7: Identity and culture

Week 7 (October 16)

Weekly video

Notes

Logistics
- Field notes assignment.
  - Case studies, ethnographies.
  - One-minute videos
    - An issue
    - A technology
    - A focal group
- Technobiographies: Identity, media, and culture
  - Identity and media
    - Importance of early computer experience (Margolis)
      - Laura: "we had one bulky desktop computer with an insanely huge hard-drive under the desk. I invite you to sit with me in this nostalgic journey, beginning sometime around 1999."
      - Muhammad: "my beloved Casio SK-8 32-Key Sampling Keyboard"
      - Danielle: "My father is a software developer, and he taught the basics of coding in Visual Basic."
    - We are all cyborgs. Haraway, Turkle.
      - Rebecca: "My life within the context of technology feels like an internal struggle... a dichotomy between the "rean and natural" and the "artificial and computerized."
    - Computational infrasructure
      - Leaky abstractions/half-baked microworlds
        
        Varun: Technological infrastructure and early hacking practices. Cyanogen, forums.
        
        Danielle: "To help facilitate our conversations, we created a server through Discord that could hold all our discussions about gaming in one space. I was one of the moderators of this server, and as a group, we decided that we wanted to add a custom Discord Bot to our server to handle some aspects of the moderation. We took on this project together and programmed a bot in Java that would help moderate the server while also allowing for fun interactions with our friends."
        
        Generational changes.
      - Lauren: Remote learning during COVID: " I feel that I didn’t learn as well through a Zoom meeting as I did in person as it didn’t feel as genuine. It almost felt like a shell of what education used to be and it wasn’t as substantial as in-person learning." But can be much more effective depending on pedagogy.
      - Laura: "MySpace and Facebook become every emo teenager’s public diary."
      - "A large part of my identities and knowledge as a teacher and a mother come from social media influencers."
  - Identity and culture
    - Language
      - Blessed: "When I first encountered computers and technology in my first year of high school, it felt like learning a new language –– a language with its own set of rules and technical terms that I had to memorize to gain a better understanding. Although I had a good command of English language, learning about computers felt strange because I struggled to grasp the terms being discussed."
      - Muhammad: "I kept interacting with my PC in English language instead of Arabic"
    - Identity practices
      - Danielle: "As I grew older, my computer science learner identity evolved and solidified. People started to ask me what I wanted to “be” when I grew up, and I took it more seriously. I began to internalize the idea that I needed to figure out a potential career path I could pursue. While I had not really programmed for a few years, I remembered how much I had enjoyed the experience of coding when I was younger, and I still identified as a computer science learner. After some personal reflection, I decided that I wanted to become a software developer when I grew up. My identity as a computer science learner took on new meaning as I started to identify as a future computer scientist."
      - Andrew: "By age 10, my parents realized I was rather fluent with the computer and I was designated as the computer assistant for my household... I have always loved helping others from a young age."
      - Danielle: I had to smile and nod as my family members praised me for pursuing a field not typical for girls, even as I began to dread the inevitable discussion of typical gender roles."
  - Schooling
    - Andrew: CS1 was "so important to my computer science identity because it labeled computer science as a skill I was capable of learning, rather than a skill that felt foreign and unattainable for me."
    - Laura on putting 5-year-olds in front of an iPad all day: "I find this new normal quite incredible and almost insane"
    - Blessed: technofraudulence. "Writing my first lines of code and encountering some error messages felt like unlocking a forbidden secret language. This period at the private school marked a shift in my identity –– from being afarid to touch a computer to actively participant in class." Also refusal, Saturated Sites of Violence in CS Education.
Holland, et al. Very important for my dissertation.
- "On the shoulders of Bakhtin and Vygotsky." Oof!
- "Practice theory of identity," fits into "Identity as position" and "identity as self" from Moje & Luke's taxonomy.
- "They were producing, from the cultural resources available to them, understandings of themselves [...which...] figured in their communication with themselves about their past and present actions... as always engaged in forming identities, in producing objectifications of self-understandings that may guide subsequent behavior. (p. 4)
- "A person or group is “offered” or “afforded” a social position when a powerful body, such as a governmental agency proposes a particular sort of subject, a “felon” say, or a “sexual harasser,” or an “at-risk” student and calls on an individual to occupy the position. Faced with such an offer, the person may either accept the position in whole or part, or try to refuse it" (Holland & Leander, 2004, quoted in Moje and Luke, 2009).
- "I view identity as a model of selfhood one authors and occupies in a literacy place, which exists at the interface “between intimate discourses, inner speaking, and bodily practices formed in the past and the discourses and practices to which people are exposed, willingly or not, in the present” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 32)."
- "Fantasy and game play serve as precursors to participation in an institutional life, where individuals are treated as scholars, bosses, or at-risk children and events such as the granting of tenure, a corporate raid, and the self-esteem of at-risk children are taken in all seriousness” (p. 51).
- “What we call identities remain dependent upon social relations and material conditions. If these relations and material conditions change, they must be ‘answered,’ and old ‘answers’ about who one is may be undone” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 189).
Flamenbaum & George
- Critique of automonous model of literacy (compare to Proctor & Rish)
- Regimes of participation. (Compare to genres of participation from Ito, et al. in Week 1)
- Patricia Baquedano-Lopez: Literacy “is less a set of acquired skills and more an activity that affords the acquisition and negotiation of new ways of thinking and acting in the world”
- Ethnographies of literacy
Questions:
- At the scale of a classroom, why should we care about any of this?

Readings

Flamenbaum & George (2023)
Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain (1998), ch. 1.