Beyond Capacity: Computing Education Can and Should Be Overflowing With Community Practices and Cultural Expertise (Poster 11)

• In Event: Expansive Framings of “Capacity Building” in Computing Education: Agency, Infrastructuring, and Advocacy

Abstract

The objective of this poster presentation is empirically driven theorization about the limitations and affordances of the metaphor of capacity for the design of culturally responsive and sustaining computing (CRSC) education. While CRSC is meant to push against hegemonic understandings of what computing is, who has expertise relevant to improving computing education, and how computational practices exist in the world (Scott et al. 2014), the language of “capacity building” invokes something akin to building a container that might expand but always has clearly demarcated boundaries for what is inside and outside of the container. This metaphor does not fit the anti-racist goals of CRSC to support Black, Brown, and Indigenous children’s meaningful engagement with computing by turning toward the dynamic community and cultural expertise that exist outside of the hegemonic confines of computing classrooms and curricula. Indeed, it is exactly those community practices and cultural expertise that are traditionally considered beyond the capacity of computing education—from hip-hop and barbering to urban gardening and fashion design—that have been crucial for successful CRSC education (e.g., Pinkard et al. 2017). Therefore, we operationalize the processes of designing meaningful and dynamic CRSC education as beyond-capacity building: pushing computing education beyond the container of hegemonic computing classrooms and curricula that are too often defined by what exists in schools and against what exists within children’s own communities.

We detail what beyond-capacity building looks like with two descriptive case studies of designing CRSC programs that are grounded in African American community practices and cultural expertise: 1) a project to create computing education that is grounded in the design practices and cultural expertise of African American barbers; 2) a project to create computing education that is grounded in the design practices and cultural expertise of African American textile artists-activists. Our choice to use a descriptive case study methodology is motivated by the fact that its goal is to help reveal “patterns and connections, in relation to theoretical constructs, in order to advance theory development” (Tobin, 2010, 289). Through qualitative analyses of recordings of design collaborations with an African American barber and an African American textile artisan-activist, both of whom worked with computing education researchers to design CRSC projects, we make two claims about beyond-capacity building for CRSC design.

First, beyond-capacity building means engaging in multi-directional exchanges of knowledge where all parties are open to changing their understandings about computing and their own relationships to computing education. These exchanges pushed everyone involved in the design of CRSE, from the researchers and educators to the barber and the textile artisan, to engage with expertise that are traditionally stereotyped as beyond the capacities of their own disciplines. This leads to the second claim: beyond-capacity building for CRSC means problematizing traditional disciplinary demarcations of computing itself. Why can’t the computational sciences include a field like computational barbering? Our findings are significant to the creation of anti-racist computing education, which, we argue, requires computing educators to go beyond themselves, beyond their own capacities and the capacities of their discipline.

Authors

• Michael L. Lachney, Michigan State University

• Madison C Allen Kuyenga, Pennsylvania State University