Designing Meaningful Computing Education for Diaspora Youth

• In Event: Community-Informed STEM Learning

Abstract

I will share insights from a culturally sustaining computing education initiative iteratively designed for Tibetan diaspora youth in the United States. The program invited middle and high school students to explore computing not only as a technical discipline but also as a medium for cultural preservation, political engagement, and community connection. Through website creation, interactive game design, and digital storytelling, students engaged with core computing concepts while exploring their ancestries and community aspirations through themes of displacement, identity, and resilience. These efforts were supported by educators, community members, and local infrastructures, collectively helping to define a more meaningful vision of computing education.

Community-based programs such as this recognize that students from displaced or diasporic communities bring rich forms of knowledge and identity shaped over generations (Calabrese Barton et al., 2020). Rather than extract students from these identities, learning based on community knowledge and identity can instead affirm and build upon them, thereby supporting students’ academic growth while also strengthening their capacity to sustain and evolve their communities’ values and voices within modern technological landscapes.

The computing curriculum draws from Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP) (Paris & Alim, 2017) and follows a “use–modify–create” project-based progression to support both disciplinary learning and sociopolitical awareness. As students moved from using and modifying code to creating their own interactive projects, they were supported not only by instructors but also by community members who served as cultural and epistemic resources.

In the first iteration of this program (Author 1, 2025), student artifacts, reflections, survey responses, and interviews revealed that students developed confidence, technical fluency, and deeper engagement when projects were grounded in personal and communal relevance. Many students expressed excitement about “creating real stuff” and seeing their identities reflected in computing. I am currently completing the second iteration of this program to further explore how such culturally situated technology projects might be accepted within dominant academic, industrial, and everyday definitions of “real” computer science (Vakil, 2018).

With this work I aim to contribute to ongoing conversations about what counts as community-based learning in computer science education, how that learning becomes meaningful, and the challenges of integrating such learning into formal or informal environments - engaging deeply with the broader question of what computing education is for, for whom it is designed, and with what purposes in mind.

Author

• Yeshi Paljor, University at Buffalo - SUNY