Beyond Coding: Using Critical Computational Literacy to Transform Tech
Soep, Elisabeth · Texas ScholarWorks (Texas Digital Library) · 2018
On a Tuesday afternoon in downtown Oakland, seven teens stare intensely into their laptops and type furiously on their keyboards.After a full day of classes at various schools across San Francisco's East Bay, these teens work diligently until 6pm on the third floor of Youth Radio, a 25year-old youth-driven production company.On this particular afternoon, the young people are figuring their way through the finer points of HTML.This image of teens on screens may conjure up similar scenes in any number of computer science classes in school-based and after-school coding programs around the country.What is not visible in this moment are all the pedagogical and curricular moves that take place before and after to connect young people's computational skills to their growing capacity to critically examine social conditions and express civic voice and agency in a complex world.That context is essential to understanding how Youth Radio Interactive works.Interactive is the division of Youth Radio--a national network of next-generation journalism, storytelling and arts--where young people combine coding, design, and reporting to create mobile apps, games, maps, online quizzes, infographics, and other digital content.The projects that the Interactive youth team develops in collaboration with professional designers and developers have been distributed via Google Play, NPR, The Atlantic, and Teen Vogue.Their media products challenge audiences to engage with some of the most pressing issues of our times, including gentrification, sexual assault in schools, the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ youth, and the mental health struggles of urban youth of color.Over the past decade, public and private organizations have backed significant growth in computer science pathways for youth.In 2016, former President Barack Obama launched Computer Science for All, a program aimed to provide opportunities for kindergarten-through-high school students to learn "the computational skills they need to be creators in the digital economy, not just consumers, and to be active citizens in our technology-driven world… computer science is a 'new basic' skill necessary for economic opportunity and social mobility."Who would argue against preparing youth to become digital-age creators, all the while giving them the necessary tools for social and economic prosperity?Groups like code.org,Code Academy, Girls Who Code, and numerous other local and national organizations that host hackathons, bootcamps, and classes across the US have emerged to pursue these same goals.Many of those driving this push to teach "code for all" have operated under a vision of "techequity," which seeks to increase the racial/ethnic and gender diversity of the highly homogenous field of computer science (CS).From the AP Computer Science A test-takers at the secondary level (Erickson, 2016); to bachelor, masters, and doctorate CS recipients (Zweben, 2010); to the demographics of the top 23 major technology companies (Desjardins, J., 2017); there continues to be an underrepresentation of women, Black and Latinx people throughout the CS pipeline.But in the last few years, some researchers (Lee & Soep, 2016;Nasir & Vakil, 2017;Sandoval; 2017;Vakil, 2014) have recognized that diversity is not sufficient.Simply adding more melanin to the workforce does not combat the roots of institutional bias and historical oppressions faced by qualified women and Black and Latinx employees.Unless educators, policy-makers, advocates, and industry leadership directly address the structural conditions that result in poor recruitment and retention rates among underrepresented groups, the tech industry will continue to lose women and people of color.Moreover, there will continue to be a dearth of pathways for young