K12DH

Race, Power, and Technology: Addressing Digital Divides

Since digital media rose to prominence in the late twentieth century, concerns have abounded about racialized divisions in access to the power afforded by these media. The first of these “digital divide” problems, identified in the 1990s, concerned unequal access to digital tools themselves.1 While these sorts of tool-driven digital divides have largely faded from view as internet-connected computing devices have become almost ubiquitous, concerns about unequal access to skills and positions of power that allow people to exercise influence through digital media remain. Studies have shown that people of color continue to be underrepresented in formal computer science education and in executive positions within tech companies.2 This lack of representation in the tech companies that set the rules for our contemporary digital media environment contributes to what Safiya Umoja Noble has called “algorithmic oppression” in which computational tools created by tech companies reinforce historical patterns of racial oppression and privilege.3

This environment of unequal access to digital skills, privilege, and power has provoked a number of attempts to ameliorate the digital divide by creating educational opportunities designed to teach digital skills outside formal computer science education. One popular method is the so-called coding boot camp, which purports to teach computer programming skills in a short, intensive program. The rhetoric surrounding these boot camps often positions them as instruments for social justice, designed to help those shut out of the upper echelons of the digital economy to pull themselves up to greater success. For example, coding boot camp App Academy brags that its unique tuition model (which asks students for no cash up front, but rather to commit to paying App Academy after securing their first tech-sector job) results in a “truly meritocratic admissions process.” A promotional video included in the “diversity and inclusion” page of App Academy’s website proclaims, “Anybody can be a software engineer,” and offers up testimonials by men and women of color who found success with the education provided by App Academy.4

However, the sort of methods traditional boot camps offer for addressing the racialized digital divide have important limitations. The job skills–focused, individualistic frame of the traditional boot camp intervention misses important elements that contribute to inequality in the digital economy. Educational technology critic Audrey Watters suggests that the “skills gap” that boot camps purportedly address may be more myth than reality. The skills gap story is belied, she writes by the fact that, “there’s been no substantive growth in wages, for example, that one would expect if there was a shortage in the supply of qualified workers.”5 Watters builds on the work of Shawna Scott to argue that “coding bootcamps re-inscribe the dominant beliefs and practices of the tech industry.”6

iCamp as Critical DH in Action

Despite the name, iCamp is not the sort of narrow, skills-focused boot camp just described.7 While iCamp is designed to help students build technical skills, it is also intended to help them become empowered members of their communities, able to speak back against the hegemonic structures these communities are embedded in.

Digital humanities pedagogy may, for some, seem like an odd place to look for resources for such a critical project. After all, early digital humanities projects were often critiqued (justly and unjustly) as an attempt to erase theory-informed questioning of power and privilege and usher in a more neoliberal-friendly, “value-neutral,” data-driven vision of humanistic inquiry. For example, Richard Grusin, in his contribution to the provocative “Dark Side of DH” panel at the 2013 MLA, argued, “If it is largely due to their instrumental or utilitarian value that university administrators, foundation officers, and government agencies are eager to fund DH projects . . . it is also the case that this neoliberal instrumentalism reproduces within the academy . . . the precaritization of labor that marks the dark side of information capitalism.”8

While these criticisms of digital humanities are important to consider, their focus on the products of digital humanities research overlooks an important part of the process of digital humanities pedagogy. Namely, it overlooks the long tradition of hands-on making and building in digital humanities classrooms. It is this DIY-inflected tradition of student-driven creativity that iCamp makes central to its pedagogy.

For digital humanists, the pedagogical potential of having students build technologically mediated texts and artifacts in the classroom goes beyond just teaching technological skills. Instead, hands-on making is a means for interrogating the cultural values embedded in technology and investigating systems of power. For example, Jentery Sayers argues that hands-on experience with the versioning platform Git helps students in the humanities classroom “develop multimodal strategies for cultural computing: strategies that persist beyond the changing particulars of platforms and the always shifting conventions of code.”9 Sayers’s use of a shared Git repository with his students also demonstrates the culture of student–teacher collaboration that we embodied in iCamp.

