Seeds of Connection: An Indigenous Knowledge Approach to Interrogate Computing and Computing Education

• In Event: Can Education Stop Killer Robots? Exploring Values, Ethics, and Impacts in K12 Computer Science Instruction

Abstract

A human-centered approach to computing and computing education must attend to the growing crisis of youth mental well-being. Today, despite the exponential proliferation of globally-networked digital tools (and entrenched promises of instant connection), feelings of isolation, loneliness, and disconnection are rising. In 2019, one third of high school students and 50% of female students reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, an overall increase of 40% from 2009” (HHS, 2021). In 2023, students who identify as female and LGBTQ+ had higher rates of poor mental health and suicidal thoughts and behaviors and Black, Latinx, Indigenous students were more likely to attempt suicide than students of other races and ethnicities (CDC, 2024). As educators and learning scientists, we meet this moment with a return to seeds of connection—to self, to others, to land, and to history.

Studies demonstrate that when teens and young adults feel connected to peers and adults, as well as their self-identity, mental health outcomes are improved (CDC, 2024). Similarly, teens’ connections to the arts, creative expression, and nature are associated with improvements in mental health.

We scope the conversation on ethics and social impacts of computing beyond specific tools and platforms, to the sanctity of knowledge creation, reproduction, and large-scale impacts to the human condition. Wielding insights from our prior work—including how students interrogate and remix the computational tools in their everyday lives—we conceptualize how indigenous knowledge can inform the use, interrogation, and creation of computing products.

Our theoretical framework builds upon indigenous and ancestral knowledge and centers the following key tenets: interconnection and interdependence with all human and non-human relatives through our relationship with the land and people; learning through the mind, body, heart, and spirit; relationality; and sustainability that supports cultural and community perpetuity (Bowra et al., 2021; Brayboy & McCarty, 2010; Macdonald et al., 2023).

Our methods follow an indigenous knowledge (Brayboy & Maughan, 2009) and emergent strategy (brown, 2017) approach that prioritizes process over content, and foregrounds relationships, rather than bounded concepts. Through multiple discussions, writing, and reflection as researchers, we construct a conceptual contribution from our prior empirical work, bringing to bear our collective wisdom, values, beliefs, and lived experiences.

Computing education should consider indigenous and ancestral knowledge as a humanizing move toward wholeness and healing. Our inquiry with youth starts at the epistemological level: what is knowledge and how is it acquired? In that process, questions arise about AI and its use of data, training, algorithms, feedback, and intention. Guided by an indigenous axiology, we evaluate computing tools and their impact on our society by whether and how they further community actualization and cultural perpetuity of our seventh generations.

Reappropriating the affective and embodied dimensions of AI helps illuminate potential for rightful, humanizing use of these as tools toward interdependence and interconnectedness as ways of being, knowing, and doing. This offers a hopeful antidote to isolation and disconnection brought on by digital tools, moving us away from transactional to interdependent relationships with humans, land, and nonhuman relatives.

Authors

• Cherise McBride, Stanford University

• Clifford H. Lee, Northeastern University