How does my research explore and demonstrate powerful new ways to think about technologies in contexts of learning and education, and uses innovative research methods to understand the impact of those technologies?

This is the central project of my research. You can see am I primary method is design-based research and conjecture mapping by which I iteratively pursue the design of new technologies and then improve them by seeking to understand them. The you can see this in several of my projects um First off is the making with code project, um a uh interctory computer science curriculum organized around the principles of constructionism, uh in particular, uh trying to form powerful personal relationships with powerful ideas, uh creating computer cultures, uh classroom in school environments and and having classrooms in schools as central nodes within broader communities in which powerful and exciting and inspiring things are being done with computers. I believe that this also surfaces the critical potential of formal computer science education within these computer cultures, young people who can come to understand the computational infrastructure, which undergirds their own identities and social practices in many broader realms of their lives. People can better understand themselves, their social interactions, and the formations of power, which shape and surveill them constantly. Within unfold studio, similarly, we can see a theoretically guided project to create media by which young people can uh come to understand better their own relationships with technology and their uh create and be powerful. We think with computational media while coming to understand the critical potential of it. A particular theoretical premise of unfold studio is a uh the botinian potential of of subverting genres by dialologizing them, by putting them into a context where they can be interrogated and laughed at and destabilized, essentially. I’m interested in unfold using unfold studio to destabilize social media by allowing young people to write stories with and about social media. If you think about it, there’s no current medium today by which it’s possible to write fiction in tweets or fiction in um Instagram posts or TikTok posts, those interfaces are they feel personal and they feel malleable, but they’re really not. They’re not under your control at all, even though they get really deep into your psyche. and those companies hold very tightly onto control over how their interfaces can be represented and presented. So that’s a project of unfold studio.

I would say the theoretical project that I’ve built, which unites all of these, is computational literacies in my work with Yasmin Kafai, we have basically argued that computational thinking is a coherent construct, but it is not up to the task to which it’s been put, uh namely, explaining and justifying why computing is something that everybody should be learning about in K-12 education. And I think computational literacy is does a much better job of that. I use computational literacies as the theoretical framework for all of the projects I’ve discussed. also part of a book project uh learning machines, humans learning, uh with my colleagues, Sarah Vogel, Enrique Suatz and Bathemmel, uh where we more broadly are bringing together a theoretical perspectives from sociology of language, uh linguistic anthropology and at learning sciences, which I think has a tremendous amount of potential. I think the frameworks that we have used in the past to understand power and ideology and language apply in a lot of ways to computing as well. This overlaps some of the translanguaging work, for example, that Chris Hudley has been part of. Most recently, an extension to unfold studio, we’ve been exploring AI interfaces for writing. I think the uh we we don’t see a lot of productive ways forward, but AI? And um I think that the approach of unfold studio is is very well suited to it. I can say more about that.

I’ve also been an innovator and methods of trying to understand what people are doing with these media. For example, Unfold Studio, I have published a sequence of articles and papers and conferences. working with learning analyics in which I study the fine grained uh writing processes that people are using in writing text and prose stories, uh as well as their uh what I’m called literacy events, their interactions within the broader discourse space of sharing stories, such as reading other people’s stories, uh making copies of other people’s stories and importing parts of other people’s stories into their own. I also have been exploring more embodied and active, spatialized, uh ways of understanding learning. I had a paper which was nominated for best paper at CSCL looking at joint visual attention in Minecraft. Continuity here with my other research agenda is trying to understand how people make sense of and behave and become powerful in online environments with computational media.

How does my research place young people and/or practicing educators at the center of the problem solving process by making their meaning-making process, their needs and constraints, and their priorities central to the project?