More recent work in postcolonial digital humanities makes more explicit the critical potential of “making.” One example of this can be found in Roopika Risam’s engagement with Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s article “Hello Worlds.” She writes that Kirschenbaum, who suggests that the value of learning to code is that it opens up students’ understanding of the “world-making” power of code, raises important questions about whether the worlds made “are reproducing the hegemonies of the ‘real’ world, and whether other worlds are possible.” Ultimately, Risam argues that, “by positioning virtual world making as ‘interactive, manipulable, extensible . . . sites of exploration, simulation, play,’ Kirschenbaum articulates the characteristics of world making through technology that are essential to postcolonial digital humanities.”10

While we did not explicitly bring these DH sources into the classroom at iCamp, as limited time forced us to focus more narrowly, we can show how iCamp embodies the kind of critical making pedagogy they call for. In particular, iCamp enacts the call to build digital artifacts rooted in the needs of diverse communities, and especially marginalized communities. As Risam writes, “At its core, post-colonial digital humanities underscores the significance of local practices for digital humanities, resisting the totalizing influences of practices from the Global North.”11 While Philadelphia is, of course, located in the Global North, the marginalized neighborhoods many iCamp students hail from have nonetheless been historically excluded from the process of building their own knowledge and representing themselves on the global stage.

Recursive Social Justice Pedagogy in Practice: iCamp in Action

The critical making pedagogy embraced by iCamp was embedded in the overall design of the iCamp experience, as well as the day-to-day activities of participants (called iCampers).

The overall structure of iCamp can be described broadly as follows. Students from the Philadelphia public school system were invited to apply to become iCampers. Accepted iCampers spent just over a week living and working on campus at West Chester University, an experience designed to help students from populations historically underserved by higher education acclimate to the experience of a college environment. During their nine-day stay, iCampers would be immersed in one of several “tracks” focused on giving students a hands-on experience of a particular form of media production. For example, the 2017 iCamp featured tracks devoted to web development, video production, game production, and audio production. From day 1 through day 7, the overarching schedule iteratively builds through three phases: preproduction/development, production/development, and postproduction/development. These phases are not mutually exclusive and are recursive. For example, in preproduction, iCampers create low-fidelity versions of their projects based on their nascent ideas or designs; these models are revisited and planned for production, and later retested and analyzed for new ideas in the next iteration. The recursion of these phases reflexively informs and changes design, pedagogy, and, largely, programmatic decisions. In the 2017 version of iCamp, these tracks were interwoven with student-directed DIY and “chill time” projects, designed to give iCampers the opportunity to build on the technical skills learned in tracks and create artifacts meaningful to themselves. In the 2018 version of iCamp, for reasons described shortly, this student-directed work was more closely integrated into the tracks themselves.

A more detailed sense of the pedagogy of iCamp can be gleaned from a closer examination of several elements of the day-to-day activities of iCampers. In particular, we focus on some of the ways iCamp evolved from its initial 2017 version to a revised version offered in the summer of 2018. This evolution was itself an example of the iterative nature of a pedagogy of critical making, as we took the same “learn by doing” approach in developing iCamp that we asked iCampers to use on their own projects.12 In particular, we want to delve deeper into the evolution of the web development track, the video track, and the introduction in 2018 of the Social Justice Hour.

The Web Track: From “Hacking” to Student-Directed Learning

The web development track, which Famiglietti oversaw, is one clear example of how iCamp attempted to enact a pedagogy of critical making and how that pedagogy evolved from 2017 to 2018. The web development track demonstrates how students engaged in critical making in the classroom and how we revised our pedagogy to center student-directed learning and making from the margins.

For the 2017 iteration of the web development track, iCampers were tasked with building a web application on behalf of a client nonprofit organization: Fab Youth Philly. The nonprofit was hoping to build a web application that would enable teens in Philadelphia to access activities that they were both interested in and that also fit their day-to-day life schedules. Since this client was an organization serving the communities iCampers hailed from, we saw building a web-based tool for the client as a good way to enable iCampers to serve their communities while building their skills.

Famiglietti planned for students to use an ambitious set of professional-grade technological tools as they developed a web application on behalf of their client. He wanted to expose students to the experience of building a full web application “from scratch” using the model–view–controller framework. For the model, or database, students would use Google Tables with a custom JavaScript link developed by Famiglietti. For the view, or front end, they would use the static site builder Jekyll and CSS and JavaScript elements from the Bootstrap library. For the controller, or business logic, they would use further Jekyll functions and JavaScript. The app would be tracked on GitHub and deployed using GitHub pages. By using these open-source, freely available, code-based tools, Famiglietti hoped to capture the “hacker” spirit embraced by digital humanities practitioners like Sayers and Alex Gil and bring it into the iCamp classroom.

With that in mind, the 2017 web track utilized a hands-on set of activities to engage students in critical making. For example, students spent one morning in a review of HTML and CSS led by Famiglietti, before spending the afternoon working on an “ugly web page contest” designed to give them hands-on practice with HTML and CSS in a low-stakes environment. Tools like Git and GitHub were introduced quickly, and then students were asked to put these tools to work.

