The Power of Community
Developing ideas about increasing inclusivity in tech through education.
Below is an excerpt from my graduate research studying the effects of community building on increasing diversity in Tech. Here, I review significant literature on the subject and consider the next steps towards making the field more inclusive.
Educators are well aware that students have basic needs that must be met in order to ensure optimal learning takes place within the classroom. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is often paired with Theodore Roosevelt's observation that “Students don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care,” as both an instructional guide for pre-service teachers as well as a figurative North Star by which to guide their future interactions with their classes. Developing relationships with and between students, and building a classroom community are paramount to not only classroom management, but also to ensuring that students can reach their highest academic potential during the school year. Just as community building within the classroom can help secure a safe space for students to learn within, teachers can also encourage community building around technology use to help scaffold and support students as their learning becomes increasingly dependent upon digital tools. These communities take on even more significance as issues of accessibility to technology are further discovered, revealing just how ubiquitous racial and gendered bias are within the tech industry, as well as the scarcity of resources available to disadvantaged communities of color. Gabriela T. Richard in “Video Games, Gender, Diversity, and Learning as Cultural Practice” (2017), Gloria Ladson-Billings in “But That’s Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy” (1995), and Andrew A. Tawfik, Todd D. Reeves, and Amy Stich in “Intended and Unintended Consequences of Educational Technology on Social Inequality” (2016) all explore, both directly and indirectly, the need for the creation of safe spaces for minorities within STEM as an intentional means to increasing diversity within the field.
Richard, Ladson-Billings, and Tawfik et. al all emphasize the importance of community building and community engagement to increase the academic success of racial and gendered minorities within the classroom and within the tech field. Ladson-Billings explains in her article that culturally relevant teaching is not an exploitative effort to incorporate the skills and experiences of community members into the classroom curriculum in order to pacify students. Rather, culturally relevant teaching insists upon building a community both within the classroom amongst students, and with the external community to ensure that students have a sense of agency with their own learning and a better sense of themselves as community members. The teachers that Ladson-Billings observed who were practicing culturally relevant teaching, all made an effort to not only learn about their individual students interests and needs, they also sought to learn from the students’ community as well. These teachers adeptly recruited the community leaders, parents, and guardians of their students who could offer a great amount of both practical and theoretical knowledge to support the classroom curriculum and the teacher’s own evolving pedagogy. Ladson-Billings found that by teachers successfully establishing these culturally relevant communities within and outside of their classrooms, they encouraged a welcome and collaborative learning environment for their students and increased their students’ motivation for academic success.
Similarly, Richard expounds the benefits of establishing community, in particular when aiming to increase the participation of minority groups in the tech industry and in tech education. Richard, citing Ladson-Billings, agrees that culturally-responsive teaching is paramount to ensuring the inclusion of ethnic minorities and women in the STEM field. Richard calls specifically for the simultaneous implementation of both Ladson-Billings culturally-responsive teaching and the concept of inclusive communities of practice. Like the community building Ladson-Billings describes, inclusive communities of practice ensure that student members take agency in their own learning of and practice with technology, as well as offer these student safe spaces in which they can feel supported during their learning. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of basic needs, students must feel safe and secure before they are able to successfully learn. Therefore, Richard’s inclusive communities of practice help ensure that the minority groups traditionally marginalized within the tech and STEM fields can feel safe enough within a community to become successful academically.
Unlike Richard and Ladson-Billings, Tawfik et al. do not expressly champion the creation of an inclusive learning community to better aid minority students academically and within the STEM field. However, their discussion about the unintended consequences o.f misguided technology use by students from minority groups, who lack adequate teacher support and mentorship from subject-matter-experts, speaks directly to the need for inclusive communities of learning and practice. Tawfik et al. explain that there are some benefits of technology integration into the curriculum for disadvantaged students, with some studies showing that students reading and math standardized scores improved with targeted intervention provided through applied computer-based programs. However, Tawfik et. al argue that technology can often do more to widen the academic achievement gap between disadvantaged and advantaged students, due to a lack of support in the effective use of that technology. For example, Tawfik et. al. describe how high school students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are less successful with navigating the college admissions process than their more advantaged peers, even with access to technology to conduct research on potential schools. The authors cite the issue stemming from a lack of understanding on the disadvantaged students’ part of how to interpret the information that they are obtaining from the technology they are using. Tawfik et. al also go on to explain that inadequate teacher training in the technologies being provided to students can also result in ineffective use of that technology within the classroom. Although the focus of Tawfik et al’s discussion was upon the unintended consequences of technology in disadvantaged classrooms, the article does further validate the significant need for the establishment of impactful learning communities that can scaffold and support these students as they learn with and about technology.
Creating inclusive communities of practice within schools are essential for increasing diversity within the tech and STEM fields. Technology and digital gaming are often developed and marketed excluding women and minority consumers. Due to the limited representation of minorities and women in the tech industry, negative stereotypes about both groups can be pervasive throughout the products it creates. These negative stereotypes can also reinforce negative self-perceptions minorities and women may have about their own capabilities surrounding tech and tech-development. Minorities and women historically have less access to entry into the technology industry, and what little access they do have, they are often met with racial and/or gendered harassment. Creating safe spaces for minorities and women within tech, beginning at the primary and secondary school level, will ensure that these groups feel empowered to pursue an education and career in the tech domain, as well as participate as members later in life. It also ensures that there is a more realistic representation of diversity in the products produced within the industry, which research has shown benefits all involved, regardless of racial or gendered background.
References
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). But That’s Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant
Pedagogy. Theory Into Practice, 34(3), 159–165. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1476635
Mcleod, S. (n.d.). Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Simply Psychology. Retrieved October 20,
2020, from https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html
Richard, G. T. (2017). Video Games, Gender, Diversity, and Learning as Cultural Practice:
Implications for Equitable Learning and Computing Participation Through Games.
Educational Technology, 57(2), 36–43. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44430522
Tawfik, A., Reeves, T., & Stich, A. (2016). Intended and Unintended Consequences of
Educational Technology on Social Inequality. TechTrends: Linking Research & Practice
to Improve Learning, 60(6), 598–605. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-016-0109-5