This is also a central concern of my research. The chapter I just wrote with Ryan Rish arguing for a literacy-based approach to AI makes the argument very clearly that we need to not be prescriptive. We need to not have the uh autonomous model of literacy as we’re approaching AI, assuming that AI is something that people haven’t got. AI literacy is something people haven’t got that they need and that we’re going to give it to them and we know that it’s going to look like and what it’s going to do and we do give it to them. We do not know. We do not know how to live with AI. We do not know what is safe and unsafe and powerful and not powerful with AI, nor what children need to learn about it. I have used schools and classrooms as places where we can work some of this out and we can create the social practices and genres of participation that we want for the age of AI media in these spaces, we make that argument very clearly. We enact that through the work we’re doing with unfold studio.

I also have been taking this stance of putting young people in their meaning making processes, their needs and constraints and their communities and identities, essentially in my policy work, arguing in my NSF grants CSRL grant with Lockport that’s, although I appreciate the work that CSF all developed with scripture bricks helping districts to plan their K12 computing education implementations. They don’t go nearly far enough in in understanding the nature and identity of communities. And in particular, they don’t go far enough in understanding the historical tensions already existed in communities. For example, in my work in Lockport, I’ very clearly documented through stakeholder interviews and a broad community survey that the people in power in the school district have a solipsistic view of the community. They see themselves as serving a wealthy and white uh community uh in the school district when the school district is is in reality today, neither, particularly wealthy nor particularly white. And the uh the view very clearly visible in in the stakehold interviews with people like administrators and counselors is that a lot of the people who have been excluded from participation are, in some way, not legitimate stakeholders in the process. I heard a lot of things like them saying it’s very hard to educate children when their parents aren’t partners, when their parents don’t care about their children’s education, that’s preposterous. Of course, parents care about their children’s education. It shows a big disconnect, and I think trying to design new computer science curriculum without that addressing that that existing tension and that existing inequity is not going to take us where we need to go. Some of the same emphases are evident in the school design project that I’m leading with Buffalo public schools, where we see computing as a powerful interdisciplinary nexus, not only potentially bringing together and transforming existing disciplines, but connecting the school to its community and to UB to create continuity of youth progressing through an education system toward opportunity.

How does my research strike an effective balance between innovation – inventing new approaches to K-12 learning with technologies – and understanding – examining existing educational environments and changes that occur when technologies are introduced?

I think I address this above, in discussing innovation, theory-building, and measurement.

How does my research use technology to bring about broad improvements in educational systems by addressing equity, diversity, culture, relations of power, and/or learning for all?

UB CS teacher preparation program and BPS school-design project. I have been working on building communities and institions. The field of K12 CS (like technology-designers in the learning sciences) has largely not succeeded in getting into schools and transforming practice. We have a chance to actually make this happen in WNY, and we’re doing it.

How is my research relevant and responsive to the current social context where society is looking to new technologies to address the landscape of education transformed by the pandemic and fighting systemic racism

My career and Spencer proposals, I think, are the best place to look here. I think I am I have been an active participant in the last decade of research on race, inequality, inequity, in education, and believe it’s it’s profoundly important. I have done a fair amount of writing around critical race theory and I think it’s it’s immediate lessons for computing education. I have been an active participant in the relationship between race and technology. And I’m aware that a lot of that research is going to be a lot harder in the next four years. I think we can potentially look at the past decade of this research on race inequality language and education, as a project of paradigm building. And perhaps those conversations will not be able to continue as easily in public or as safely in the next four years, but perhaps we can see that paradigm as stable and a good place from which to launch empirical research. which can be perhaps a little bit flying below the radar a bit safer, because it’s just moving forward in a normal scientific method creating empirical data, but asking the right questions. We can we can continue working within the paradigm we’ve built, asking the right questions empirically and continue to make progress, even when direct ideological confrontation is not in a good not in such a good place.

Similarly, I think, on the ground and pragmatically, we can do a lot of good for young people creating schools and structures and supporting schools and school leaders and teachers in keeping their young people safe and in providing them with powerful educational environments as well as we can dealing with the political and cultural environment as it is