Why We Wrote Power On!
By Jean J. Ryoo and Jane Margolis
A brief note from Marie before we get on to Jean and Jane’s post:
Welcome back and Happy New Year! We appreciated time to rest over this winter break and hope you all were able to take some moments for rest and reflection as well. We are excited to share our reflections and what’s ahead for Civics of Technology in 2023 in a coming blog post.
In fact, first up for 2023 is book club! We’re reading Power On! and discussing it on January 12th at 8:00 p.m. EST. Register now! There’s still time to read the graphic novel, and please feel free to attend even if you aren’t finished.
And now, back to Jean and Jane, authors of Power On!
Students today do not live in a bubble: they have access to social media accounts, technological tools, and all the latest newsfeeds that adults access on a daily basis. And if you talk to youth about their concerns regarding our world and future, you hear that they are focused on issues of racism, anti-gay beliefs, Black Lives Matter, climate change, COVID, shootings, and other social justice topics. And, while these issues are intertwined today with computing and tech, in too few K-12 computer science classes does the curriculum focus on how, why, and what are the impacts. (Ryoo et al., 2021). There are few opportunities for students to learn about the ethical and social implications of computer science, how biases get built into tech and reproduce inequality, as well as our roles as both creators and users of technology. Further, our CS education movement has heard too little from students’ themselves about what engages them with computing and what they want to learn about regarding these topics.
This is why we wrote our new graphic novel Power On! (MIT Press, April 2022). We wanted to create a resource that would translate decades of academic research—such as that found in Stuck in the Shallow End (Margolis et al., 2008/2017), our current student voice research, and other research concerned about the role of tech in shaping inequality (Buolamwini, 2016; O’Neil, 2016/17; Noble, 2018; Eubanks, 2018; Benjamin, 2019; etc.)—into a medium that is highly accessible to youth, educators, and families. We wrote Power On! to support meaningful and critical conversations addressing the role of CS in today’s world as well as the agency we have to ensure tech has positive, and not negative impacts, on our communities and people with less power in society.
Power On! follows the lives of four high school friends who find out that a police shooting in their neighborhood was the result of using a racially-biased facial recognition system. The teens are compelled to learn all they can and they start asking questions: How can this happen? Can technology be racist? How does AI work? What are algorithms and who creates them? Why are there so few people of color and women in the tech world? They decide they want to learn more (and resources for them to learn more are linked in the book), but when they try to take computer science in high school they are confronted by unequal access to CS classes in schools. It turns out that only 53% of US high schools offer computer science (Code.org, 2022).
The friends discover that there are direct connections between the obstacles they face in receiving quality computing education, the underrepresentation of women and People of Color in tech, and the racist technology impacting their communities. They come to understand that in technology, as in most things, underrepresentation really matters in terms of what is designed, who designs it, who it benefits, and who it harms. And, the story ends with these students taking the lead in fighting for CS education for all students.
Of course, to introduce these topics into CS classrooms, teachers are key. Yet, a 2021 survey conducted by the CSTA and Kapor Center found that 39% of CS K-12 teachers do not see the importance of covering computing’s role in perpetuating biases related to racism, sexism, and other inequities in their classrooms; and only 59% of white teachers (compared to 67% of Black Indigenous, Latinx, & Pacific Islander teachers) are confident utilizing material highlighting race, ethnicity and culture (Koshy, et al., 2021).
This is why we collaborated with a powerful team of CSTA Equity Fellows—CS educators and equity advocates from across the nation—to create the Power On! Facilitators Guide supporting educators as they engage students (and themselves) with these issues. In the guide, facilitators can access not only resources for teaching with the graphic novel—such as discussion questions, lessons/activities, resources, tools for facilitating challenging conversations, etc.—but also suggestions for preparing to lead these conversations. See: www.poweronbook.com
We believe that the role of computing (its power, the good and the harm that it causes) is creating a critical teaching moment. However, this is not a new issue as, in 1981, the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility organization was founded in response to military uses of computing technology. We can learn much from the organization’s slogan: “Technology is driving the future…it is up to us to do the steering,” which challenges the myth that computing itself is “neutral” and “objective.” The organization pushed the field to ask important questions about technology: not just “is it cool?” but “does it make our lives better or more just?”
Takeria Blunt, a member of our Mississippi student voice research team who is a grad student in Technology and Society and majored in CS as an undergraduate at Spelman College, captures this tension today when she shares this observation about why bringing these issues into the CS classroom is important: “Many students are aware of and connected to social justice efforts, and being in a scientific major doesn't change the fact that they're looking for CS to connect with the real world/issues that they care about.” She explains that all students working with tech—regardless of whether they become computer scientists or not—need to develop “critical literacies” but that “Purely technical education doesn't do that.” Rather, in our CS classrooms, “the social/ethical aspect is always important if we're saying that we're bringing up the next generation of technologists, policy makers, etc.”
Indeed, “purely technical education” will not give students the critical awareness and literacy about their own field and its impact on the world. And, if CS education is to prepare and inform students about the world and how to become the change leaders our world needs, the “civics of tech” must be included. All students benefit when books and learning are contextualized in issues that deeply impact their current lives and CS students are no exception.
Thus, we hope that Power On! will help support parallel efforts, such as the Kapor Center’s Framework for Equitable CS, Exploring Computer Science, the Alliance of Identity Inclusive Computing Education, Civics of Tech, Constellations, and many other programs that are actively involved in amplifying the importance of anti-racism, social responsibility, and ethics in CS education. But also, rather than remaining siloed in our separate subject areas, we hope that Power On! will find its way into the hands of youth studying Social Studies, Ethnic Studies, English, Art, and more.
References
Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after Technology. Polity.
Buolamwini, J. (2016). How I’m fighting bias in algorithms [Video]. TEDxBeaconStreet. https://www.ted.com/talks/joy_buolamwini_how_i_m_fighting_bias_in_algorithms.
Code.org. (2022). 2022 State of Computer Science Education. https://advocacy.code.org/stateofcs.
Eubanks, V. (2018). Automating Inequality: How High-tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. St Martin’s Press.
Gebru, T. (2021). The hierarchy of knowledge in machine learning and related fields and its consequences [Webinar]. Center of Excellence for Minority Women in STEM. Spelman College.
Koshy, S., Martin, A., Hinton, L., Scott, A., Twarek, B., & Davis, K. (2021). The computer science teacher landscape: Results of a nationwide teacher survey. CSTA and Kapor Center.
Margolis, J., Estrella, R., Goode, J., Jellison-Holme, J., & Nao, K. (2008/2017). Stuck in the shallow end: Education, race, and computing. MIT Press.
Noble, S. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York University Press.
O’Neil, C. (2016/17). Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Broadway Books.
Ryoo, J.J., Morris, A., & Margolis, J. (2021). “What happens to the Raspado man in a cash-free society?”: Teaching and Learning Socially Responsible Computing. ACM Transactions on Computing Education, 21(4). Special Issue on Justice-Centered Computing Education, DOI: 10.1145/3453653.