4: Critical computational literacies

Week 4 (September 18)
Due: A. Technobiography

We will draw parallels between the disciplinary conversation within English/Language Arts and current debates within K-12 CS education in order to center questions of inclusion, representation, and power. We will identify several specific senses of "critical" education and make connections between the readings and our own experiences as students and teachers.

Video notes

Week 4: technobiography due.
Week 3 Discussion Reports
- Boyd
  - Should people be worried? Are cell phones addictive now? Were they then?
    - Role of educators, designers, policymakers.
  - How does computational literacy deal with this issue?
    - Zoom out scope of education: parents, communities.
    - Supporting emergent practices
    - Relationality
    - Could CS education help?
Grover & Pea
- Focus on gender feels dated
  - Rejecting essentialism. Compare with how "code switching" now feel dated.
- research on learning trajectories.
  - Look ahead to Benjamin
Proctor & Rish
- “Youth are then caught up in institutions wherein literacy practices and the people who enact them are valued and treated differently based on how commensurate their literacies are with those sanctioned by the institution since US schools tend to reflect white middle class values and social practices those students whose literacy practices are situated in white middle class social domains are valued and regarded differently than their peers whose literacy practices may be situated in more diverse social domains.”
  - Examples from ELA
  - How does one teach computational literacy without colonizing the practice?
  - Such immense disruption, as introduced by artificial intelligence, can lead to times of transition. In these transitionally turbulent times how does one keep the disruption of classroom evaluation by AI from leading to further technological equality gaps within education?
    - Moral panics
    - Look at previous transitions?
    - Need for teacher agency.
Critical Computational literacies
- What do we mean by critical?
  - Unit of analysis
  - Understanding how power works. Critical literacy is “use of the technologies of print and other media of communication to analyze, critique, and transform the norms, rule systems, and practices governing the social fields of everyday life” (Luke, 2012, p. 5).
    - Creation
    - Critique
- Lee & Garcia "I want them to feel the fear..."
  - Critical literacy through making and personal expression
  - "The possession of computational thinking practices, even among the most marginalized, can readily provide a more secure material existence."
- Benjamin: "Race after technology: Abolitionalist tools for the New Jim Code."
  - Carcerality / Racial caste system. Alexander, The new Jim Crow.
  - Critique of neutrality.
  - Surveillance as a form of control. Foucault, Scott.
    - What would we want for our students?
  - Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
  - What is race?
    - Critical Race Theory.
    - Black Feminist thought: who counts as human? Quotation from pp. 31-32.

Readings

Lee, C. H., & Garcia, A. D. (2014). “I Want Them to Feel the Fear...”: Critical Computational Literacy as the New Multimodal Composition. In Exploring multimodal composition and digital writing (pp. 364-378). IGI Global.

Benjamin, R. (2019). Introduction. In Race after technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity Press. (pp. 1-48).

Be sure to carefully read the section starting on p. 71 which theorizes race and racialization.