While students did succeed in building a mock-up web application during the 2017 iCamp, and while building this mock-up helped them to build key technical skills, ultimately we felt the 2017 web development track had not lived up to its full potential. For one thing, students were overwhelmed by the technical tools they were being asked to engage with and never gained enough mastery to express themselves creatively within the medium of web development. For another, the client-based project they were asked to engage with limited their sense of ownership over their work and prevented them from becoming really critically engaged.

In response to these issues with the 2017 version of the web development track, some substantial changes were made for the 2018 version. In terms of content, the idea of having students develop for an outside client was abandoned, in favor of allowing students to develop a web-based project in response to their own interests and the interests of their peer iCampers. The complex web application development of the 2017 track was also set aside in favor of a simpler WordPress-based website built using the Snowball content-authoring tool in WordPress. This toolset still gave students extensive access “under the hood” to tweak content and appearance using custom-written CSS to modify existing WordPress themes but allowed them to focus on creativity and design rather than being bogged down in overly complex tools.

While the majority of the 2018 web development track focused on the same sort of hands-on activities that were present in the 2017 track, the 2018 version, which Famiglietti taught in conjunction with his West Chester University colleague Ben Kuebrich, was framed by a lesson explicitly connecting technology and social justice. This lesson, entitled “New Media and Social Justice,” was the introductory lesson of the track and explored some of the ways that activists had used digital media to call attention to racism, exploitation, and other forms of oppression. This lesson, along with the content of the Social Justice Hour (discussed in more detail later), helped to foreground the “critical” part of “critical making” in ways that made the 2018 iCamp more successful in its intended pedagogy.

This success showed in the work done by the students. Their website, Social Just(Us), was a well-designed and moving collection of stories about their lives and hopes, an archive of material that might have been otherwise overlooked.

The Video Track

Another example of how our pedagogy of critical making evolved can be found in the development of the video track from 2017 to 2018. During the 2017 version of iCamp, two video tracks were offered. Track A worked closely with a client, West Chester University’s Academic Development Program (ADP), to build a series of promotional videos. Track B worked on a more open-ended assignment, building a documentary about local activist and antique dealer Alice Thomas. Like the experience in the web track, the 2017 video track demonstrated both the potential of critical making and the limitations of client-based learning for our pedagogy.

Students in track A engaged in meaningful hands-on learning and calibrated their passions to the client’s goals. iCampers scripted, produced, and edited six ADP promotional videos—media that displayed the effectiveness of summer achievement programs for precollege students. Engaging in this hands-on production process allowed the group to master skills. For example, one iCamper’s video consisted primarily of an interview with just one ADP student and was shot in an “A Day in the Life” fashion. Text overlay of questions, such as, “Why did you choose West Chester University?” and “How is College Different from High School?,” framed the interviewee’s responses as selected B-roll of the ADP student’s classroom learning interwove with the sit-down interview. Another iCamper’s video chose multiple styles of interviews, shifting between group and individual interviews, inside and outside the classroom. The selected B-roll included shots of iconic statues and buildings at West Chester University, thus demonstrating the iCamper’s (learned) scouting and investigation skills.

While the ADP group worked toward a piece that prioritized high production values, the less client-focused track B group was able to engage with social justice values more profoundly. Their workshop schedule consisted of early “sharing and discussion,” developing ideas and forming narratives through people and spaces. Preproduction and production phases consisted largely of developing digital storytelling skills, through workshop activities led by the instructor and often deepened by invited filmmaker guests who talk about narrative and shot composition. Thus track B’s piece, entitled Alice Thomas: Draw My Life, documented the work of the local activist and antique dealer. The client-based model here was inverted, giving iCampers’ community value of celebrating everyday social justice figures precedence. On days 3–6 these iCampers produced, shot, and edited a short documentary in which Thomas narrated her experience of activism and provided advice on how to be an activist today. This video project was an opportunity for students to engage with hands-on making as a critical practice rather than simply build commercially valuable “skills.”

Building on 2017, iCamp 2018 took a more team project–based approach and developed projects from day 1’s large-group Social Justice Hour’s hashtag activity—an ideation activity that asks students to write and wear identifiers on sticky notes, then migrate and share familiar hashtag stories. From these activities, the video track formed multiple teams and projects, developing multiple genres of videos—for instance, short features, digital poetry, and PSAs. For example, one team project, Criminal, was a short feature that highlighted the ills of the criminal justice system that perpetuate the wrongful accusation of Black and brown people.

