Lander (Wilensky, 2005), the NetLogo computer model used for the study, simulates a spaceship landing on the lunar surface. Nezuko and Yasmine participated in 7 sessions totalling approximately forty hours, working with two researchers to re-design and change the simulation based on their desires. Data includes participants’ artifacts (code, simulations, and drawings), and video and audio-recording of their conversations and interactions.
Adopting a grounded theoretical approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), we used the constant comparative method (Charmaz, 2014) to identify ethical-affective design turns in the epistemic and representational work of the participants. These “turns” represent a chain of conversations, embodied interactions and representational work of the participants, eventually resulting in changes in the code and the simulation interface, which in turn represent both ethical and affective re-orientations of the original computational model. For example, as fans of BTS (Korean pop music band), the sisters transformed the lunar terrain into a purple-hued BTS-themed surface, and listening to BTS music and buying their merchandise were positioned as essential to gain access to the new land, which became a “concert space”. While drawing and importing the background image for their concert space, the youth, idiosyncratically shared a memory from their childhood of crossing a stream on foot in a Himalayan valley. This then led to the second design turn (Design Turn 2, Figure 2), in which they collaborated with the researchers to create new NetLogo code for representing shading and ripples in the water so that it represents their sensory-affective memories of crossing the stream.
These design turns illustrate how participants learned to “care” about their code in joint-activities (Vossoughi et al., 2020) that centred their desires (Leander & Boldt, 2018) and sensory-affective memories. Furthermore, their work also challenged and dis/oriented the White, colonial and technocentric gaze that underlies many normative computer modeling activities (e.g., Ames, 2019; Sengupta et al., 2022).

Authors

• Megha Sanyal, University of Calgary

• Santanu Dutta, University of Calgary

• Basak Helvaci Ozacar, University of Calgary

• Pallavi Banerjee, University of Calgary

• Pratim Sengupta, University of Calgary