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Abstract This paper describes a decolonial perspective on material agency in the context of STEM education and application. Using the framework of generative STEM, we engaged in case studies with African, African American, South American, and Native American educational communities. This research shows that understanding material agency based on Indigenous knowledge systems can open a rich source of research and education content. Using a suite of simulations, Culturally Situated Design Tools, we apply this body of research to the classroom. One important theoretical conclusion is the contrast to a “content agnostic” position. A generative framework instead offers a robust blend of user agency and instructional guidance. The outcomes indicate statistically significant and notable improvement for STEM skills and interests. We conclude with a contrast to the quantum epistemology approach to posthumanism. We show that the Indigenous material agency framework in generative STEM is a better fit to decolonial aspirations, and that it offers a more transformative vision for the potential role of STEM in transitioning from an extractive to a generative economy. 

Long before the internet provided us with a networked digital system, music exchanges had created a global networked analog system, built of recordings, radio broadcasts, and live performance. The features that allowed some audio formations to go viral, while others failed, fall at the intersection of three domains: access, culture, and cognition. We know how the explosive growth of the hip hop recording industry addressed the access problem, and how hip hop lyrics addressed cultural needs. But why does hip hop make your ass shake? This essay proposes that hip hop artists were creating an innovation in brain-to-brain connectivity. That is to say, there are deep parts of the limbic system that had not previously been connected to linguistic centers in the combination of neural and social pathways that hip hop facilitated. This research is not an argument for using computational neuroscience to analyze hip hop. Rather, it is asking what hip hop artists accomplished as the street version of computational neuroscientists; and, how they strategically deployed Black music traditions to rewire the world’s global rhythmic nervous system for new cognitive, cultural, and political alignments and sensibilities. 

Students’ lives, both in and out of school, are full of different forms of value. Wealthy students enjoy value in the form of financial capital; their fit to hegemonic social practices; excellent health care and so on. Low-income students, especially those from African American, Native American, and Latinx communities, often lack access to those resources. But there are other forms of value that low-income students do possess. Most examples of what we will call Counter-Hegemonic Practice (CHP) in the African American community involve some mixture of Indigenous African heritage, contemporary innovation in the Black community, and other influences. Moving between these value forms and the computing classroom is a non-trivial task, especially if we are to avoid merely using the appearance of culture to attract students. Our objective in this paper is to provide a framework for deeper investigations into the computational potentials for CHP; its potential as a link between education and community development; and a more dignified role for its utilization in the CS classroom. We report on a series of collaborative engagements with CHP, largely focused on African American communities. 

Inequity and social injustice are omnipresent wicked problems, complex challenges for which there are no single solutions due to their cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, and systemic nature. For example, the 'green revolution' of the 1970s was supposed to solve world hunger. However, we saw a rise in corporate control over agriculture (Pielke and Linner, 2019) instead. The design of social media, widely touted as creating a harmonious global village in the 1980s, has instead partly turned into hatching grounds for a global white supremacist movement and other forms of extremism. We cannot afford to allow accidental synergies to create global disasters passively. Instead, we need to bring social, technological, economic, and environmental concerns, among other considerations, into a deliberate and reflective emergent process. We refer to this decolonial, emancipatory form of design emergence as 'radical synergy.' In this paper, we begin by visualizing how radical synergy provides scaffolding for the program. Then, we show snapshots of how it took pedagogical form over the past two years, enabling graduate students and their partners to take steps toward attaining it by facilitating community-based, deep collaboration informed by anti-racism, decolonization, and integrative critical analysis, and facilitated by an integrative design thinking and making approach. 

The food system in the US has supported growing dominance of industrial agriculture, corporate distribution chains, and other means by which power is exerted at the expense of environmental sustainability, citizen health and wealth inequality. Economic impacts have been most damaging to low resourced and racialized communities. Online purchasing creates new opportunities--particularly in the context of the covid epidemic--but barriers may arise that are also along race and class divisions. This paper examines an initial data set for two Black led collaborative Food System projects (two urban farms and a mobile farmers market initiative), all of which are primarily staffed by African American leadership and serve a diverse set of community members with Black consumers being of the majority. While issues such as government benefit payments constitute formal economic barriers, other challenges are better illuminated through the lens of the extraction of value: the loss of community connections and increased dependency on modes of production that do not return value to the community. We define “generative production networks” as those which maximize unalienated value return rather than value extraction. We utilize this framework to examine alternative online systems to overcome these barriers. 

The concept of enoughness holds importance for both African American and Indigenous communities. In Indigenous contexts, ideas of enoughness can be about moving from extractive to sustainable economies where balance, interdependence, cooperation, and decentralization are prioritized in the production and sharing of resources. In African American contexts enoughness is about challenging deficit views of Black children as maladjusted and incomplete with an insistence that people, especially educators, see their existing brilliance and celebrate the fact that they are already enough. We explore how these concepts shaped efforts to make science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education more equitable, justice-oriented, and generative, thus re-thinking the shape of STEM itself as a platform for generative justice. We detail how this was accomplished through designing and researching educational technologies called Culturally Situated Design Tools. 

Despite the value that cultural experts bring to efforts to broaden the participation of racially minoritized youth in US computer science, there has been little research on supporting their knowledge of computing. This is a missed opportunity to explore the diffusion of computing knowledge across local community contexts where underrepresented youth of color spend time. To address this gap, we present one strategy for promoting cultural experts’ early engagement with code, culturally responsive debugging: using culturally situated expertise and knowledge to debug code. We analyzed qualitative data from a professional development workshop for cultural experts to evaluate this strategy. Our findings have implications for broadening participation efforts and supporting non-programmers’ knowledge of code. 

Culturally responsive computing (CRC) frames the localized knowledges and practices of Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities as assets for working toward racial justice in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). A key part of CRC is the role that local communities play in designing and/or implementing curricula and technologies. Yet, there is a dearth of research on collaborating with local knowledge experts and what they think about CRC. In response, this paper details a two-year-long research project on the design and implementation of one CRC program called pH Empowered. pH Empowered uses computing to bridge Black hairstyling, chemistry, and entrepreneurship. Through a mixed-methods study of one pH Empowered professional development workshop, we show how cosmetologists, urban farmers, and librarians had diverse perspectives about how to be culturally responsive with STEM and the racial justice goal of broadening participation in STEM education. 

ABSTRACT Background: As teachers work to broaden the participation of racially and ethnically underrepresented groups in computer science (CS), culturally responsive computing (CRC) becomes more pertinent to formal settings. Objective: Yet, equity-oriented literature offers limited guidance for developing deep forms of CRC in the classroom. In response, we support the claim that “it takes a village” to develop equity-oriented CS education but additively highlight the roles of cultural experts in the process. Methods: We use a case study methodology to explore one instance of this: a collaboration between a multi-racial team of researchers, a Black cosmetologist, and a White technology teacher. Findings: Three themes supported the CRC collaboration: multi-directional relationship building, iterative engagement with culture-computing, and collaborative implementation of a hybrid lesson. Implications: As opposed to orienting broadening participation around extractive metaphors like “pipelines,” our case study constructs the metaphor of an “open village” to orient CS education toward collaborations between schools and the communities they serve.