Ancestral STEM Pedagogy and Aztech Kidz Code: A Community-Led Renaissance Movement

• In Event: A Bilingual Renaissance: Remedying and Repairing Monolingualism Through Critical Multilingual Education Research, Policy, and Practice

Abstract

This case study describes a community-based organization's efforts to create a program for emergent bilingual Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students to learn how to code and design video games rooted in Indigenous epistemologies, blockchain technology, and culturally sustaining pedagogies. The chapter aims to examine the collaborative partnership between Aztech Kidz Code (AKC), Academia Cuauhtli, and the Austin Independent School District (AISD) with various commUNITY stakeholders to increase student engagement and achievement in STEM fields for systematically marginalized youth. The researchers employed an ethnographic case study approach for data collection and analysis.
We draw from ancestral computer science (Moreno Sandoval, 2013) in the Academia Cuauhtli AKC site to improve our understanding of creating spaces organizationally and structurally for emergent bilingual students of color in STEM. Drawing on Perez (1999) and Author (2019), we theorize Academia Cuauhtli as a “third space” that mediates the over-prescribed role of the school and the under-prescribed space of the home where decolonial, epistemic freedom may be found. The very existence of just such a space in Austin, Texas, was generative of our foray into ancestral computing.
Data collection for this ethnographic case study (Author, 1999) consists of extensive field notes, students' classroom work, pláticas, observations, reflexiónes (reflection), and meeting notes. We also included video-recorded class and meeting sessions and teaching artifacts.
Analysis of project documents (minutes, memoranda, reports), reflective journal entries written by AKC Maestra/os highlight essential decision points and curriculum development processes, Austin ISD documents, and Texas Education Agency documents. Data collection processes did not operate as isolated methodological phases. On the contrary, they were collected and analyzed together like trenzas (Cordova, 2021), meaning a non-linear, inductive approach attuned to ground-level understandings of curriculum and pedagogy.
The findings from this study address a significant gap in the literature on the intersectionality of culturally sustaining pedagogies, bilingual education, computer science education, and community-led approaches to curriculum development by decolonial, postcolonial scholars of color.

Author

• Angela Valenzuela, University of Texas at Austin