From Social Justice Nudges to #SocialJusticeHour

Social justice is core to iCamp’s mission and identity. When students apply to the academy in March, the application explicitly asks them open-ended questions like, “What issues in your life, school, or community motivate you the most? What causes connect with your passion? Write a paragraph or two showing your change-making side.” They reply and apply, planting a seed for their project ideas. Social justice serves as students’ impetuses (i.e., the planted seed) for project design during iCamp, and during day 1 of the iCamp program’s keynote address, iCamp staffers water these seeds of inspiration. In 2017, we relied on “nature taking its course” with those ideas, but after many staff meetings, analysis of 2017 projects, and reflection during our postmortem after the program, we asked, How can we move beyond periodic inspirational nudges for social justice to a more comprehensive method for critical making in the classroom?

The Social Justice Hour was formed through such reflections; its evolution significantly reflects how iCamp has and continues to build an explicit pedagogy of critical making through programmatic and pedagogical practices. For example, in 2017, iCamp days ran from ten o’clock in the morning until nine o’clock at night; six out of the ten contact hours with iCampers were dedicated to hands-on workshops. While the students remained enthusiastic about seeing their projects to the end, often creative production plateaued, requiring staffers to readjust workshop activities. Additionally, the social justice weight in iCampers’ projects differed, as seen in the discussion of the web and video tracks. Optimization of time and resources was the first place we started when thinking about increasing the social justice value. For example, in 2017, lead social justice expert faculty Ben Kuebrich and Michael Burns served as real-time advisers to student projects, periodically migrating to track workshops to support students in developing their stories through production.

In 2018, we revamped the week’s schedule, allotting an hour and a half of time midmorning for Social Justice Hour—a time for all iCampers to meet and build knowledge together through a series of critical digital literacy thinking and writing activities led by Burns and Kuebrich. This experiential space is crucial: (1) through various writing prompts and media analysis activities, students learned how to encode and decode the rhetorical strategies of various media texts; (2) such student integration allowed the students a space to engage with one another as a whole group (without being siloed). We have seen great improvements from this Social Justice Hour in 2018; students collaboratively produced over twenty media projects on issues such as #MeToo, anxiety in schools, and gentrification.

iCamp and Critical DH Pedagogy in K–12 Spaces

The recursive process of building and rebuilding iCamp is still ongoing, as future iCamps are planned. While no single educational space can hope to undo the dominant power structures embedded in digital media, we hope that the example we have set in iCamp points toward productive ways to use DH-inflected pedagogy for social justice–oriented youth media training more broadly.

Notes

1. 1. National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Falling through the Net.

2. 2. See Bours, “Women and Minorities.”

3. 3. See Noble, Algorithms of Oppression.

4. 4. App Academy, “App Academy—Anyone.” See placement on App Academy, “Diversity & Inclusion.”

5. 5. Watters, “Why Are Coding Bootcamps?”

6. 6. Watters, “Coding Bootcamps.”

7. 7. iCamp Academy, “iCamp Academy.”

8. 8. Grusin in Chun et al., “Dark Side,” 499–500.

9. 9. Sayers, “Git Commit.”

10. 10. Risam, New Digital Worlds, 33, 34.

11. 11. Risam, New Digital Worlds, 25.

12. 12. See Cooke, “Metatuning.”

Bibliography

1. App Academy. “App Academy—Anyone Can Be a Software Engineer.” October 1, 2015. YouTube video, 2:50. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TI0H1zNcLA.
2. App Academy. “Diversity & Inclusion.” https://www.appacademy.io/diversity-inclusion.
3. Bours, Ben. “Women and Minorities in Tech, by the Numbers.” Wired, March 27, 2018. https://www.wired.com/story/computer-science-graduates-diversity/.
4. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, Richard Grusin, Patrick Jagoda, and Rita Raley. “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, 493–509. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu.
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7. National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Falling through the Net: Defining the Digital Divide: A Report on the Telecommunications and Information Technology Gap in America. July 1999. https://www.ntia.doc.gov/legacy/ntiahome/fttn99/FTTN.pdf.
8. Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press, 2018.
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11. Watters, Audrey. “Coding Bootcamps and the New For-Profit Higher Ed.” Hack Education (blog), November 23, 2015. https://hackeducation.com/2015/11/23/bootcamps-the-new-for-profit-higher-ed.
12. Watters, Audrey. “Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?” Hack Education (blog), July 22, 2017. https://hackeducation.com/2017/07/22/bootcamp-bust.