Kimberly Sheridan

Culturally responsive computing: a theory revisited

Despite multiple efforts and considerable funding, historically marginalized groups (e.g., racial minorities and women) continue not to enter or persist in the most lucrative of fields – technology. Understanding the potency of culturally responsive teaching (CRT), some technology-enrichment programs modified CRP principles to establish a culturally responsive computing (CRC) experience for disenfranchised groups. We draw from our respective praxes developing two such initiatives and reconceptualize CRC as a heuristic. In this theoretical article, we offer a more nuanced vision of CRC considering intersectionality, innovations, and technosocial activism. Implications for the newly defined tenets consider programmatic, theoretical, and methodological concerns.

Students Designing Video Games about Immunology: Insights for Science Learning

Exposing American K–12 students to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) content is a national initiative. Game Design Through Mentoring and Collaboration targets students from underserved communities and uses their interest in video games as a way to introduce science, technology, engineering, and math topics. This article describes a Game Design Through Mentoring and Collaboration summer program for 16 high school students and 3 college student mentors who collaborated with a science subject matter expert. After four weeks, most students produced 2-D video games with themes based on immunology concepts from the educational science game Immune Attack. Findings from three groups that finished their games and one group with an uncompleted game are explored.

Designing Games, Designing Roles A Study of Youth Agency in an Urban Informal Education Program

Collaboration (GDMC), an informal education program in 3D computer modeling and 2D interactive game design serving primarily African American youth aged 7 to 19 years in the Washington, D.C. metro area, transformed from a program designed and taught by adults to one designed and taught by youth. In Year 1, 8% of youth participants held a leadership role; by Year 4, 30% of youth participants did. Moreover, the nature of these roles transformed, with youth increasingly taking on responsibilities formerly held by adults. In this qualitative study, the authors describe and seek to understand this role shifting. Through the extensive collection and analysis of field observations over 4 years, the authors describe qualitative shifts in the agency involved in these roles—moving from a conception of youth as student to assistant to youth as designer and implementer of instruction. The authors analyze changes in youth agency that accompanied their implementation of the studio mentorship model where classrooms were transformed from traditional teacher-led classes to studios with a 1:3 ratio of peer mentors to students. The authors describe how, following this shift, youth initiated new instructional roles leading to the creation of a mentor-instructor pipeline. The authors pose the GDMC program as an example to discuss how culturally relevant computing practice emerges from a programmatic goal of viewing youth as assets and actively seeking ways to support youth’s initiatives and agency in digital technology education. The authors argue for the value of this asset building in technology education as a way to encourage youth from traditionally underserved groups to become technology leaders and innovators.

The effects of environment and ownership on children's innovation of tools and tool material selection

Research indicates that in experimental settings, young children of 3–7 years old are unlikely to devise a simple tool to solve a problem. This series of exploratory studies done in museums in the US and UK explores how environment and ownership of materials may improve childrens ability and inclination for (i) tool material selection and (ii) innovation. The first study takes place in a childrens museum, an environment where children can use tools and materials freely. We replicated a tool innovation task in this environment and found that while 3–4 year olds showed the predicted low levels of innovation rates, 4–7 year olds showed higher rates of innovation than the younger children and than reported in prior studies. The second study explores the effect of whether the experimental materials are owned by the experimenter or the child on tool selection and innovation. Results showed that 5–6 year olds and 6–7 year olds were more likely to select tool material they owned compared to tool material owned by the experimenter, although ownership had no effect on tool innovation. We argue that learning environments supporting tool exploration and invention and conveying ownership over materials may encourage successful tool innovation at earlier ages.

Towards a Diagnostic Toolkit for the Language of Agency

ABSTRACT Agency—broadly, the capacity to produce effects—is a critical aspect of human activity, yet its multifaceted character makes analysis difficult. Drawing from functional linguistics, we propose a linguistic toolkit for analyzing the degree to which and manner in which speakers represent themselves as acting intentionally and autonomously. After a brief review of relevant agency literature, we propose three sets of grammatical tools, demonstrating their efficacy with a brief case study of 4 adult secondary learners’ educational narratives. We find that our toolkit offers insight both across contexts within an individual and across individuals in a single context.

Studio Thinking in Early Childhood

Studio learning environments provide important support for young children as they learn to create and interpret in visual art and design. In this chapter, I use the Studio Thinking Framework, developed from research at Harvard University’s Project Zero that involved close observation of studio art classrooms to see what teachers intend to teach and how they teach it, to inform how we can think about learning in formal and informal early childhood education. I describe strategies teachers can use to create a studio environment that fosters children’s development of habits of mind such as becoming more observant, more engaged and persistent, reflective on their work, and willing to explore and express ideas. I discuss how teachers can use this focus on developing students’ habits of mind in the arts to build connections to other learning areas.