"Growing as a person": Developing Identity and Agency Across Formal CS Education and Everyday Computing Contexts

To understand how learners develop identities in computer science (CS), we must investigate learners’ experiences with computing throughout their lives. Drawing from a theory of learning as participation in communities of practice, we analyze interviews with high school students at the end of their time in a 2-year, constructionist CS course to better understand how these students’ CS education affected their experiences with computing in their everyday lives. We identify moments where students begin to “re-see” technology which offer insight into how students author their computational identities. However, our analysis reveals that re-seeing does not inevitably align with a positive trajectory of participation in CS. Instead, we discuss how the nuances of students’ “re-seeing” experiences combine with various social factors to influence students’ computational identity authorship.

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APA

Wolf, J., Han, J., Proctor, C., Brown, E., Pang, J., & Blikstein, P. (2023). “Growing as a person”: Developing Identity and Agency Across Formal CS Education and Everyday Computing Contexts. In Building knowledge and sustaining our community, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning - CSCL 2023. Montreal, Canada: International Society of the Learning Sciences.

Bibtex

@inproceedings{wolf2023growing,
  title = {“Growing as a person”: Developing Identity and Agency Across Formal CS Education and Everyday Computing Contexts},
  booktitle = {Building knowledge and sustaining our community, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning - CSCL 2023},
  author = {Wolf, J., Han, J., Proctor, C., Brown, E., Pang, J., Blikstein, P.},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {{International Society of the Learning Sciences}},
  langid = {english}
}