Is This Relevant to Me or Just the Project? How Black Youth Engage COVID-Related Data

• In Event: #TheMoreYouKnow: Critical Data Practices With New Digital Media and Technologies Toward Justice

Abstract

Objective
This paper explores how Black youth from low-income communities access and engage with COVID-related data, including from social media apps, while working on a STEM-rich maker project during their city’s lock-down. The maker project involved designing and modeling a commercial airline cabin to be as COVID-safe as possible for passengers for travel during the pandemic

We explore when and how youth drew on what kinds of COVID-related data, as defined by youth themselves, in the context of 1) engaging in a making project that is part of a national competition focused on encouraging youth in STEM; 2) youth negotiating COVID lock down where schooling was virtual; 3) youths’ experiences with information sources, including social media apps, as connected to their salient identities – youth, Black, low-income; 4) youths’ ideas about air travel as related to their experiences with such.

Our research question is: While engaging in a COVID-related STEM-rich making project during COVID lock-down during a pandemic, what kinds of information/data do youth seek, through what sources and how did they make sense of the range of information while engaging in their project? In what ways are youths’ data literacy practices related to who they are as Black youth negotiating COVID lock-down?

Theoretical Framework
We draw on Špiranec and colleagues’ (2019) operationalization of critical data literacy specifically the ontological treatment of data, paying attention to both the contextuality and the interpretativeness of data. Contextuality foregrounds the cultural, historical and for this study, also the political underpinnings of data. For interpretativeness, we focus on how the significance of data is tied to one’s understanding and the non-neutrality of data. We also draw on Black Education Spaces (BES) (Warren & Coles, 2020) which features the importance of fugitivity through active decentering of traditional Eurocentric norms, fostering a racial counterspace that centers Blackness.

Methods
We engaged in longitudinal critical ethnography (Madison, 2011) in a community making space. Data include field notes, videos of select sessions, interviews and youth-produced artifacts during the process of design and building a COVID-safe airplane cabin model. In sum, data was collected from weekly sessions (50 minutes/week) for 7 months.

Findings
We report on how youth brought their everyday experiences to bear in identifying what kinds of information they need, from which sources, how they perceive the sources to be trustworthy, and why the information were important to which components of the STEM-rich making project. Through this process, we attempt to map youths’ personal experiences to shared cultural resources (e.g., information shared by The Shade Room) to how youth make decisions on which kinds of data is necessary for engaging in which stages of the project from their perspectives. We conjecture on what critical data literary entails for Black youth and the implications of such for designing robust and just learning experiences.

Significance
This study provides insights on historically minoritized Black youths’ critical data literacy practices as they negotiate everyday challenges during COVID lock down as they participate in a COVID-related STEM-rich making project.

Authors

• Edna Tan, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Ti'Era Worsley, University of North Carolina - Greensboro