New Research - Breaking the Code: Confronting Racism in Computer Science through Community, Criticality, and Citizenship
By Marie Heath and Aman Yadav
Alex Hanna, Timinit Gebru, and others have critiqued the whiteness within the computing industry, pointing out that the individual harms to raced and gendered people are symptomatic of an institutional problem of racism within computer science. Starting from this place of acknowledged racism within the industry, Aman and I recently wrote an article arguing that CS as a discipline presumes its work to be objective and neutral, allowing computer scientists and educators to ignore harms that exist within the field and as a result of the field.
As educators, we wondered what role we play in contributing to and confronting racism in computer science. This led us to wrestle with how K-12 CS education can confront racism through an institutional shift in its approach. We both believe thoughtful computing preparation is critical to our collective future and that broadening participation in computer science remains vital to this work. However, we increasingly see a need to interrogate a discipline that automates and upholds racialization. In our paper, we take a critical perspective toward CS education, arguing for a justice-centered CS education which centers communities, criticality, and citizenship.
Community
Curriculum in CS remains distanced from students’ everyday lives. It is often taught as abstract concepts without grounding in the joys and challenges of living in community. In our paper, we argue for a community-oriented approach to instruction which centers identity and culture and uses computing for personal agency, creative expression, and problem solving. Lachney and Yadav (2020) offer an approach to community-based CS education that brings together community experts, educators, and technologists to design technologies and curricula centering students and their lived experiences into the classroom.
Criticality
Helping students and educators to critically interrogate the development and deployment of technologies facilitates discussion of the ways CS upholds whiteness in society. Ko and colleagues (2020) remind educators to challenge the perceived neutrality and techno-optimism of technologies, arguing that teachers “must replace these conceptions with the reality that software is often wrong; software always embeds its creators’ values and biases; and software can only solve some problems, and many cases, creates new ones” (p. 32).
A critical lens also requires CS education to reconsider that broadening participation without directly confronting the whiteness and patriarchy in computing causes violences to people of color and women who enter computing spaces. We support broadened participation in CS, and Aman has worked extensively to ensure that women and people of color have access to CS. However, when workplaces discriminate against, harass, and fire black women, CS education needs to critically examine how and what we teach.
Citizenship
Finally, we argue that anti-racist CS incorporate humanities into curriculum in order to teach computing as part of society, not a magic bullet to society’s problems. We developed an inquiry approach with draws on models of citizen science and the model of taking informed action from social studies. We aim for this to be used as an inquiry- and action-based pedagogy in computer science. The goal of these practices is to encourage participatory practices, the democratization of technology, and a dismantling of oppressive systems.
This CS inquiry includes deep collaboration with communities and community elders to center the wisdom and knowledge of the people living within the community. Students identify challenges in their communities that may be symptomatic of systemic oppression and the ways technology upholds that oppression (e.g., digital surveillance). Using practices of citizen science, multiple community members and students participate in collecting and analyzing data. Students then design systems for coding and storing data. Students analyze data, consulting with community members and adjusting analyses. Finally, students pattern to develop and implement technical and social solutions to the problem.
We hope that this article helps the field of computer science education pause, consider, and work to confront its internal injustices and work to prevent further harms to society. We’d also love to hear from you about whether you could use these approaches in your own educational spaces.
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References and Further Reading
Jared O'Leary Multiplicity podcast review of the article.
On Racialized Tech Organizations and Complaint: A Goodbye to Google
Google Researcher Says She Was Fired Over Paper Highlighting Bias in A.I.
Mobilizing for Racial Justice: Rebuilding a More Equitable Tech Sector, Economy, and Society
Computing and Community in Formal Education
Ko, A. J., Oleson, A., Ryan, N., Register, Y., Xie, B., Tari, M., Davidson, M., Druga, S., & Loksa, D. (2020). It is time for more critical CS education. Communications of the ACM, 63(11), 31–33. https://doi.org/10.1145/3424000