Michael Lachney

Culturally responsive computing as brokerage: toward asset building with education-based social movements

ABSTRACT Bridging schools and communities has been a goal, if not hurdle, for reformers who aim to improve the education of low-income and underrepresented students from the bottom-up. Strategies to create these connections are often characterized as ‘brokerage’, where individuals or organizations bridge two or more social worlds. This paper details the design and implementation of educational technologies that support the brokering of school–community connections using a ‘culturally responsive computing’ (CRC) framework. Culturally responsive education is often limited to content and learning styles, which misses the opportunities it creates for a brokerage process that also connects to education-based social movements for economic access in underrepresented communities. This paper provides empirical support for the claim that the CRC framework is well suited for both purposes. It allows schools and communities to build assets together, translating the knowledge and skills of underrepresented communities into math and computing education, while illuminating the ways in which technologies can motivate education-based social movement building.

Epistemological Luddism: Reinvigorating a Concept for Action in 21st Century Sociotechnical Struggles

ABSTRACT Explicitly dismantling or decommissioning existing sociotechnical systems seems to be unimaginable both within dominant public imaginaries and in academic thought. Indeed, ‘gee whiz’ journalistic narratives regarding emerging technoscience abound as many members of the public appear to eagerly await any new innovation coming out of Silicon Valley. At the same time, most science and technology studies (STS) research focuses on the creation of new technoscience, not its destruction or temporary decommissioning. Yet, lay citizens clearly engage in forms of Luddism: schoolchildren and overworked professionals take digital ‘detoxes’, a number of cities have dismantled their urban highways, and a growing movement of parents have opted their children out of their state’s standardized testing requirements. While all such efforts are rooted in the rejection of a technology, they vary in terms of their resemblance to 19th century English Luddism as well as with respect to Langdon Winner’s concept of epistemological Luddism. How might STS scholars better make sense of 21st century Luddism? This article conceptualizes a number of contemporary examples of technological dismantling with regard to their epistemological and political characteristics. We end with a call for research to better understand lay technological refusal, especially in comparison to elite-driven forms of disruption.

Computational communities: African-American cultural capital in computer science education

Abstract Enrolling the cultural capital of underrepresented communities in PK-12 technology and curriculum design has been a primary strategy for broadening the participation of students of color in U.S. computer science (CS) fields. This article examines two ways that African-American cultural capital and computing can be bridged in CS education. The first is community representation, using cultural capital to highlight students’ social identities and networks through computational thinking. The second, computational integration, locates computation in cultural capital itself. I survey two risks – the appearance of shallow computing and the reproduction of assimilationist logics – that may arise when constructing one bridge without the other. To avoid these risks, I introduce the concept of computational communities by exploring areas in CS education that employ both strategies. This concept is then grounded in qualitative data from an after school program that connected CS to African-American cosmetology.