Youth as Philosophers of Technology

• In Event: Examining Intergenerational Cultures of Collaboration, Resistance, and Social Dreaming in Multimedia Learning Environments

Abstract

There is an urgent need to disrupt technology education (e.g., #CSforAll) organized around economic, militaristic, or “STEM pipeline” logics and to consider paradigms that interrogate the cultural, ethical, and political uses and implications of technology. In particular, research is needed that illustrates how youth can be supported in decoding technology’s relationship with power and the moral and ethical implications of technology and its uses. We take up this conceptual and methodological challenge by asking the following question: What kinds of sense making open up when we encourage racially, culturally, and/or economically minoritized youth’s inquiry into the ethical uses and implications of technology rather than to simply consume and produce technology?
Taking up this question, we examine a university-community partnership, Young People’s Race Power and Tech Project (YPRPT), in the Chicago area where youth research and produce documentaries exploring the impact of technology on their communities. We explore an approach to technology learning that imagines and prepares youth to become philosophers of technology, a conceptual pivot from the limiting frames of ‘youth as consumers’ or ‘youth as producers’ of technology prevalent in recent efforts to enhance digital, technological, and computational literacies for all students. Learning to code, a prerequisite for designing, engineering, debugging, and deploying advancing technologies, has been the overwhelming pedagogical priority in computer science education. Youth as philosophers of technology, in contrast, foregrounds learning how to decode tech’s relationship with power, to question the role of technology in society, and consider the possibilities and limitations of technology to intervene on behalf of justice.
Our analysis centers around the sense-making of two high school students who created a film examining how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) use advanced technologies to surveil and track immigrants and how immigrant communities have created technologies of resistance for themselves. Focusing on the youth’s collective sense-making about the film as the artifacts or signs of learning, we analyze the kinds of technology learning and moral imaginaries YPRPT, and the relationships therein, made possible. This study also has implications for how we conceptualize technology learning, research youth sensemaking, and design learning environments that cultivate youth’s relationality, political identities, criticality and brilliance. This research moves away from neoliberal commitments to train youth as proficient users and producers of technology to instead take up liberatory commitments towards cultivating youth’s diverse sensemaking in, through, and about technology and its uses and impact on society.

Authors

• Sepehr Vakil, Northwestern University

• Maxine McKinney de Royston, Erikson Institute