Identity as Interface paper idea

IDENTITY AS INTERFACE

CP: I think the overlaps between CT and ELA are profoundly important, but the way the overlap is currently framed isn’t going to take us to the right place. CT is presumed to be a stable construct, of high status and somewhat incontestable to those outside the CS priesthood. Meanwhile, ELA is presumed to be fluid and in need. Starting from this premise, the adaptation/accommodation is going to happen on the ELA side. The truth is that CT is hugely-contested within CS. A common starting point is Wing’s argument that everyone would love CT and use it all the time if they only had the education. This is a dangerous framing. I’ve written about CT as a lacuna, a site where the question of how CS might be meaningful and important beyond the narrow bounds of professional specialists, but where good answers haven’t emerged yet. In my view, most attempts to frame CT have been generally clumsy and cringey, because of the narrow participation in these conversations and the lack of access to the wealth of experience and theory literacies has accumulated. So I’d recenter this conversation around how literacies education is growing into the computational age and throw away CT and start over. There is a status difference between fields which I think accounts for why this isn’t a more common approach.

CP: Youth are building things with code as well as with prose. Through participation in textual/computational/other communities of practice, they learn what it is to find voice within genre, and to transform genre and definitions of excellence. Rhetorical and ethical issues would emerge in authentic context (e.g. the students would be making decisions about whether to restrict speech in their own online digital communities, rather than just talking about what Twitter is doing. Schools become sites of political power via literacies. I’ve seen this through student journalism, for example. The shame of it is that now that schools are thoroughly (and sometimes exclusively) digital, all that infrastructure is there, ready for appropriation as learning environments. But we think about things like email systems as pertaining to a plane lower than pedagogy.

CS operationalizes important literacy constructs. They make more concrete phenomena that already exist in the world, but

For example, semantic meaning

And the other way around, we problematicly elevate

–Add in comments from the pad on my desk

Potentially-unrelated notes

Toward the end of high school, some students take the AP English Literature exam. In this exam, students are presented with excerpts of literature and asked to analyze them, to explain what they mean and how the author constructed these meanings using literary elements such as characterization, metaphor, mood, and tone. The high status of the AP exam helps prioritize this way of analyzing texts into earlier grades as well. Many students, particularly those who love literature, have trouble with this kind of textual analysis. They can do it, but it doesn’t feel right. It can be very helpful to study the philosophical underpinnings of this approach to texts, called New Criticism, and to name alternate ways of reading and studying texts. New Criticism argues that the meaning of a text lies encoded in “the text itself.” From this it follows that the correct reading of a text does not depend on who is reading it. Surfacing